“My dear,” he answered, kindly, “you will have any number of friends now that you are poor.  It was merely your money that kept you from having any.  You see,” Mr. Kennaston went on, with somewhat the air of one climbing upon his favourite hobby, “money is the only thing that counts nowadays.  In America, the rich are necessarily our only aristocracy.  It is quite natural.  One cannot hope for an aristocracy of intellect, if only for the reason that not one person in a thousand has any; and birth does not count for much.  Of course, it is quite true that all of our remote ancestors came over with William the Conqueror—­I have sometimes thought that the number of steerage passengers his ships would accommodate must have been little short of marvellous—­but it is equally true that the grandfathers of most of our leisure class were either deserving or dishonest persons—­who either started life on a farm, and studied Euclid by the firelight and did all the other priggish things they thought would look well in a biography, or else met with marked success in embezzlement.  So money, after all, is our only standard; and when a woman is as rich as you were yesterday she cannot hope for friends any more than the Queen of England can.  You could have plenty of flatterers, toadies, sycophants—­anything, in fine, but friends.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Margaret, half angrily—­“not a word of it.  There must be some honest people in the world who don’t consider that money is everything.  You know there must be, beautiful!”

The poet laughed.  “That,” said he, affably, “is poppycock.  You are repeating the sort of thing I said to you yesterday.  I am honest now.  The best of us, Margaret, cannot help being impressed by the power of money.  It is the greatest power in the world, and we cannot—­cannot possibly—­look upon rich people as being quite like us.  We must toady to them a bit, Margaret, whether we want to or not.  The Eagle intimidates us all.”

“I hate him!” Miss Hugonin announced, with vehemence.

Kennaston searched his pockets.  After a moment he produced a dollar bill and showed her the Eagle on it.

“There,” he said, gravely, “is the original of the Woods Eagle—­the Eagle that intimidates us all.  Do you remember what Shakespeare—­one always harks back to Shakespeare to clinch an argument, because not even our foremost actors have been able to conceal the fact that he was, as somebody in Dickens acutely points out, ’a dayvilish clever fellow’—­do you remember.  I say, what Shakespeare observes as to this very Eagle?”

Miss Hugonin shook her little head till it glittered in the sunlight like a topaz.  She cared no more for Shakespeare than the average woman does, and she was never quite comfortable when he was alluded to.

  “He says,” Mr. Kennaston quoted, solemnly: 
  “The Eagle suffers little birds to sing,
  And is not careful what they mean thereby,
  Knowing that with the shadow of his wing
  He can at pleasure still their melody.”