“What's the matter?” Semple asked quickly. “Has anything gone wrong with you?”
Thorpe slowly shook his head. “What better off do you think you'll be with six figures than you are with five?” he pursued, with dogmatic insistence.
Semple shrugged his shoulders. He seemed to have grown much brighter and gayer of mood in this past twelvemonth. Apparently he was somewhat stouter, and certainly there was a mellowed softening of his sharp glance and shrewd smile. It was evident that his friend's mood somewhat nonplussed him, but his good-humour was unflagging.
“It's the way we're taught at school,” he hazarded, genially. “In all the arithmetics six beats five, and seven beats six.”
“They're wrong,” Thorpe declared, and then consented to laugh in a grudging, dogged way at his friend's facial confession of puzzlement. “What I mean is—what's the good of piling up money, while you can't pile up the enjoyments it will buy? What will a million give you, that the fifth of it, or the tenth of it, won't give you just as well?”
“Aye,” said Semple, with a gleam of comprehension in his glance. “So you've come to that frame of mind, have you? Why does a man go on and shoot five hundred pheasants, when he can eat only one?”
“Oh, if you like the mere making of money, I've nothing more to say,” Thorpe responded, with a touch of resentment. “I've always thought of you as a man like myself, who wanted to make his pile and then enjoy himself.”
The Scotchman laughed joyously. “Enjoy myself! Like you!” he cried. “Man, you're as doleful as a mute at a laird's funeral! What's come over you? I know what it is. You go and take a course of German waters——”
“Oh, that be damned!” Thorpe objected, gloomily. “I tell you I'm all right. Only—only—God! I've a great notion to go and get drunk.”
Colin Semple viewed his companion with a more sympathetic expression. “I'm sorry you're so hipped,” he said, in gentle tones. “It can't be more than some passing whimsy. You're in no real trouble, are you?—no family trouble?”