“When one is in debt to one’s banker and one’s tradesmen, and has to let one’s place to a sugar-baker, the less said about honor the better. I wish I were a monkey—don’t you wish you were one? They get such fun out of each other’s tails, and it must be such a jolly life swinging on branches and living on fruits. And if you like ancient lineage look at theirs!”
She smiled, but her heart was heavy. She knew that she could not alter her fate, and she loathed it.
“Do not misunderstand me,” she said, with a passing flush coming on her face. “Do not think me more stoical or philosophical than I am. It is probably pride not humility which makes me suffer so much from my sense of my parents’ present position. If I had been born in your class, in your world, I should probably have been odiously arrogant.”
“I do not think you could be ‘odiously’ anything, my dear,” said Lord Framlingham with a smile.
“Oh, yes, I can; I know it, I feel it, I regret it, and yet I cannot help it. When I am in their world, to which we have no right, to which we shall be only welcomed for reasons as discreditable to ourselves as to those who welcome us, I know that I offend everyone, and that I afflict, surprise and disappoint, my parents; but I cannot be otherwise; it is all I can do to keep in unspoken the bitter truths which rise to my lips.”
“The amari aliquid was never enclosed in a fairer crystal sphere,” said her host gallantly.
“I never would have left my mother,” she added, “but I could do nothing. I was only the helpless spectator of a kind of effort which is in my sight the most ignoble, the most foolish of all, the endeavor to appear what one is not, and never can be.”
“You take it too much to heart,” said her companion. “You do not make allowance for the times. Your people are only doing what every person who has made money does on a small scale or a big scale, according to their means. Mr. Massarene is immensely rich, and so his aspirations are very large too.”
“Aspirations! To get on in society, to have great persons to dinner, to represent in Parliament the interest of a constituency he had never heard of a year ago, to get a title, though my brothers are all dead, to entertain troops of people who scarcely know his name and have hardly the decency to pretend to know it, do you call that aspiration? It is more like degradation. Why cannot he remain in obscurity spending his vast fortune for the good of others instead of squandering it on idle people, impudent people, worthless people, people to whom he is a jest, a by-word and a jeer?”
“My dear young lady, money is power,” said Lord Framlingham. “It is nothing new that it should be so; but in other ages, it was subordinate to many greater powers than itself. Now it is practically supreme; it is practically alone. Aristocracy in its true sense exists no longer. War in its modern form is wholly a question of supply. The victory will go to who can pay most and longest. The religious orders, once so absolute, are now timid anachronisms quaking before secular governments. Science, which cannot move a step without funds, goes cap in hand to the rich. Art has perished nearly. What is left of it does the same thing as science. The Pope, who ought to be a purely spiritual power, is mendicant and begs like Belisarius. What remains? Nothing except trade, and trade cannot oppose wealth, because it lives solely through it. For this reason, money, mere money, with no other qualities or attractions behind it, is omnipotent now as it never was before in the history of the world. It is not one person or set of persons who is responsible for this. It is the tendency of the age, an age which is essentially mercenary and is very little else! In politics, as in war and in science, there is no moving a step without money and much money. The least corrupt election costs a large outlay. Royalty recognizing that money is stronger than itself, courts men of money, borrows from them, and puts out in foreign stocks where it borrows as a reserve fund against exile. You see there is no power left which can, or dare, attempt to oppose the undisputed sway of money. A great evil, you say? No doubt.”