you would call improper conversation, literature or correspondence.  They feel the strain of being continually pure; they realize that all strains are pernicious, and that there is no action without its reaction.  They unbend.  Only inveterate folks do not unbend.  They dare not, because they have no backbone.  They know that if they once unbent, they could not straighten themselves out again.  They make a virtue of their own organic defect.  They explain their natural imperfection by calling themselves pure.  If you had a little money—­”

“You are always harking back to that point.  What has money to do with it?”

“Poverty is like rain.  It drops down ceaselessly, disintegrating the finer tissues of a man, his recent, delicate adjustments, and leaving nothing but the bleak and gaunt framework.  A poor man is a wintry tree—­alive, but stripped of its shining splendour.  He is always denying himself this or that.  One by one, his humane instincts, his elegant desires, are starved away by stress of circumstances.  The charming diversity of life ceases to have any meaning for him.  To console himself, he sets up perverse canons of right and wrong.  What the rich do, that is wrong.  Why?  Because he does not do it.  Why not?  Because he has no money.  A poor man is forced into a hypocritical attitude towards life—­debarred from being intellectually honest.  He cannot pay for the necessary experience.”

“There is something in what you say,” Eames would assent.  “But I fear you are overstating your case.”

“So did Demosthenes and Jesus Christ, and likewise Cicero and Julius Caesar.  Everybody overstates his case, particularly when he is anxious to do something which he considers useful.  I regard it as a real grievance, Eames, not to be allowed to assist you financially.  Having never done a stroke of work in my life, I can talk freely about my money.  My grandfather was a pirate and slave-dealer.  To my certain knowledge, not a penny of his wealth was honestly come by.  That ought to allay your scruples about accepting it.  Non OLET, you know.  Let me write you out a cheque for five hundred, there’s a good fellow.  Solely as a means of smoothing over the anfractuosities of life and squeezing all the possible pleasure out of it!  What else is money made for?  They say you live on milk and salad.  Why the Hell—­”

“Thanks!  I have all I want; sufficient to pay for the minor pleasures of life.”

“Such as?”

“A clean handkerchief now and then.  I see no harm in dying poor.”

“Where would I be, if my grandfather had seen no harm in it?  Don’t you really believe that money sweetens all things, as Pepys says?”

The diarist was one of Keith’s favourite authors.  He called him a representative Englishman and regretted that the type was becoming extinct.  Eames would reply: 

“Your Pepys was a disgusting climber.  He makes me ill with his snobbishness and silver plate and monthly gloatings over his gains.  I wonder you can read the man.  He may have been a capable official, but he was not a gentleman.”