t of respect for his mother's
sage advice, or with the object of putting the housekeeper of Sneyd Hall
off the scent, if she should chance to meet Denry, who shall say?

CHAPTER VII

THE RESCUER OF DAMES

I

It next happened that Denry began to suffer from the ravages of a malady
which is almost worse than failure--namely, a surfeit of success. The
success was that of his Universal Thrift Club. This device, by which
members after subscribing one pound in weekly instalments could at once
get two pounds' worth of goods at nearly any large shop in the district,
appealed with enormous force to the democracy of the Five Towns. There
was no need whatever for Denry to spend money on advertising. The first
members of the club did all the advertising and made no charge for doing
it. A stream of people anxious to deposit money with Denry in exchange
for a card never ceased to flow Into his little office in St Luke's
Square. The stream, indeed, constantly thickened. It was a wonderful
invention, the Universal Thrift Club. And Denry ought to have been
happy, especially as his beard was growing strongly and evenly, and
giving him the desired air of a man of wisdom and stability. But he was
not happy. And the reason was that the popularity of the Thrift Club
necessitated much book-keeping, which he hated.

He was an adventurer, in the old honest sense, and no clerk. And he
found himself obliged not merely to buy large books of account, but to
fill them with figures; and to do addition sums from page to page; and
to fill up hundreds of cards; and to write out lists of shops, and to
have long interviews with printers whose proofs made him dream of
lunatic asylums; and to reckon innumerable piles of small coins; and to
assist his small office-boy in the great task of licking envelopes and
stamps. Moreover, he was worried by shopkeepers; every shopkeeper in the
district now wanted to allow him twopence in the shilling on the
purchases of club members. And he had to collect all the subscriptions,
in addition to his rents; and also to make personal preliminary
inquiries as to the reputation of intending members. If he could have
risen every day at 4 A.M. and stayed up working every night till 4 A.M.
he might have got through most of the labour. He did, as a fact, come
very near to this ideal. So near that one morning his mother said to
him, at her driest:

"I suppose I may as well sell your bedstead. Denry?"

And there was n