Hah! That is felt on all hands to be a shot in the bull’s eye. How can people do that! The Analytical Chemist going round with champagne, looks very much as if he could give them a pretty good idea how people did that, if he had a mind.
“How,” says Mrs. Veneering, laying down her fork to press her aquiline hands together at the tips of the fingers, and addressing the Father who travels the three thousand miles per week: “how a mother can look at her baby, and know that she lives beyond her husband’s means, I cannot imagine.”
Eugene suggests that Mrs. Lammle, not being a mother, had no baby to look at.
“True,” says Mrs. Veneering, “but the principle is the same.”
Boots is clear that the principle is the same. So is Buffer. It is the unfortunate destiny of Buffer to damage a cause by espousing it. The rest of the company have meekly yielded to the proposition that the principle is the same, until Buffer says it is; when instantly a general murmur arises that the principle is not the same.
“But I don’t understand,” says the Father of the three hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds, “—if these people spoken of, occupied the position of being in society—they were in society?”
Veneering is bound to confess that they dined here, and were even married from here.
“Then I don’t understand,” pursues the Father, “how even their living beyond their means could bring them to what has been termed a total smash. Because, there is always such a thing as an adjustment of affairs, in the case of people of any standing at all.”
Eugene (who would seem to be in a gloomy state of suggestiveness), suggests, “Suppose you have no means and live beyond them?”