"I suppose this must be our last evening together."
"I suppose it must," said Septimus.
"Are you quite sure you can afford all the money you're leaving with me?"
"Of course. It comes out of the bank."
"I know that, you stupid," she laughed. "Where else could it come from unless you kept it in a stocking? But the bank isn't an unlimited gold-mine from which you can draw out as many handfuls as you want."
Septimus knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
"People don't get sovereigns out of gold-mines. I wish they did. They extract a bit of gold about the size of this pebble out of a ton of quartz. I once bought shares in a gold-mine and there wasn't any gold in it at all. I always used to be buying things like that. People sold them to me. I was like Moses."
"Moses?"
"Oh, not that Moses. He could get anything out of anything. He got water out of a rock. I mean the son of the Vicar of Wakefield, who bought the green spectacles."
"Oh," said Emmy, who after the way of her generation had never heard of him.