‘How immoral they are!’ she said to Melville. ‘The salle de jeu by daylight is monstrous; but since it is their form of happiness——’
‘Happiness!’ muttered Geraldine between his teeth.
‘All your preaching and mine will not alter them,’ she continued. ‘It is an extraordinary thing; neither Platon nor Lord Geraldine cares a straw for money; neither of them would awake a whit merrier if their fortunes were quadrupled to-morrow; and yet they find absolute intoxication in playing for money! What an inexplicable anomaly! Othmar is far more consistent. He despises his own fortune and the table of M. Blanc with equal sincerity.’
‘I do not despise wealth, I dislike it,’ said Othmar.
‘Why should you do either?’ said Melville. ‘Look at the immense potentialities of great riches.’
‘That is what I said this morning,’ continued Princess Nadine.
‘Surely great riches help one very nearly to happiness,’ continued Melville. ‘I do not mean from the bourgeois point of view, but simply because they remove so many material obstacles in the way of happiness. There can be hardly any great difficulties for a very rich man. He goes where he chooses, he can purchase whatever he desires; there are swept aside from his path for ever all the thousand and one annoyances and hindrances which beset the man who is not rich. Only imagine a person who cannot reach his dying child because he has not money enough for the journey; imagine another who has his homestead made intolerable to him by the erection of a steam-mill, and yet is obliged to end his days in it because he cannot afford to move; imagine yet another with weak lungs, who would recover his strength if he could take a house in the country, in the south, and yet cannot leave his business, which chains him to a city in the north. Those are the sort of sorrows from which wealth sets free a man or a woman. One may say roughly, I think, that if his health be good, a very rich person is exempt from all other misfortunes than those which come to him from his affections or his friendships; his troubles are, in a word, entirely those of sentiment.’
‘Precisely,’ said Nadine Napraxine.
‘Un seul être est mort et tout est dépeuplé!’
murmured Othmar; ‘you will not allow, or cannot comprehend that, Princess?’