There was no safety in life, he reflected, thinking for the moment of the warning which he had received, like the safety of poverty.
"I am a man of forty-one," Sabatini said.

"You, I believe, are twenty-four.

There can, therefore, be no impertinences in the truth from me to you." "There could be none in any case," Arnold assured him.
Sabatini gazed thoughtfully across the table into his guest's face.
"I do not know your history or your parentage," he went on.

"Such knowledge is unnecessary.

It is obvious that your position at the present moment is the result of an accident." "It is the outcome of actual poverty," Arnold told him softly.
Sabatini assented.
"Ah! well," he said, "it is a poverty, then, which you have accepted.