“Not a shilling.”
“Nor prospects?”
“None.”
“Then I don’t understand——”
“Of course you don’t understand. Nor could I make you understand how fellows like myself play the game of life. But let me try by an illustration to enlighten you. When there’s no wind on a boat, and her sails flap lazily against the mast, she can have no guidance, for there is no steerage-way on her. She may drift with a current, or rot in a calm, or wait to be crushed by some heavier craft surging against her. Any wind—a squall, a hurricane—would be better than that. Such is my case. Marriage without means is a hurricane; but I’d rather face a hurricane than be water-logged between two winds.”
“But the girl you marry—”
“The girl I marry—or rather the girl who marries me—will soon learn that she’s on board a privateer, and that on the wide ocean called life there’s plenty of booty to be had, for a little dash and a little danger to grasp it.”
“And is it to a condition like this you’d bring the girl you love, Calvert?”
“Not if I had five thousand a year. If I owned that, or even four, I’d be as decorous as yourself; and I’d send my sons to Rugby, and act as poor-law guardian, and give my twenty pounds to the county hospital, and be a model Englishman, to your heart’s content. But I haven’t five thousand a year, no, nor five hundred a year; and as for the poor-house and the hospital, I’m far more likely to claim the benefit than aid the funds. Don’t you see, my wise-headed friend, that the whole is a question of money? Morality is just now one of the very dearest things going, and even the rich cannot always afford it. As for me, a poor sub in an Indian regiment, I no more affect it than I presume to keep a yacht, or stand for a county.”
“But what right have you to reduce another to such straits as these? Why bring a young girl into such a conflict?”