"Well, you tell'em! I never heard of anything taking so long."
"Oh, they all do," he replied listlessly; "all will cases. They say it's exceptional to have one settled under four or five years."
"Oh ..." Muriel daringly changed her tack, "why don't you go to work, you la-azy!"
"At what?" he demanded abruptly.
"Why, at anything, I suppose. You're still a young man."
"If that's encouragement, I'm much obliged," he answered dryly--and then with sudden weariness: "Does it bother you particularly that I don't want to work?"
"It doesn't bother me--but, it does bother a lot of people who claim--"
"Oh, God!" he said brokenly, "it seems to me that for three years I've heard nothing about myself but wild stories and virtuous admonitions. I'm tired of it. If you don't want to see us, let us alone. I don't bother my former friends.' But I need no charity calls, and no criticism disguised as good advice--" Then he added apologetically: "I'm sorry--but really, Muriel, you mustn't talk like a lady slum-worker even if you are visiting the lower middle classes." He turned his bloodshot eyes on her reproachfully--eyes that had once been a deep, clear blue, that were weak now, strained, and half-ruined from reading when he was drunk.
"Why do you say such awful things?" she protested. You talk as if you and Gloria were in the middle classes."
"Why pretend we're not? I hate people who claim to be great aristocrats when they can't even keep up the appearances of it."
"Do you think a person has to have money to be aristocratic?"
Muriel ... the horrified democrat ...!
"Why, of course. Aristocracy's only an admission that certain traits which we call fine--courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing--can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don't have the warpings of ignorance and necessity."
Muriel bit her lower lip and waved her head from side to side.
"Well, all _I_ say is that if a person comes from a good family they're always nice people. That's the trouble with you and Gloria. You think that just because things aren't going your way right now all your old friends are trying to avoid you. You're too sensitive--"
"As a matter of fact," said Anthony, "you know nothing at all about it. With me it's simply a matter of pride, and for once Gloria's reasonable enough to agree that we oughtn't go where we're not wanted. And people don't want us. We're too much the ideal bad examples."
"Nonsense! You can't park your pessimism in my little sun parlor. I think you ought to forget all those morbid speculations and go to work."