“Maybe I talk like one, but I’m not. I don’t care whether a fellow has money or hasn’t, and I care just as little whether his great-grandfather or his grandfather or his father came over with the Pilgrims in 1500 or whenever it was, or came last Friday in the steerage. If a chap is square, that’s enough for me. He doesn’t have to have silver military brushes with monograms on ’em, and I don’t give a hang if he says ‘ain’t’ for ‘isn’t’! Birth be blowed!”
“But you make money everything!” Leon had protested.
“I don’t! I make the confidence that having money gives you everything. Gee, I’m talking like a spell-binder at a country picnic! I don’t say that it’s a fine thing to have money just as money, but I say it’s a fine thing to have it for what it gets you. If I was poor, know what I’d do?” Leon shook his head. “Well, I’d make some money,” chuckled Monty.
“There are lots of better things to do!”
“Maybe, but you can do them better if you have the money, son. If I wanted to be—to be a musician, for instance, I’d make me a little pile first off. Or if I wanted to be a statesman, or—or anything else.”
“And by the time you’d got your money it would be too late to be anything!”
“Don’t you believe it! Making money isn’t hard.”
“Why doesn’t everyone have it then?”
“I’ll tell you, Leon. It’s a secret, but I’ll tell it to you. It’s because the way to make money is to work, and a lot of folks never learned that. They think you have to sit down and wait for it to drop into your pocket. Savvy?”
“I ‘savvy’ that you’re a perfect ass,” grumbled Leon. “And I don’t believe you believe——”