“No, alas!” He began to butter another scone. “All my relations are either poor or stingy.”
“But I had an idea that all dukes were rich and superb—your mother’s father—”
“He quarrels with his steward every quarter day over the accounts, the very household bills. I hate him, and so did my father. He cannot endure me because I don’t pot birds from the 12th of August until the hunting season begins and then ride to hounds every day. I have an idea he is afraid I will write poetry and disgrace the family. The metre would, no doubt.”
Margarethe looked at him curiously. According to American canons she ought to despise him, but he was so inevitably a part of a system, and so replete with all the delightful qualities for which that system was responsible, besides having an accent all his own, that she could but accept him as a matter of course. Nevertheless, more to draw him out than with motive, she asked: “I suppose it has never occurred to you to work?”
“Work?” He barely saved his knife from dropping to the little Sèvres plate. His eyes grew round and his mouth fell slightly apart.
Styr almost laughed outright, but she dropped her eyes to her cup and said: “Well, I am an American, you know. A young man over there, born in a position corresponding to your own—well, if he found himself in debt or wanted money badly, and there was no immediate prospect of inheritance, he would go to work and make it.”
“How odd! No, I don’t mean that. Of course I know those things do happen, but it must be when they feel fitted, have been prepared—for some of those things that make money. The only time I ever thought about it—one night not long ago,” he paled at the memory, “I could not think of any means by which I could support myself did I lose the little I have. But in America I suppose the business instinct is in every man’s brain—naturally. Why shouldn’t they be able to make fortunes if they must? Some of our chaps have to go to work also, but I never heard of any of them making a fortune—not even in the colonies. Only people you never heard of before do that. I suppose our brains are too old, they are no longer capable of that amount of concentration and energy. For generations we have had so many interests. To let a fixed idea like money-making control you, I fancy you must have, and inherit, little intellectual development. Nevertheless, I should think that those same indulgences and developments must be among the incentives.”
“That is the most ingenious defence I ever heard a lazy man put up! But I am not sure there is not a good deal in it. The fact remains, however, that you want money and do not want to marry. Suppose I send you to my banker in New York? He is a good friend of mine and would give you a chance of some sort. Would you concentrate your very superior faculties upon the making of money?”
“Good heavens, no! I should hate it. To spend one’s life trying to be more dishonest than the next man—I had rather live on a younger son’s portion all my life.” And he elevated his nose in aristocratic disgust.
“It is not quite as bad as that, although I do not pretend that great fortunes are made with gloves on.”