Miss Seldon gave a little lift to her superb shoulders. "You're incurably romantic, Moya. It's only a scramble for money, after all."
"Don't know about that, Miss Seldon," disagreed Captain Kilmeny. "Of course it's gold they all want. But gold stands for any number of good things, tangible and abstract—success, you know, and home, and love, and kiddies, the better development of the race—all that sort of thing."
"Is that what it means to the highgraders too?" Joyce let her smiling eyes rest with innocent impudence in those of the miner.
Kilmeny showed no sign of discomfiture. His gaze met hers fully and steadily. "Something of that sort, I suppose."
"Just what is a highgrader?"
Moya held her breath. The debonair lightness of the question could not rob it of its significance. Nobody but Joyce would have dared such a home thrust.
Jack laughed dryly. "A highgrader is a miner who saves the company for which he works the trouble of having valuable ore smelted."
"But doesn't the ore belong to the company?"
"There's a difference of opinion about that. Legally it does, morally it doesn't—not all of it. The man who risks his life and the support of his family by working underground is entitled to a share of the profit, isn't he?"
"He gets his wages, doesn't he?"