ay, sir," said the young man. "I shouldn't
quite like to regard it as a career, you know."

"No, no. I understand that. And I quite agree with you. But you know
I've always contended that the affections could be made to combine
pleasure and profit. I wouldn't have a man marry for money,--that
would be rather bad,--but I don't see why, when it comes to falling in
love, a man shouldn't fall in love with a rich girl as easily as a poor
one. Some of the rich girls are very nice, and I should say that the
chances of a quiet life with them were rather greater. They've always
had everything, and they wouldn't be so ambitious and uneasy. Don't
you think so?"

"It would depend," said the son, "upon whether a girl's people had been
rich long enough to have given her position before she married. If
they hadn't, I don't see how she would be any better than a poor girl
in that respect."

"Yes, there's sense in that. But the suddenly rich are on a level with
any of us nowadays. Money buys position at once. I don't say that it
isn't all right. The world generally knows what it's about, and knows
how to drive a bargain. I dare say it makes the new rich pay too much.
But there's no doubt but money is to the fore now. It is the romance,
the poetry of our age. It's the thing that chiefly strikes the
imagination. The Englishmen who come here are more curious about the
great new millionaires than about any one else, and they respect them
more. It's all very well. I don't complain of it."

"And you would like a rich daughter-in-law, quite regardless, then?"

"Oh, not quite so bad as that, Tom," said his father. "A little youth,
a little beauty, a little good sense and pretty behaviour--one mustn't
object to those things; and they go just as often with money as without
it. And I suppose I should like her people to be rather grammatical."

"It seems to me that you're exacting, sir," said the son. "How can you
expect people who have been strictly devoted to business to be
grammatical? Isn't that rather too much?"

"Perhaps it is. Perhaps you're right. But I understood your mother to
say that those benefactors of hers, whom you met last summer, were very
passably grammatical."

"The father isn't."

The elder, who had been smoking with his profile toward his son, now
turned his face full upon him. "I didn't know you had seen him?"

"I hadn't until to-day," said young Corey, with a little heightening of
his col