Читаем A Dangerous Fortune (1994) полностью

After a while they lay side by side, head to tail, and he caressed her between her legs while she kissed and licked and then sucked his penis. He loved to do this in the afternoon, and he cried out softly as he came in her mouth.

She changed her position and nestled in the crook of his arm.

"What does it taste like?" he said sleepily.

She smacked her lips. "Caviar."

He giggled and closed his eyes.

She began to stroke herself. Soon he was snoring. When she came he did not stir.

"The men who ran the City of Glasgow Bank should go to jail," Maisie said shortly before dinner.

"That's a bit hard," Hugh responded.

The remark struck her as smug. "Hard?" she said irritably. "Not as hard as what happened to the workingmen whose money was lost!"

"Still, no one is perfect, not even those workingmen," Hugh persisted. "If a carpenter makes a mistake, and a house falls down, should he go to jail?"

"It's not the same!"

"And why not?"

"Because the carpenter is paid thirty shillings a week and obliged to follow a foreman's orders, whereas a banker gets thousands, and justifies it by saying he carries a weight of responsibility."

"All true. But the banker is human, and has a wife and children to support."

"You might say the same of murderers, yet we hang them regardless of the fate of their orphaned children."

"But if a man kills another accidentally, for example by shooting at a rabbit and hitting a man behind a bush, we don't even send him to jail. So why should we jail bankers who lose other people's money?"

"To make other bankers more careful!"

"And by the same logic we might hang the man who shot at the rabbit, to make other shooters more careful."

"Hugh, you're just being perverse."

"No, I'm not. Why treat careless bankers more harshly than careless rabbit-shooters?"

"The difference is that careless shots do not throw thousands of working people into destitution every few years, whereas careless bankers do."

At this point Kingo interjected languidly: "The directors of the City of Glasgow Bank probably will go to jail, I hear; and the manager too."

Hugh said: "So I believe."

Maisie felt like screaming with frustration. "Then why have you been contradicting me?"

He grinned. "To see whether you could justify your attitude."