By way of making clear what was in his mind, he told Jimmie a little about his own life.  He pictured a big household, with a father beset by business cares, and turning over the managing of his home to employees.  “My mother was a fool,” said Lacey.  “I suppose it sounds bad for a man to say that, but I’ve known it all my life.  Maybe the old man was too busy to look up a woman with sense—­or maybe he didn’t believe there were any.  Anyhow, my mother’s idea was to be seen spending more money than any other woman in town; that was her ‘position’, and her children were part of the show—­we must wear more clothes and bully more servants than anybody else’s children.  I’ve thought it all out—­I’ve had lots of opportunity for thinking of late.  I can’t remember when I didn’t hit my nurse in the face if she tried to take away a toy from me.  I never had to ask for anything twice—­if I did, I went into a tantrum and got it.  I learned to smoke and to drink wine, and then came the women—­the women finished me, as you know.”

He paused; and Jimmie nodded sympathetically, remembering the story of the eight chorus-girls about whom “Wild Bill” had read out in the local.

“It’s hell for a boy to have a lot of money,” said Lacey, “and to be preyed on by women.  You have your human emotions, of course—­you’re absolutely compelled to believe in some women; and they’re all perfectly cold-blooded—­at least the kinds that a rich boy meets.  I don’t mean only adventuresses—­I mean the society-girls, the ones you’re supposed to marry.  Their damned old harpies of mothers are pushing behind them, of course—­laying out everything they own for clothes, and not knowing how they can pay the bills for last season.  They set out to catch you, they’re mad with the determination, they don’t care about reputation, they’ll do any damned thing.  You take them out in your car, and then they want to get out and pick flowers, and they draw you into the woods, and presently you’ve got hold of their hands, and then you’re hugging and kissing them, and then you go the limit.  But then you’ve got to marry them; and when they find you won’t, they have hysterics, and say they’re going to shoot their heads off; only they don’t shoot their heads off, they kiss you some more, and borrow your diamond scarf-pin and forget to return it.”

The young lord of Leesville fell silent.  Sombre memories possessed him, and Jimmie, darting a swift glance at him, saw the look of weary age on his face.  “I’ve never talked with anybody about what happened at the end,” said he, “and I never mean to; but I’ll say this much—­the time I loved a married woman was the only honest love I ever had, because she was the only woman who wasn’t looking to marry me!”

That was, of course, too subtle for a man like Jimmie Higgins.  But this much the little Socialist got—­that the heir of the Granitch fortune had been in truth a miserably unhappy mortal.  And this was an extraordinary revelation to Jimmie, who had taken it for granted that the rich were the lucky ones of earth.  He had hated them on the supposition that they were without care; they were the Lotus-eaters, of whom the poet wrote that they