'Well,' he said at length, 'how do you like the life?'
'It is better than the old one,' she said.
'Oh, so you've come to that. You have given up the absolutes.'
'Yes, I've given them up. A woman like me has to.'
'Yes, I suppose you've got to,' pondered Farwell. 'But apart from that, is it a success? Are you attaining your end? That's the only thing that matters, you know.'
'I am, in a sense; I'm saving money. You see, he's generous.'
'Excellent, excellent,' sneered Farwell. 'I like to see you making out of what the bourgeois call vice that which will enable you to command bourgeois respect. By-and-by I suppose you'll have made a fortune.'
'Well, no; a competency perhaps, with luck.'
'With luck, as you say. Do you know, Victoria, this luck business is grand! My firm goes in for mines: they went prospecting in America twenty years ago and they happened to strike copper. That was good. Other men struck granite only. That was bad. But my boss is a City Sheriff now. Frightfully rich. There used to be four of them, but one died of copper poisoning, and another was found shot in a gulch. Nobody knows how it happened, but the other two got the mines.'
Victoria smiled. She liked this piratical tit bit.