The equipage quickly grew into a familiar sight of the streets of the district. Denry said that it was funny without being vulgar. Certainly it amounted to a continual advertisement for him; an infinitely more effective advertisement than, for instance, a sandwich-man at eighteen-pence a day, and costing no more, even with the license and the shoeing. Moreover a sandwich-man has this inferiority to a turnout: when you have done with him you cannot put him up to auction and sell him. Further, there are no sandwich-men in the Five Towns; in that democratic and independent neighbourhood nobody would deign to be a sandwich-man. The mulish vehicular display does not end the tale of Denry’s splendour. He had an office in St. Luke’s Square, and in the office was an office-boy, small but genuine, and a real copying-press, and outside it was the little square signboard which in the day of his simplicity used to be screwed on to his mother’s door. His mother’s steely firmness of character had driven him into the extravagance of an office. Even after he had made over a thousand pounds out of the Llandudno lifeboat in less than three months, she would not listen to a proposal for going into a slightly larger house, of which one room might serve as an office. Nor would she abandon her own labours as a sempstress. She said that since her marriage she had always lived in that cottage and had always worked, and that she meant to die there, working; and that Denry could do what he chose. He was a bold youth, but not bold enough to dream of quitting his mother; besides, his share of household expenses in the cottage was only ten shillings a week. So he rented the office; and he hired an office-boy, partly to convey to his mother that he should do what he chose, and partly for his own private amusement. He was thus, at an age when fellows without imagination are fraying their cuffs for the enrichment of their elders and glad if they can afford a cigar once a month, in possession of a business, business premises, a clerical staff, and a private carriage drawn by an animal unique in the Five Towns. He was living on less than his income; and in the course of about two years, to a very small extent by economies and to a very large extent by injudicious but happy investments, he had doubled the Llandudno thousand and won the deference of the manager of the bank at the top of St. Luke’s Square—one of the most unsentimental men that ever wrote "refer to drawer" on a cheque.