The Young Man and His Ledger

Cheltenham, the second Thursday of the month, and the reading room of the library kept a small fire against the damp. At the table nearest the window sat a young man with a ledger open before him, and I, waiting for a carriage that would not come until four, had leisure to observe him. His page was ruled in columns, and the entry at the head of each column read expiration week, followed by a figure: 0.35 per cent, repeated down the sheet with the small variations that mark honest copying rather than invention.

He was copying, I understood, from a paper by a gentleman lately deceased - a Mr. H., who had spent eleven years collecting these returns and had died in February with the method finished and the fortune unmade. The young man’s own account of the matter, delivered to the librarian rather than to me, though the room is small and I heard all, was that the rule required no belief. A rule, he said, does not grieve; it does not doubt itself on a bad quarter; it does not marry unwisely and leave the arithmetic to a nephew. He said this with the satisfaction of a man who has discovered that he may inherit a fortune without the trouble of loving the testator.

The librarian, for her part, held that the rule was Mr. H.’s in the way a joke is a man’s - it survives the telling, but only while somebody is telling it. She had known him. She said the 0.35 per cent was smaller than his conviction had been, and that conviction, being untransferable, would decay before the premium did. Both accounts are consistent. Neither contains the other. The young man copies the numbers; the librarian remembers the man; and the market, indifferent to both, will produce whatever it produces on the third Friday whether either of them is attending or not.

He folded his ledger at half past three, having filled one column and left the next blank for the week to come. The premium, if it holds, is 0.35 per cent.