“Do you mean—”
“Why here’s what I mean; it’s very simple. Tompkins is a blacksmith; has a family; works for wages; and hard, too—fooling around won’t furnish the bread. Suppose it should turn out that by the death of somebody in England he is suddenly an earl—income, half a million dollars a year. What would he do?”
“Well, I—I suppose he would have to decline to—”
“Man, he would grab it in a second!”
“Do you really think he would?”
“Think?—I don’t think anything about it, I know it.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because he’s not a fool.”
“So you think that if he were a fool, he—”
“No, I don’t. Fool or no fool, he would grab it. Anybody would. Anybody that’s alive. And I’ve seen dead people that would get up and go for it. I would myself.”