“Money? oh, of course! We are a moneyed family.”
“That is well. Mine is a moneyed family. One cannot be comfortable oneself without money, nor have anything to do comfortably with other people unless they’re moneyed. I have often thought there is a great gulf fixed between the comfortably off and those who are in poor circumstances, and those who are in comfort can’t pass to the other side—not right they should; let them make their associates among the comfortably off. That’s my doctrine.”
“And mine also,” said Pasco. “I like to hear you talk like this—it’s wholesome.”
“Well, and what do you want with me?”
Pepperill crossed his legs, uncrossed them, and crossed them again.
“I’ve been doing a lot o’ business lately,” said he.
“So I hear. But do you want to do business with me? I bought your orchard and meadow. There I think you did wrong. Hold on to land; never let that go—that’s my doctrine. You got rid of it, and where are you now? In Coombe Cellars, without as much as five acres around it of your own.”
“I never was calculated to be a farmer,” said Pasco. “My head was always set on a commercial life, and I can’t say I regret it. A lot of money has passed through my hands.”
“I don’t care so much for the passing as the sticking of money,” retorted Pooke.
“Well, in my line, money comes in with a tide and goes out with a tide. When it is out, it is very much out indeed; but I have only to wait awhile, and, sure as anything in nature, in comes the tide once more.”