“Ye can call it influenza if ye like,” said Mrs Machin.  “There was no influenza in my young days.  We called a cold a cold.”

“Well,” said Denry, “you aren’t well, are you?”

“I never said I was,” she answered grimly.

“No,” said Denry, with the triumphant ring of one who is about to devastate an enemy.  “And you never will be in this rotten old cottage.”

“This was reckoned a very good class of house when your father and I came into it.  And it’s always been kept in repair.  It was good enough for your father, and it’s good enough for me.  I don’t see myself flitting.  But some folks have gotten so grand.  As for health, old Reuben next door is ninety-one.  How many people over ninety are there in those gimcrack houses up by the Park, I should like to know?”

Denry could argue with any one save his mother.  Always, when he was about to reduce her to impotence, she fell on him thus and rolled him in the dust.  Still, he began again.

“Do we pay four-and-sixpence a week for this cottage, or don’t we?” he demanded.

“And always have done,” said Mrs Machin.  “I should like to see the landlord put it up,” she added, formidably, as if to say:  “I’d landlord him, if he tried to put my rent up!”

“Well,” said Denry, “here we are living in a four-and-six-a-week cottage, and do you know how much I’m making?  I’m making two thousand pounds a year.  That’s what I’m making.”

A second wilful deception of his mother!  As Managing Director of the Five Towns Universal Thrift Club, as proprietor of the majority of its shares, as its absolute autocrat, he was making very nearly four thousand a year.  Why could he not as easily have said four as two to his mother?  The simple answer is that he was afraid to say four.  It was as if he ought to blush before his mother for being so plutocratic, his mother who had passed most of her life in hard toil to gain a few shillings a week.  Four thousand seemed so fantastic!  And in fact the Thrift Club, which he had invented in a moment, had arrived at a prodigious success, with its central offices in Hanbridge and its branch offices in the other four towns, and its scores of clerks and collectors presided over by Mr Penkethman.  It had met with opposition.  The mighty said that Denry was making an unholy fortune under the guise of philanthropy.  And to be on the safe side the Countess of Chell had resigned her official patronage of the club and given her shares to the Pirehill Infirmary, which had accepted the high dividends on them without the least protest.  As for Denry, he said that he had never set out to be a philanthropist nor posed as one, and that his unique intention was to grow rich by supplying a want, like the rest of them, and that anyhow there was no compulsion to belong to his Thrift Club.  Then letters in his defence from representatives of the thousands and thousands of members of the club rained into the columns of the Signal, and Denry was