'done.'"

"A rich one's better; he can do more," I replied with conviction.

At this she appeared to have, in the oddest way, a momentary revulsion.
"So you'd have reason to know if you had led the life that we have!
Never to have had really enough--I mean to do just the few simple things
we've wanted; never to have had the sinews of war, I suppose you'd call
them, the funds for a campaign; to have felt every day and every hour
the hard eternal pinch and found the question of dollars and cents--and
so horridly few of them--mixed up with every experience, with every
impulse: that DOES make one mercenary, does make money seem a good
beyond all others; which it's quite natural it should! And it's why
Linda's of the opinion that a fortune's always a fortune. She knows all
about that of your nephew, how it's invested, how it may be expected to
increase, exactly on what sort of footing it would enable her to live.
She has decided that it's enough, and enough is as good as a feast. She
thinks she could lead him by the nose, and I dare say she could. She'll
of course make him live in these countries; she hasn't the slightest
intention of casting her pearls--but basta!" said my friend. "I think
she has views upon London, because in England he can hunt and shoot, and
that will make him leave her more or less to herself."

"I don't know about his leaving her to herself, but it strikes me that
he would like the rest of that matter very much," I returned. "That's
not at all a bad programme even from Archie's point of view."

"It's no use thinking of princes," she pursued as if she hadn't heard
me. "They're most of them more in want of money even than we. Therefore
'greatness' is out of the question--we really recognised that at an