For an instant Patsy looked at him without speaking; then she answered, slowly: "You have told me, haven't you? You are the master of the place, and you look a mortal lonely one." "I--am." The words seemed to slip from his lips without his being at all conscious of having spoken. "And the money couldn't keep it from you." There was no mockery in her tone. "'Tis pitifully few comforts you can buy in life, when all's said and done." "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."