"Well, my boy, that's better than what your uncle said. How long did it take you to write?"
"Oh, not more than half an hour. If it comes to that, the money was quickly earned."
For a minute and more Mrs. Ringrose gazed steadily at an upper sash, which was one's only chance of seeing the sky through the windows of the flat. Her lips were tightly pursed; they always were when she was in the toils of a calculation.
"A thousand a year!" she exclaimed at length.
"What do you mean, mother?"
"Well, if this poem only took you half an hour, you might easily turn out half a dozen a day. That would be three guineas. Three guineas a day would come to over a thousand a year."
Harry laughed and kissed her.
"I'll see what I can do," he said; "but I'm very much afraid half a dozen a week will be more than I can manage. Three guineas a week would be splendid. I shouldn't have to go round begging for work any more; they would never give me half as much in an office. Heigho! Here are the verses for you to read."
He put on his hat, and went into the High Street to cash his order. It was the first money his pen had ever earned him in the open market, and, since the sum seemed to Harry too small to make much difference, he determined to lay out the whole of it in festive and appropriate, if unjustifiable fashion. The High Street shops met all his wants. At one he bought a ninepenny tin of mulligatawny, and a five-and-ninepenny bottle of Perrier Jouet; at another, some oyster patties and meringues and half a pound of pressed beef (cut in slices), which came to half-a-crown between them. The remaining shilling he spent on strawberries and the odd sixpence on cream. He would have nothing sent, so we may picture a triumphant, but rather laborious return to the flat.
He found his mother in tears over the proofs of his first verses; she shed more when he showed her how he had spent his first honorarium. Yet she was delighted; there had been very little in the house, but now they would be able to do without the porter's wife to cook, and would be all by themselves for their little treat. No one enjoyed what she loved to call a "treat" more than Mrs. Ringrose; and perhaps even in the best of days she had never had a greater one than that now given her by her extravagant son. It was unexpected, and, indeed, unpremeditated; it had all the elements of success; and for one short evening it made Harry's mother almost forget that she was also the wife of a fraudulent and missing bankrupt.