“I’m hard hit, governor.”
“Does you credit,” said I.
“Yeah,” said he, pulling at his under lip. “But you know it’s deuced hard for a fellow like me to say anything. All that cursed money of mine, you know. I’ve never been taken for what I am myself until I came up here, and when it comes to telling Miss Paxton how things stand with me, don’t you know—why, I wouldn’t blame her if she refused me, even if she loved me, because a girl like that doesn’t like to be thought—doesn’t like to be thought to be influenced by the money a fellow has.”
“Well, she wouldn’t be.”
“No, that isn’t the point. She wouldn’t be, but she might be afraid that the world would think she was.”
We were walking back and forth along the “Midway,” and we had now come to the wheel of fortune and subconsciously I felt impelled to stop and look in at the operations which had just started up with the placing of a dollar by a raw-boned fellow fresh from the plough.
“You mean to say,” said I, “that if you were in the position of Sibthorp, for instance, that you would feel you had a good chance of winning her?”
“I don’t think Sibthorp has any chance with her. I mean that if I was ordinarily well off I would go in and ask her, and I think she’d have me. I’d tell you what I wouldn’t say to any one else up here, for I think you understand those things. I’m not conceited but—well, a fellow knows.”
“Lost it, young man,” said the man at the wheel, “but next time you may have better luck. You want to try?”
“Why, I believe I will.”