And yet Denry was not satisfied. He had a secret woe, due to the facts
that he was gradually ceasing to be a card, and that he was not
multiplying his capital by two every six months. He did not understand
the money market, nor the stock market, nor even the financial article
in the _Signal_; but he regarded himself as a financial genius, and
deemed that as a financial genius he was vegetating. And as for setting
the town on fire, or painting it scarlet, he seemed to have lost the
trick of that.
II
And then one day the populace saw on his office door, beneath his
name-board, another sign:
FIVE TOWNS UNIVERSAL THRIFT CLUB. _Secretary and Manager_--E.H. MACHIN.
An idea had visited him.
Many tradesmen formed slate-clubs--goose-clubs, turkey-clubs,
whisky-clubs--in the autumn, for Christmas. Their humble customers paid
so much a week to the tradesmen, who charged them nothing for keeping
it, and at the end of the agreed period they took out the total sum in
goods--dead or alive; eatable, drinkable, or wearable. Denry conceived a
universal slate-club. He meant it to embrace each of the Five Towns. He
saw forty thousand industrial families paying weekly instalments into
his slate-club.
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