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That they had managed to keep a great estate not very much impaired so long was certainly a proof of great cleverness, since there had been many spend-thrifts among them; but fortunately there had been a miser or two, who had restored the average, and their fortunes. Mr.
[It struck David about this time that women were getting a little out of hand, strained, over-inclined to laugh mirthless laughter, greedy for sensuality, sensation, sincerity, sweetmeats. Something. Even if they satisfied some fleeting passion or jealousy by marrying, they soon wanted to be de-married, separated, divorced, to don male costume, to go on the amateur stage and act Salome parts on Sunday afternoons that most ladies of the real Stage had refused; while the men that went about with them in these troops from restaurant to restaurant, studio to studio, music hall to café chantant, Brighton to Monte Carlo, Sandown to Goodwood, were shifty, too well-dressed, too near neutrality in sex, without defined professions, known by nicknames only, spend-thrifts, spongers, bankrupts, and collectors of needless bric-
Whatever the cause, certain it was that the change in the boy's view of life was as instantaneous as it was radical. And this was quite possible when his blood is considered. There had been, it is true, dominating tyrants way back in his ancestry, as well as spend-thrifts, drunkards, roysterers, and gamesters, but so far as the records showed there had never been a coward.
On inquiring for the bank in which I had invested the savings of my former voyage, I found that it had failed, and that I was as poor as when I began the world, with this difference, that I had a profession, and had bought a large amount of experience with the money I had squandered which is not always the case with spend-thrifts. I made inquiries for Captain Carr, but could hear nothing of him.
As his wife had pointed out to him in the morning, all obstacles had fallen away before him; the family which had dishonoured him had, at the last moment, worked for his elevation; his sons Eugene and Aristide, those spend-thrifts, the cost of whose college life he had so bitterly regretted, were at last paying interest on the capital expended for their education.
Barbara did not like to be placed in the wrong, and felt that she must endeavor to justify herself. "He is the most reckless of spend-thrifts, we know, and he probably indulges in even less respectable excitement." Peggy was not tall, but she carried her head at this moment as though she were in the habit of looking down on the world.
"The Americani are a nation of spend-thrifts," she would mutter to herself, as she quickened the charcoal in her droll little range by fanning it with a palm-leaf fan; "they squander money like water. Well, all the better for us Italians!" with a shrug of her shoulders. "But, Maria, it was only sixteen cents that we paid, and look at those flowers! There are at least half a bushel of them."
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