"I am not ready to offer myself to Your Eminency."
"Not ready?"
"I hoped that I had made it clear to you that, in regard to my Vocation, I am 'marking time,' until I shall have earned enough to pay my debts incurred on the strength of my faith in the honour of a parcel of archiepiscopal and episcopal and clerical sharpers, and also a sum sufficient to produce me a small and certain annuity——"
"You keep harping upon that string," the cardinal complained.
"It is the only string which you have left unbroken on my lute."
"I see you are a very sensitive subject, Mr. Rose. I think that long brooding over your wrongs has fixed in you some such pagan and erroneous idea as that which Juvenal expresses in the verse where he says that poverty makes a man ridiculous."
"Nothing of the kind," George retorted with all his claws out. "On the contrary, it is I—the creature of you, my Lord Cardinal, and your Catholics—who make Holy Poverty look ridiculous!"
"A clever paradox!" The cardinal let a tinge of his normal sneer affect his voice.
"Not even a paradox. A poor thing: but mine own," George flung in, glaring through his great-great-grandfather's silver spectacles which he used indoors.