These were not Culduffs views. His code--it is the code of all his calling--was: No country of any pretensions, no more than any gentleman of blood and family, ever became bankrupt. Pressed, hard-pushed, he would say, Yes! we all of us have had our difficulties, and to surmount them occasionally we are driven to make unprofitable bargains, but we “rub through,” and so will Greece and Spain and those other countries where they are borrowing at twelve or twenty per cent, and raise a loan each year to discharge the dividends. Not only, then, were these two little gifted with qualities to render them companionable to each other, but from the totally different way every event and every circumstance presented itself to their minds, each grew to conceive for the other a sort of depreciatory estimate as of one who only could see a very small part of any subject, and even that colored and tinted by the hues of his own daily calling. “So, then,” said Culduff, after listening to a somewhat lengthy explanation from Bramleigh of why and how it was that there was nothing to be done financially at the moment,--“so, then, I am to gather the plan of a company to work the mines is out of the question?” “I would rather call it deferred than abandoned,” was the cautious reply. “In my career what we postpone we generally prohibit. And what other course is open to us?” “We can wait, my Lord, we can wait. Coal is not like indigo or tobacco; it is not a question of hours--whether the crop be saved or ruined. We can wait.” “Very true, sir; but _I_ cannot wait. There are some urgent calls upon me just now, the men who are pressing which will not be so complaisant as to wait either.” “I was always under the impression, my Lord, that your position as a peer, and the nature of the services that you were engaged in, were sufficient to relieve you from all the embarrassments that attach to humbler men in difficulties?” “They don't arrest, but they dun us, sir; and they dun with an insistence and an amount of menace, too, that middle-class people can form no conception of. They besiege the departments we serve under with their vulgar complaints, and if the rumor gets abroad that one of us is about to be advanced to a governorship or an embassy, they assemble in Downing Street like a Reform demonstration. I declare to you I had to make my way through a lane of creditors from the Privy Council Office to the private entrance to F. O., my hands full of their confounded accounts--one fellow, a boot-maker, actually having pinned his bill to the skirt of my coat as I went. And the worst of these impertinences is, that they give a Minister who is indisposed towards you a handle for refusing your just claims. I have just come through such an ordeal: I have been told that my debts are to be a bar to my promotion.” The almost tremulous horror which he gave to this last expression--as of an outrage unknown to mankind--warned Bramleigh to be silent.