"It would be an interesting game, wouldn't it?" said Susan.
She was reflectively observing the handsome, earnest face before her—an incarnation of intelligent ambition, a Freddie Palmer who was somehow divesting himself of himself—was growing up—away from the rotten soil that had nourished him—up into the air—was growing strongly—yes, splendidly!
"And we've got everything to gain and nothing to lose," pursued he. "We'd not be adventurers, you see. Adventurers are people who haven't any money and are looking round to try to steal it. We'd have money. So, we'd be building solid, right on the rock." The handsome young man—the strongest, the most intelligent, the most purposeful she had ever met, except possibly Brent—looked at her with an admiring tenderness that moved her, the forlorn derelict adrift on the vast, lonely, treacherous sea. "The reason I've waited for you to invite you in on this scheme is that I tried you out and I found that you belong to the mighty few people who do what they say they'll do, good bargain or bad. It'd never occur to you to shuffle out of trying to keep your word."
"It hasn't—so far," said Susan.
"Well—that's the only sort of thing worth talking about as morality. Believe me, for I've been through the whole game from chimney pots to cellar floor."
"There's another thing, too," said the girl.
"What's that?"
"Not to injure anyone else."
Palmer shook his head positively. "It's believing that and acting on it that has kept you down in spite of your brains and looks."
"That I shall never do," said the girl. "It may be weakness—I guess it is weakness. But—I draw the line there."