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“No, you can’t,” said Pamela quickly. She had never heard such flat heresy, and it made her manners more abrupt than usual.

“Nowadays you can, and you always could more or less. Society is composed of people who have money and people who have had money, and who kept it long enough to get prestige.”

Pamela turned a small, haughty face to him. “You don’t know,” she said. “You don’t understand. It isn’t like that at all. It’s not money that gives position, it’s———” She hesitated.

“Birth?”

Tony laughed at a vision of the Ste. Croix family, mainly hectic and seedy, and likely to be very much ashamed of him if they knew his way of life.

“Birth meant money in the first instance. Oh, there’s no harm in it. Money isn’t necessarily vulgar, and personally I think it is the best thing in the world.”

Pamela did not trouble to hide the scornful curve of her lips.

“Do you?” she said briefly.

“Yes. So does anybody who has had to fight for it. It is easy to despise money when you have never had to worry about it. It’s you who don’t understand. There are millions of people you don’t know about—you mean to be very nice to them, but I expect you feel that they’re quite different to you—and if the places were changed, it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to anyone really. It’s not your fault.”

Pamela felt angry and helpless. What right had he to talk like this? At a dance too. And he was all wrong, she knew. He was detestable now, he made her feel a child—and really he didn’t know what he was talking about. How could a man like that know anything of—her and her friends? No doubt he supposed she never thought