“Do you claim that as a merit?”
“No, I state it as a fact. How can you respect such people?”
“You might respect yourself, then,” said the girl. “Or perhaps that wouldn't be so easy, either.”
“No, it wouldn't. I like to have you say these things to me,” said Beaton, impartially.
“Well, I like to say them,” Alma returned.
“They do me good.”
“Oh, I don't know that that was my motive.”
“There is no one like you—no one,” said Beaton, as if apostrophizing her in her absence. “To come from that house, with its assertions of money—you can hear it chink; you can smell the foul old banknotes; it stifles you—into an atmosphere like this, is like coming into another world.”
“Thank you,” said Alma. “I'm glad there isn't that unpleasant odor here; but I wish there was a little more of the chinking.”
“No, no! Don't say that!” he implored. “I like to think that there is one soul uncontaminated by the sense of money in this big, brutal, sordid city.”