“Even so,” replied Lovel, patiently submitting to an interrogatory which he could not well evade. “Yet I am so detached from all the world, have so few in whom I am interested, or who are interested in me, that my very state of destitution gives me independence. He whose good or evil fortune affects himself alone, has the best right to pursue it according to his own fancy.”
“Pardon me, young man,” said Oldbuck, laying his hand kindly on his shoulder, and making a full halt--“sufflamina--a little patience, if you please. I will suppose that you have no friends to share or rejoice in your success in life--that you cannot look back to those to whom you owe gratitude, or forward to those to whom you ought to afford protection; but it is no less incumbent on you to move steadily in the path of duty--for your active exertions are due not only to society, but in humble gratitude to the Being who made you a member of it, with powers to serve yourself and others.”
“But I am unconscious of possessing such powers,” said Lovel, somewhat impatiently. “I ask nothing of society but the permission of walking innoxiously through the path of life, without jostling others, or permitting myself to be jostled. I owe no man anything--I have the means of maintaining, myself with complete independence; and so moderate are my wishes in this respect, that even these means, however limited, rather exceed than fall short of them.”
“Nay, then,” said Oldbuck, removing his hand, and turning again to the road, “if you are so true a philosopher as to think you have money enough, there’s no more to be said--I cannot pretend to be entitled to advise you;--you have attained the acme’--the summit of perfection. And how came Fairport to be the selected abode of so much self-denying philosophy? It is as if a worshipper of the true religion had set up his staff by choice among the multifarious idolaters of the land of Egypt. There is not a man in Fairport who is not a devoted worshipper of the Golden Calf--the mammon of unrighteousness. Why, even I, man, am so infected by the bad neighbourhood, that I feel inclined occasionally to become an idolater myself.”
“My principal amusements being literary,” answered Lovel, “and circumstances which I cannot mention having induced me, for a time at least, to relinquish the military service, I have pitched on Fairport as a place where I might follow my pursuits without any of those temptations to society which a more elegant circle might have presented to me.”