“Whether you do or think you do, it’s the same thing. You spend what you haven’t got, and in return you get greater value from spending what you haven’t got than I get from spending what I have got, and what I have sweated to get.”
“Why don’t you change the basis of your coinage, then?” she queried teasingly.
He looked at her quickly, half-hopefully, and then said, all regretfully: “Too late. I’d like to, perhaps, but I can’t. My pocketbook is stuffed with the old coinage, and it’s a stubborn thing. I can never bring myself to recognize anything else as valid.”
He ceased speaking, and his gaze wandered absently past her and became lost in the placid sea. The old primal melancholy was strong upon him. He was quivering to it. He had reasoned himself into a spell of the blues, and within few hours one could look for the devil within him to be up and stirring. I remembered Charley Furuseth, and knew this man’s sadness as the penalty which the materialist ever pays for his materialism.
CHAPTER XXV.
“You’ve been on deck, Mr. Van Weyden,” Wolf Larsen said, the following morning at the breakfast-table, “How do things look?”
“Clear enough,” I answered, glancing at the sunshine which streamed down the open companion-way. “Fair westerly breeze, with a promise of stiffening, if Louis predicts correctly.”
He nodded his head in a pleased way. “Any signs of fog?”
“Thick banks in the north and north-west.”
He nodded his head again, evincing even greater satisfaction than before.