by Rebecca West
‘I do not waste money,’ I objected.
‘Nobody really does that,’ he conceded. ‘It is very hard to imagine an action that falls into that category except lighting one’s cigarette with a five-pound note. It is almost impossible to spend money without getting something for it. Even if it gives one only a momentary satisfaction that is something for which only a miser would be unwilling to spend money. Nevertheless, the fact that you have never really gone without anything you wanted since you were a grown woman might, if you considered it carefully, have some effect on your conduct. And remember, dear Rose, that you and Oliver have a more expensive household to keep up than Mary who is, now that she lives in her water-tower, in the position where I would like Rose to be. If Mary were unable to give another concert she would be able to go on living exactly as she does now, on her income from her investments, and even still save a little, to make her income larger in the case of a rise in prices. Rose could not do that. She will have to save quite a bit more in the next two years than she has been saving before she is in the same position.’
‘But this is extraordinary,’ said Oliver. ‘You must have had great difficulties in doing this for them, sir. For they’re both horribly careless about money.’
‘Horribly careless,’ said Mr Morpurgo, ‘and horribly lucky. I really should make no effort to control them in the actual handling of the money, apart from suggesting that they do not spend it like drunken sailors. But the idiot whom you married left ten thousand dollars in a San Francisco bank; she forgot about it for two years, she then remembered it suddenly in the worst period of the depression and got the banker to buy some stock for her at bargain prices. I think in ten years that stock will be worth a small fortune in itself. If she had invested the money at once, as I have taught her, she would have made not a fraction of it. Oh, leave them alone, it’s really safer.’
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1985 by the estate of Rebecca West
cover design by Karen Horton
ISBN: 978-1-4532-0710-9
This edition published in 2010 by Open Road Integrated Media
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