‘Dad,’ the girl began, ‘you are very rich, aren’t you? very, very rich?’ She smiled anxiously, timidly. He did not remember to have seen that expression on her face before. He wanted to make a facetious reply, but checked himself.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am. You ought to know that by this time.’
‘How soon could you realize a million pounds?’
‘A million—what?’ he cried. Even he was staggered by her calm reference to this gigantic sum. ‘What on earth are you driving at?’
‘A million pounds, I said. That is to say, five million dollars. How soon could you realize as much as that?’
‘Oh!’ he answered, ‘in about a month, if I went about it neatly enough. I could unload as much as that in a month without scaring Wall Street and other places. But it would want some arrangement.’
‘Useless!’ she exclaimed. ‘Couldn’t you do it quicker, if you really had to?’
‘If I really had to, I could fix it in a week, but it would make things lively, and I should lose on the job.’
‘Couldn’t you,’ she persisted, ‘couldn’t you go down this morning and raise a million, somehow, if it was a matter of life and death?’
He hesitated. ‘Look here, Nella,’ he said, ‘what is it you’ve got up your sleeve?’