“You need not wonder, Madeline. I have told you often I loathe it from beginning to end. Buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest is not an axiom for me. And I think, perhaps, I hate trade more since I have seen it on the other side. They don’t care there for our decent veils. Profit is the visible god. The means by which they pursue him and his rites, are more candid than among us. It was uncongenial before—it is antipathetic now.”
“And yet we have always been business people since we were—anybody,” she said. “Do you think we’ve been doing wrong all the time? All this comes of trade—every penny we have. If it is so bad that you will not follow it, shouldn’t we give up all that we have? for it has all been purchased in the same way.”
This speech startled Gervase not a little. “I have always heard,” he said, with a sort of admiring dismay, “that women carried a conclusion further than men, being less artificial, less complicated——”
“That is the kind of praise that means contempt.”
“Oh no, far from contempt; but I don’t go so far. I think the methods of trade were very likely better when our money was made. Our grandfathers did things in a better way. They did not make such haste to be rich—they were honourable, straightforward——”
“Gervase!”
“What have I said wrong?”
“You spoke as if papa, my father——”
“No, no, no,” he said. “I was thinking of my own, who is as honourable a man as any one. But only—they don’t think it necessary to carry that into trade, Madeline. I don’t mean to say anything I oughtn’t to say. I suppose they don’t go into every detail. They leave a great deal to—clerks and people. Every transaction is not carried on as it would be between two men—of the same social grade—under the eyes of all the world. I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t blame my father; but I—couldn’t do it. I could not—I could not. You know you and I have been brought up in another sort of a way. If that is what they meant, they shouldn’t have done it.”
“Done what?” she asked.