And he had been brought up in that criminal ignorance of the value of money which has compassed the ruin of so many of the younger members of the British aristocracy. American fathers may live up to the last dollar of the large income they make by the constant turning over of their discrepant capital, die bankrupt, or leave nothing but a life insurance to their women; but the sons, no matter how indulged, grow up in the electric atmosphere of a business country; the subject of money and its infinite meanings is never long absent from the conversation about them nor from their minds; they witness the rise and fall of fortunes, the fluctuation of incomes, the accidents to which the most cautious are liable; and they live through those periodical rabies of the money market known as panics, which focus the attention of the most careless. Leisure they know to be merely an incident; they realize that, however wise it may be to enjoy life while conditions are favourable, it is equally wise to keep one’s energies polished and alert. And these energies are born in the blood, which perhaps is the whole point.
There is, save for war and sport, little latent energy in the blood of the young British aristocrat whose ancestors have too long been men of leisure. He has no acquaintance with business, and as little premonition of the serious responsibilities of life as of its ugly contacts. Surrounded, sheltered, reared in an atmosphere of plenty, with expensive habits, and self-denial no part of his creed (and the sons of peers comparatively poor are no exceptions), he has during his father’s lifetime all the advantages and refinements of the concentrated income of the estates that go to the head of the house. Then comes the inevitable moment when he is turned adrift, and confronted with the problem of maintaining his legitimate position in the world upon a younger son’s pittance. Readjustment taking place in few characters except at the conclusion of a series of shocks, and as often not then, he goes on spending mechanically, expecting that a new deus ex machinâ will as inevitably appear as the regular if sometimes invisible stars.
Ordham had imbibed the half-admitted principle that those that toiled existed merely by virtue of their usefulness to the great. It might be necessary to throw a bone occasionally to prevent snarling, or even for mere humanity’s sake; but that these underlings should presume to demand a settlement of accounts at inconvenient seasons—the liberty would hardly be greater did they solicit an invitation to dinner! That it was dishonest to buy when you had no definite prospect of paying, Ordham would have regarded as a principle of foreign growth, possibly American, wholly plebeian. It was not a matter upon which he had ever wasted a moment’s analysis; but possibly, had it been put to him with uncompromising bluntness, he would have been startled and ashamed, for he was not only kind and lavish, but without conscious arrogance; as for the word “dishonesty” it never entered his conversation or head unless some man of his class committed incomprehensible follies and went to Wormwood Scrubbs.