e."

"Comforts!" The sick man's eyes grew sharp, attacking, with a force
that had not been his for days. "You are talking now like a fool.
Money is the only thing that can buy comforts. What comforts have the
poor?"

"Are you meaning butlers and limousines, electric vibrators and
mud-baths? Those are only cures for the bodily necessities and ills
that money brings on a man: the over-feeding and the over-drinking
and the--under-living. But what comforts would they bring to a
troubled mind and a pinched heart? Tell me that!"

"So! You would prefer to be poor--more pastorally poetic?" Burgeman
sneered.

"More comfortable," corrected Patsy. "Mind you, I'm not meaning
starved, ground-under-the-heel poverty, the kind that breeds
anarchists and criminals. God pity them, too! I mean the man who is
still too poor to reckon his worth to a community in mere money, who,
instead, doles kindness and service to his neighbors. Did you ever
see a man richer than the one who comes home at day's end, after
eight hours of good, clean work, and finds the wife and children
watching for him, happy-eyed and laughing?"

The sick man stirred uneasily. "Well--can't a rich man find the same
happiness?"

"Aye, he can; but does he? Does he even want it? Count up the rich
men you know, and how many are there--like that?" No answer being
given, Patsy continued: "Take the richest man--the very richest man
in all this country--do you suppose in all his life he ever saw his
own lad watching for him to come home?"

"What do you know about the richest man--and his son?" The sick man
had for a moment become again a fiercely bitter, fighting force, a
power given to sweeping what it willed before it. He sat with hands
clenched, his eyes burning into the girl's on the ground beside him.
"I know what the world says."

"The world lies; it has always lied."

"You are wrong. It is a tongue here and a tongue there that bears
false witness; but the world passes on the truth; it has to."

"You forget"--Burgeman senior spoke with difficulty--"it is the rich
who bear the burdens of the world's cares and troubles, and what do
they get for it? The hatred of every one else, even their sons! Every
one hates and envies the man richer and more powerful than himself;
the more he has the more he is feared. He lives friendless; he
dies--lonely."

Patsy rose to her knees and knelt there, shaking her fist--a
composite picture of supplicating Justice and accusing T