“For you, my boy, I put the matter of money in the first place,” he declared, leaning back in his chair, smoking a cigarette and from time to time tapping Eleanor on the shoulder with his cane. “For any boy I put money-making in the first place. It is only women and fools who despise money-making. Look at Eleanor here. The time and thought she puts into the selling of hats would be the death of me, but it has been the making of her. See how fine and purposeful she has become. Without the millinery business she would be a purposeless fool intent upon clothes and with it she is all a woman should be. It is like a child to her.” Eleanor, who had turned to laugh at her husband, looked instead at the ground and a shadow crossed her face. Telfer, who had begun talking thoughtlessly, out of his excess of words, glanced from the woman to the boy. He knew that the suggestion regarding a child had touched a secret regret in Eleanor, and began trying to efface the shadow on her face by throwing himself into the subject that chanced to be on his tongue, making the words roll and tumble from his lips. “No matter what may come in the future, in our day money-making precedes many virtues that are forever on men’s lips,” he declared fiercely as though trying to down an opponent. “It is one of the virtues that proves man not a savage. It has lifted him up--not money-making, but the power to make money. Money makes life livable. It gives freedom and destroys fear. Having it means sanitary houses and well-made clothes. It brings into men’s lives beauty and the love of beauty. It enables a man to go adventuring after the stuff of life as I have done. “Writers are fond of telling stories of the crude excesses of great wealth,” he went on hurriedly, glancing again at Eleanor. “No doubt the things they tell of do happen. Money, and not the ability and the instinct to make money, is at fault. And what of the cruder excesses of poverty, the drunken men who beat and starve their families, the grim silences of the crowded, unsanitary houses of the poor, the inefficient, and the defeated? Go sit around the lounging room of the most vapid rich man’s city club as I have done, and then sit among the workers of a factory at the noon hour. Virtue, you will find, is no fonder of poverty than you and I, and the man who has merely learned to be industrious, and who has not acquired that eager hunger and shrewdness that enables him to get on, may build up a strong dexterous body while his mind is diseased and decaying.” Grasping his cane and beginning to be carried away by the wind of his eloquence Telfer forgot Eleanor and talked for his love of talking.