“Oh, Sidney; have you been doing anything?”

“No, my best beloved; I am a gentleman, and have been doing nothing.  That a man can do so and not starve is nowadays not even a paradox.  Every halfpenny I possess is stolen money; but it has been stolen legally, and, what is of some practical importance to you, I have no means of restoring it to the rightful owners even if I felt inclined to.  Do you know what my father was?”

“What difference can that make now?  Don’t be disagreeable and full of ridiculous fads, Sidney dear.  I didn’t marry your father.”

“No; but you married—­only incidentally, of course—­my father’s fortune.  That necklace of yours was purchased with his money; and I can almost fancy stains of blood.”

“Stop, Sidney.  I don’t like this sort of romancing.  It’s all nonsense.  Do be nice to me.”

“There are stains of sweat on it, I know.”

“You nasty wretch!”

“I am thinking, not of you, my dainty one, but of the unfortunate people who slave that we may live idly.  Let me explain to you why we are so rich.  My father was a shrewd, energetic, and ambitious Manchester man, who understood an exchange of any sort as a transaction by which one man should lose and the other gain.  He made it his object to make as many exchanges as possible, and to be always the gaining party in them.  I do not know exactly what he was, for he was ashamed both of his antecedents and of his relatives, from which I can only infer that they were honest, and, therefore, unsuccessful people.  However, he acquired some knowledge of the cotton trade, saved some money, borrowed some more on the security of his reputation for getting the better of other people in business, and, as he accurately told me afterwards, started for himself.  He bought a factory and some raw cotton.  Now you must know that a man, by laboring some time on a piece of raw cotton, can turn it into a piece of manufactured cotton fit for making into sheets and shifts and the like.  The manufactured cotton is more valuable than the raw cotton, because the manufacture costs wear and tear of machinery, wear and tear of the factory, rent of the ground upon which the factory is built, and human labor, or wear and tear of live men, which has to be made good by food, shelter, and rest.  Do you understand that?”

“We used to learn all about it at college.  I don’t see what it has to do with us, since you are not in the cotton trade.”

“You learned as much as it was thought safe to teach you, no doubt; but not quite all, I should think.  When my father started for himself, there were many men in Manchester who were willing to labor in this way, but they had no factory to work in, no machinery to work with, and no raw cotton to work on, simply because all this indispensable plant, and the materials for producing a fresh supply of it, had been appropriated by earlier comers.  So they