Money makes life livable. It gives freedom and destroys fear.
Having it means sanitary houses and well-made clothes. It brings into
men's lives beauty and the love of beauty. It enables a man to go
adventuring after the stuff of life as I have done.
"Writers are fond of telling stories of the crude excesses of great
wealth," he went on hurriedly, glancing again at Eleanor. "No doubt the
things they tell of do happen. Money, and not the ability and the instinct
to make money, is at fault. And what of the cruder excesses of poverty,
the drunken men who beat and starve their families, the grim silences of
the crowded, unsanitary houses of the poor, the inefficient, and the
defeated? Go sit around the lounging room of the most vapid rich man's
city club as I have done, and then sit among the workers of a factory at
the noon hour. Virtue, you will find, is no fonder of poverty than you and
I, and the man who has merely learned to be industrious, and who has not
acquired that eager hunger and shrewdness that enables him to get on, may
build up a strong dexterous body while his mind is diseased and decaying."
Grasping his cane and beginning to be carried away by the wind of his
eloquence Telfer forgot Eleanor and talked for his love of talking.
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