Page:The history of Mr. Polly.djvu/146

 “Don’t tell anyone yet a bit,” he said.

“Only mother,” said Miriam firmly.

Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black—looked at in the right light, and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. You return from a little careless holiday abroad, and turn over the page of a newspaper, and against the name of that distant, vague-conceived railway in mortgages upon which you have embarked the bulk of your capital, you see instead of the familiar, persistent 95-6 (varying at most to 93 ex. div.) this slightly richer arrangement of marks: 76 1/2—78 1/2.

It is like the opening of a pit just under your feet!

So, too, Mr. Polly’s happy sense of limitless resources was obliterated suddenly by a vision of this tracery:

instead of the

he had come to regard as the fixed symbol of his affluence.

It gave him a disagreeable feeling about the diaphragm, akin in a remote degree to the sensation he had when the perfidy of the red-haired schoolgirl became plain to him. It made his brow moist.

“Going down a vortex!” he whispered.