Rather reluctantly they obeyed, casting wishful glances backward to the grown-up boy with whom they had hoped to have a frolic.
"Glad to see you," said Mr. Holworthy. "You have been unsocial, lately."
"Yes; all the effect of the panic. I am such a butterfly that I seem out of place in a work-a-day community. I am constantly advised, like the volatile person in the fable, to learn wisdom from my aunt; but I can't, for the soul of me."
"You ought to visit the more, to cheer the wretched and downcast."
"Oh, but it's a fearful waste of magnetism. Five minutes' talk with a man who has notes to pay draws all the virtue out of me. It lowers my vital tone like standing in an ice-house. You feel such a man from afar like a coming iceberg. You don't have notes to pay? I thought not. I should go at once."
"No, my little shop pays its way. I buy for cash. I pay my hands when they bring in their work, and I have customers enough who ask me for no credit."
"Happy man! most fortunate of tailors!—I have been thinking, Holworthy, among your many benevolent projects, why you never devised some means of relieving people who are supposed to be in good circumstances,—a society for ameliorating the condition of the rich."
"Bless me! the poor are quite numerous enough, and are in unusual straits just now."
"I know, and for that reason they are better off than usual. People say, 'How the poor must suffer in these pinching times!' So they double their charities."
"Poverty is an ocean without bottom, my friend. All that is given is like emptying stones into the sea; the waves swallow them and sweep over as before."