What does the storyteller mean by the words "Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed"?

In Oscar Wilde's text "The Model Millionaire," the charming and penniless Hughie Erskine is madly in love with Laura Merton, the daughter of a retired colonel who finds Hughie congenial but will not give Hughie permission to wed Laura until he has amassed a fortune of 10,000 pounds. So, on the one hand, a major theme of this short story is that money is essential to happiness—without it Hughie cannot marry his true love. Poor men cannot waste time and energy on romance; they should be focusing their energies on working their way out of poverty.
Yet as the story progresses, we find that Hughie eventually comes into a fortune of 10,000 pounds by being kindhearted and impractical, giving his last sovereign to a man he thinks is a poor artist's model. The artist's model turns out to be a wealthy baron who rewards Hughie with the 10,000 pounds he needs to marry Laura. Even in a thoroughly material world, Hughie's kindness is shown to have monetary value, completely contradicting the last part of the sentence referenced above: "Romance is the privilege of the rich, not the profession of the unemployed. The poor should be practical and prosaic."