“What but the best kind!” Patsy thought for a moment, and smiled whimsically while her eyes grew strangely starry in that early twilight. “Wouldn’t I like to be choosing those fortunes, and wouldn’t they be an odd lot, entirely! There’d be singing hearts that had learned to sing above trouble; there’d be true fellowship—the kind that finds brotherhood in beggars as well as—as prime ministers; there’d be peace of soul—not the kind that naps by the fire, content that the wind doesn’t be blowing down his chimney, but the kind that fights above fighting and keeps neighbor from harrying neighbor. Troth, the world is in mortial need of fortunes like the last.”
“And wouldn’t you be choosin’ gold for a fortune?” asked the tinker.
Patsy shook her head vehemently.
“Why not?”
“That’s the why!” Suddenly Patsy clenched her hands and shook two menacing fists against the gathering dark. “I hate gold, along with the meanness and the lying and the thieving and the false judgment it brings into the world.”
“But the world can’t get along without it,” reminded the tinker, shrewdly.
“Aye, but it can. It can get along without the hoarded gold, the inherited gold, the cheating, bribing, starving gold—that’s the kind I mean, the kind that gets into a man’s heart and veins until his fingers itch to gild everything he touches, like the rich man in the city yonder.”
“What rich man? I thought the—I thought the city was full o’ rich men.”
“Maybe; but there’s just one I’m thinking of now; and God pity him—and his son.”