With a reflective survey of his friend, Briarley commenced with a kind of confidential frankness.
“If you are to make marriage a commodity, why not be brutally practical? You are a very decent sort of a chap, and fame, for you, is on the up grade. You could marry money. A poor married man might as well be a street-car mule and be done with it. Talk about it being easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to go to heaven, why it’s easier for a whole drove of them to get through than for man to get anywhere without money.”
“You are very good to care anything about it, but I have quite decided in my mind what I shall do with that problem,” Glenn announced with resolute calmness. The other lit a cigar, and leaned back in comfort.
“I’ll swear you provoke me, and I don’t know why I should give a hang. Self-will sometimes degenerates—then it is stubbornness—but I suppose every fellow has a right to sign his own death warrant if he chooses, and failure is a death warrant.”
“There are some things you know and some that you don’t know.”
“And a devilish lot that nobody will ever know,” said Briarley, as he flicked the ashes from his cigar.
There was a tender spot in his iron heart for Glenn Andrews. He was too noble, too talented, to lose in sacrifice the possibilities of so brilliant a future.
CHAPTER X.
They were strolling together in the art gallery. It was the first time that Glenn had seen Esther since returning from his vacation. He stopped to admire a picture, for the second time, pointing out its beauties for her. She appreciated his interpretations, and her acute understanding grew more beautiful to him.
“I never look at such work,” he said, “without wondering what it cost its creator. The gift of art is great, sacred, yet it is one long term of self-denial.”