Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/27

 his articulations rattled with startling vehemence. "Most emphatically I deny the position. A man may roll in wealth and be none the worse for it. On the contrary, poverty, but for the unremitting labour it demands, would be far more conducive to crime than a sufficiency, or even a superfluity of means. No; the real enemy with whom every man has to contend confronts him in the morning at his glass, and sticks persistently to him throughout the day. The source of most unhappiness, the cause of all ill-doing, the universal origin of evil, is not money, but self"

"You mean selfishness," I retorted; "and I am surprised to hear a man of the world—I mean of the other world, or, indeed, of any world whatever—assert so obvious a fallacy. Just as the liver, and not the heart, is the seat of our real well-being, so maintain that self-indulgence, and not