He was silent a moment.
“Nellie, would you marry me if I were rich?” he asked.
She made a gesture of impatience.
“How on earth can I tell?” she said. “If you were rich you would be quite a different person.”
“No, I shouldn’t——”
“Oh, Peter, how stupid you are,” she said. “And how frightfully Victorian. That is so shallow. Wealth is just as much part of a man or a woman as brains or beauty. I don’t say that a girl loves a man for his brains, or his money, or his beauty, but they all make a part of him. Wealth isn’t an accident; it’s an attribute. A poor man—I’m not talking about you and me, but only speaking in the abstract—may be the same in character and charm as a rich man, but what a gulf money makes between them! Let one man be poor, and another, his absolute double in every way, be rich. They cease to be doubles at once.”
“But if you happened to love the costermonger——“ began Peter.
“We can leave that out, because neither of us has the slightest idea what love means.”
“How about the bond you spoke of, then?” asked he. “Hasn’t that got anything to do with it?”
She considered this, and then laid her hand on his arm.