oney, the awkwardness of how to go about it naturally makes
one gloomy and preoccupied. Had there been broad fields of turnips to
walk in and Holstein cattle to punch in the ribs, one might have
managed to borrow it in the course of gentlemanly intercourse, as from
one cattle-man to another. But in New York, amid piles of masonry and
roaring street-traffic and glittering lunches and palatial residences
one simply couldn't do it.

Herein lay the truth about the Duke of Dulham's visit and the error of
Mr. Lucullus Fyshe. Mr. Fyshe was thinking that the Duke had come to
_lend_ money. In reality he had come to _borrow_ it. In fact, the Duke
was reckoning that by putting a second mortgage on Dulham Towers for
twenty thousand sterling, and by selling his Scotch shooting and
leasing his Irish grazing and sub-letting his Welsh coal rent he could
raise altogether a hundred thousand pounds. This for a duke, is an
enormous sum. If he once had it he would be able to pay off the first
mortgage on Dulham Towers, buy in the rights of the present tenant of
the Scotch shooting and the claim of the present mortgagee of the Irish
grazing, and in fact be just where he started. This is ducal finance,
which moves always in a circle.

In other words the Duke was really a poor man--not poor in the American
sense, where poverty comes as a sudden blighting stringency, taking the
form of an inability to get hold of a quarter of a million dollars, no
matter how badly one needs it, and where it passes like a storm-cloud
and is gone, but poor in that permanent and distressing sense known
only to the British aristocracy. The Duke's case, of course, was
notorious, and Mr. Fyshe ought to have known of it. The Duke was so
poor that the Duchess was compelled to spend three or four months every
year at a fashionable hotel on the Riviera simply to save money, and
his eldest son, the young Marquis of Beldoodle, had to put in most of
his time shooting big game in Uganda, with only twenty or twenty-five
beaters, and with so few carriers and couriers and such a dearth of
elephant men and hyena boys that the thing was a perfect scandal. The
Duke indeed was so poor that a younger son, simply to add his efforts
to those of the rest, was compelled to pass his days in mountain
climbing in the Himalayas, and the Duke's daughter was obliged to pay
long visits to minor German princesses, putting up with all sorts of
hardship. And while the ducal family wandered about