By-and-by, however, his opinion began to change about the hundred pounds in the bank. It changed by slow degrees after he had changed his second ten-pound note, and saw those last precious sovereigns slipping out of his grasp, which they did with a strange noiseless celerity inconceivable to him. How did they go? When he counted up all he had spent, every sixpence seemed so modest, so natural! and yet they were gone, he knew not how; vanished even, he thought, while he was looking at them. Then the thought arose in his mind, why keep a hundred pounds in the bank? It was a waste of capital, money which brought in no return; and for that matter, if it was merely to secure something to “fall back upon,” fifty pounds were just as good as a hundred. The income of a Queen’s Messenger was good, he said to himself (he had not, in reality, the least idea what it was!), and when he got his appointment it would be very easy to put back the other fifty pounds if he found it expedient. But the more he thought of it the less he saw any need for keeping so much money lying useless. He never could get any income from so small a sum, and the fifty pounds was quite enough for any sudden emergency. Or supposing, he said, seventy-five? Seventy-five pounds was magnificent as a fund to fall back upon; and it was with a feeling that twenty-five pounds had been somehow added, not taken from his capital, that he went to the bank one day in December and drew out the quarter, not the half, of his little stock of money. With twenty-five pounds in his pocket and seventy-five in the bank, he felt much richer than with the poor little undivided hundred. And somehow every day as he grew poorer, he became more convinced that it would be the most short-sighted economy to remove from his Piccadilly lodgings, or to relinquish his dinners at the club. Why, they were cheap, absolutely cheap, both the one and the other, in comparison with the nasty meals and wretched lodgings for which, no doubt, he might pay a little less money. He even became slightly extravagant and disposed to buy little knick-knacks, and to consume little delicacies as his means grew smaller and smaller.