That night, as they sat beside the fire, he talked with an interest he had never shown before about Arthur's prospects in life. He drew from him a particular account of his work upon the ranch, the scenery, the business possibilities in fruit-growing, and so forth. "I suppose now men get rich out there pretty quick, don't they?" "A few." "But there's gold and copper in those hills, isn't there?" "So they say. There are old men who have been looking for it all their lives, though, and they haven't found it." "But you might find it, eh? You've education, and that counts for a lot anywhere. And you've brains--you could organise things. I wouldn't wonder if you were rich some day." "I don't want to be rich, father. The rich people appear to me the unhappiest people in the world." "Ah, that's true, too! It's the same everywhere. You see, if a man's _born_ rich, he grows up to it, and knows how to behave. But when he _gets_ rich, he generally makes a mess of things. Isn't used to it, and it goes to his head like wine." A long pause--and then, "What's the verse about choosing the better part? Well, I reckon you've chosen the better part. I didn't think so once, but I've begun to see a lot of new things of late, and that's one of them." "Then you forgive me for going away, father?" "Oh! I don't know about that. Isn't it enough if I say that I think you did the wise thing? It's pretty hard for me to say that, and you must be content with it." He talked on for an hour or so, in a quiet, musing voice, recalling the histories of men he had known, most of them dead. He recalled their struggles, their ambitions, their infrequent victories, their frequent defeats, their occasional rise into social eminence, and the domestic infelicities that poisoned their success. It was a sorry record, a kind of epitome of modern covetousness, through which wailed the sombre note of the Hebrew moralist, _Vanitas Vanitatum_! Arthur could not but notice that he spoke no longer as a participant in the strife, but as a mere spectator. He saw the frantic whirl of men in pursuit of gold as something far off, unimportant, inherently mean and despicable. And he himself spoke as a man completely disillusioned, a derider and a mocker, whose dominant temper was ironic pity. "Poor Sandy Macphail--I knew him when he earned a pound a week." And then would come a caustic sketch of Sandy, lying for his life in some crisis of his fortunes, "eating dirt," as he put it, to creep into a big man's favour, dragging with him into social light a wife who was the laughing-stock of unfamiliar drawing-rooms, and his cubs of boys, who took to drink or gambling--ending with the grim comment, "Spent his last years wheeled about in a chair, did Sandy--paralysed, you know."