"Then, won't you take a ticket for the lotteree?" rejoined Sugarman pleasantly. "Then you get a money-bag of your own."
"No, thank you."
"Not even half a ticket? Only thirty-six shillings! You needn't pay me now. I trust you."
She shook her head.
"But think—I may win you the great prize—a hundred thousand marks."
The sum fascinated Salvina, and for an instant her imagination played with its marvellous potentialities. They could all move to the country, and there among the birds and the flowers she could study all day long, and even try for a degree with Honours. Her father would be saved from the cigar factory, her sister from exile amid strangers, her mother should have a servant, her brother the wife he coveted. All her Spitalfields circle had speculated through Sugarman, not without encouraging hits. She smiled as she remembered the vendor of slippers who had won sixty pounds and was so puffed up that when his wife stopped in the street to speak to a shabby acquaintance, he cried vehemently, "Betsey, Betsey, do learn to behave according to your station."
"You don't believe me?" said Sugarman, misapprehending her smile. "You can read it all for yourself. A hundred thousand marks, so sure my little Nehemiah shall see rejoicings. Look!"
But Salvina waved back the thin rustling papers with their exotic Continental flavour. "Gambling is wicked," she said.
Sugarman was incensed. "Me in a wicked business! Why, I know more Talmud than anybody in London, and can be called up the Law as Morenu! You'll say marrying is wicked, next. But they are both State Institutions. England is the only country in the world without a lotteree."
Salvina wavered, but her instinct was repugnant to money that did not accumulate itself by slow, painful economies, and her multifarious reading had made the word "Speculation" a prism of glittering vice.