“La! you don’t know what money is,” said Mrs. Dolly. “Why haven’t you five thousand pounds, man? You don’t know what can be done with five thousand pounds, cousin Maurice.”
“No, nor you neither, cousin Dolly; or you’d never talk of setting up your coach.”
“Why not, pray? I know what a coach costs as well as another. I know we can have a second-hand coach, and we need not tell nobody that it’s second-hand, for about a hundred pounds. And what’s a hundred pounds out of five thousand?”
“But if we’ve a coach, we must have horses, must not we?” said Ellen, “and they’ll cost a hundred more.”
“Oh, we can have job horses, that will cost us little or nothing,” said Mrs. Dolly.
“Say £150. a-year,” replied Maurice; “for I heard my master’s coachman telling that the livery-keeper in London declared as how he made nothing by letting him have job horses for £150. a-year.”
“We are to have our own coach,” said Dolly, “and that will be cheaper, you know.”
“But the coach won’t last for ever,” said Ellen; “it must be mended, and that will cost something.”
“It is time enough to think of that when the coach wants mending,” said Mrs. Dolly; who, without giving herself the trouble of calculating, seemed to be convinced that every thing might be done for five thousand pounds. “I must let you know a little secret,” continued she. “I have written, that is, got a friend to write, to have the house at Paddington taken for a year; for I know it’s quite the thing for us, and we are only to give fifty pounds a-year for it: and you know that one thousand pounds would pay that rent for twenty years to come.”
“But then,” said Ellen, “you will want to do a great many other things with that thousand pounds. There’s the coach you mentioned; and you said we must keep a footboy, and must see a deal of company, and must not grudge to buy clothes, and that we could not follow any trade, nor have a farm, nor do any thing to make money; so we must live on upon what we have. Now let us count, and see how we shall do it. You know, Maurice, that William Deane inquired about what we could get for our five thousand pounds, if we put it out to interest?”