! But, upon my word, what a queer
parable it all is! Shall I tell you how it shapes itself to me?" He
looked, tongs in hand, at Victoria, his greenish eyes all alive. "I see
you all--you, Harry, Faversham, and Melrose, Miss Lydia--grouped round a
central point. The point is wealth. You are all in different relations to
wealth. You and Harry are indifferent to wealth, because you have always
had it. It has come to you without toiling and spinning--can you imagine
being without it?--but it has not spoilt you. You sit loose to it;
because you have never _struggled_ for it. But I doubt whether the
Recording Angel, when it comes to reckoning up, will give you very high
marks for your indifference! Dear friend!"--he put out a sudden hand
and touched Victoria's--"bear with me! There's one thing you'll hear, if
any one does, at the last day--'I was a stranger and ye took me in.'" His
eyes shone upon her.

After which, he resumed in his former tone: "Then take Melrose. He too is
determined by his relation to wealth. Wealth has just ruined him--burnt
him up--made out of him so much refuse for the nether fires. Faversham
again! Wealth, the crucial, deciding factor! The testing with him is
still going on. He seems, from your account, to be coming out badly. And
lastly, the girl--who, like you, is indifferent to wealth, but for
different reasons; who probably hates and shrinks from it; like a wild
bird that fears the cage. You, my dear lady--you and Harry--have got so
used to wealth, its trammels no longer gall you. You carry the weight of
it, as the horse of the Middle Ages carried his trappings; it's second
nature. And you can enjoy, you can move, you can feel, in spite of it.
You have risked your soul, without knowing it; but you have kept your
soul! This girl, I take it, is afraid to risk her soul. She is not in
love with Harry--worse luck for Harry!--she is in love--remember I have
talked to her a little!--with something she calls beauty, with liberty,
with an unfettered course for the spirit, with all the lovely,
intangible, priceless _best_, which the world holds for its true lovers.
Wealth grasping at that best has a way of killing it--as the child kills
the butterfly. _That's_ what she's afraid of. As to Faversham"--he got up
from his seat, and with his thumbs in his waistcoat began to pace the
room--"Faversham no doubt is in a bad way. He's on the road to damnation.
Melrose of course is damned and done with. But Faversham?