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He shook his head. "I am denied sugar. Has it ever occurred to you that
middle age ought to be called the age of denial?" Then his tone changed.
"But I wonder if you begin to realize how fortunate you are? You have
the collector's instinct and the means to gratify it. To discover with
you is to possess--don't you understand the blessing of that? You love
beauty as a favoured daughter, not as one of the disinherited who can
only peer through the windows of her palace."
"But you also--you love beauty as I do."
"But I can't own it--not as you do." He was speaking frankly. "I haven't
the means. At least what I have I have made myself, and therefore I
guard it more carefully. It is only those who have once been poor who
are really under the curse of money, for that curse is the inability to
understand that money is less valuable than anything else on earth that
you happen to need or desire. Now to me the most terrible thing on earth
is not to be without beauty, but to be without money--"
She smiled.


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