People are gouging, and shinning, and sucking all round.  It’s give and take.  I am not here to look out for other men, I’m here to take care of myself—­for nobody else will.  It’s very sad, I know; it’s very sad, indeed.  It’s absolutely melancholy.  Ah, yes! where was I?  Oh!  I was saying that a lie well stuck to is better than the truth wavering.  It’s perfectly dreadful, my son, from some points of view—­Christianity, for instance.  But what on earth are you going to do?  The only happy people are the rich people, for they don’t have this eternal bother how to make money.  Don’t misunderstand me, my son; I do not say that you must always tell stories.  Heaven forbid!  But a man is not bound always to tell the whole truth.  The very law itself says that no man need give evidence against himself.  Besides, business is no worse than every other calling.  Do you suppose a lawyer never defends a man whom he knows to be guilty?  He says he does it to give the culprit a fair trial.  Fiddle-de-dee!  He strains every nerve to get the man off.  A lawyer is hired to take the side of a company or a corporation in every quarrel.  He’s paid by the year or by the case.  He probably stops to consider whether his company is right, doesn’t he? he works for justice, not for victory?  Oh, yes! stuff!  He works for fees.  What’s the meaning of a retainer?  That if, upon examination, the lawyer finds the retaining party to be in the right, he will undertake the case?  Fiddle! no! but that he will undertake the case any how and fight it through.  So ’tis all round.  I wish I was rich, and I’d be out of it.”

Mr. Boniface Newt discoursed warmly; Mr. Abel Newt listened with extreme coolness.  He whiffed his cigar, and leaned his head on one side as he hearkened to the wisdom of experience; observing that his father put his practice into words and called it philosophy.

CHAPTER XVII.

OF GIRLS AND FLOWERS.

Mr. Abel Newt was not a philosopher; he was a man of action.

He told his mother that he could not accompany her to the Springs, because he must prepare himself to enter the counting-room of his father.  But the evening before she left, Mrs. Newt gave a little party for Mrs. Plumer, of New Orleans.  So Miss Grace, of whom his mother had written Abel, and who was just about leaving school, left school and entered society, simultaneously, by taking leave of Madame de Feuille and making her courtesy at Mrs. Boniface Newt’s.

Madame de Feuille’s was a “finishing” school.  An extreme polish was given to young ladies by Madame de Feuille.  By her generous system they were fitted to be wives of men of even the largest fortune.  There was not one of her pupils who would not have been equal to the addresses of a millionaire.  It is the profound conviction of all who were familiar with that seminary that the pupils would not have shrunk from marrying a crown-prince, or any king in any country who confined himself to Christian wedlock with one wife, or even the son of an English duke—­so perfect was the polish, so liberal the education.