Abel Newt smoked a great many cigars to enable him to see his position clearly.

When he told his mother that he could not accompany her to the Springs because he was about entering his father’s counting-room, it was not so much because he was enamored of business as that his future relations with Hope were entirely doubtful, and he did not wish to complicate them by exposing himself to the chances of Saratoga.

“Business, of course, is the only career in this country, my son,” said Boniface Newt.  “What men want, and women too, is money.  What is this city of New York?  A combination of men and machines for making money.  Every body respects a rich man.  They may laugh at him behind his back.  They may sneer at his ignorance and awkwardness, and all that sort of thing, but they respect his money.  Now there’s old Jacob Van Boozenberg.  I say to you in strict confidence, my son, that there was never a greater fool than that man.  He absolutely knows nothing at all.  When he dies he will be no more missed in this world than an old dead stage-horse who is made into a manure heap.  He is coarse, and vulgar, and mean.  His daughter Kate married his clerk, young Tom Witchet—­not a cent, you know, but five hundred dollars salary.  ’Twas against the old man’s will, and he shut his door, and his purse, and his heart.  He turned Witchet away; told his daughter that she might lie in the bed she had made for herself; told Witchet that he was a rotten young swindler, and that, as he had married his daughter for her money, he’d be d——­d if he wouldn’t be up with him, and deuce of a cent should they get from him.  They live I don’t know where, nor how.  Some of her old friends send her money—­actually give five-dollar bills to old Jacob Van Boozenberg’s daughter, somewhere over by the North River.  Every body knows it, you know; but, for all that, we have to make bows to old Van B. Don’t we want accommodations?  Look here, Abel; if Jacob were not worth a million of dollars, he would be of less consequence than the old fellow who sells apples at the corner of his bank.  But as it is, we all agree that he is a shrewd, sensible old fellow; rough in some of his ways—­full of little prejudices—­rather sharp; and as for Mrs. Tom Witchet, why, if girls will run away, and all that sort of thing, they must take the consequences, you know.  Of course they must.  Where should we be if every rich merchant’s daughters were at the mercy of his clerks?  I’m sorry for all this.  It’s sad, you know.  It’s positively melancholy.  It troubles me.  Ah, yes! where was I?  Oh, I was saying that money is the respectable thing.  And mark, Abel, if this were the Millennium, things would be very different.  But it isn’t the Millennium.  It’s give one and take two, if you can get it.  That’s what it is here; and let him who wants to, kick against the pricks.”

Abel hung his legs over the arms of the office-chairs in the counting-room, and listened gravely.