“All the same,” I said, “I’ll take this cheap one for luck and because I like it.”
He smiled as he gave me the change.
“I would have sold the pair for four guineas,” he said.
Edmund laughed.
“I think our friend Iscariot will manage very well for us,” he whispered.
He never called him anything else, and Mr. Schultz appeared to have no objection to his nickname.
During this period I learned an extraordinary number of things about some of the practical commercial affairs of life, and I was surprised and somewhat gratified at the energy and capacity displayed by Captain Welfare, and indeed by Edmund too.
It was soon evident that the shop was going to be a paying concern. In the slang of the day “it caught on.” I had always had a general idea that shop-keepers made very large sums of money except when they failed altogether, but I never could understand how they did it. It seemed to me that if they sold expensive things their customers were too few, and if they sold cheap things their profits must be too small to afford them a comfortable interest on their capital. I do not understand this yet, except in the case of people like butchers, and publicans, and very large shops that are crowded with people all day.
But when I learned what our “takings,” as they called them, amounted to on the first day, my fear was that the whole stock would disappear in a week. But Captain Welfare assured me we could double our sales and carry on till long after the arrival of our next consignment from the East.
I asked him if he was quite satisfied to leave everything in the hands of Mr. Schultz.