Club manufacture
things, or cause them to be manufactured, or--what is the same
thing--merge them when they are manufactured. This gives them their
peculiar chemical attitude towards their food. One often sees a member
suddenly call the head waiter at breakfast to tell him that there is
too much ammonia in the bacon; and another one protest at the amount of
glucose in the olive oil; and another that there is too high a
percentage of nitrogen in the anchovy. A man of distorted imagination
might think this tasting of chemicals in the food a sort of nemesis of
fate upon the members. But that would be very foolish, for in every
case the head waiter, who is the chief of the Chinese philosophers
mentioned above, says that he'll see to it immediately and have the
percentage removed. And as for the members themselves, they are about
as much ashamed of manufacturing and merging things as the Marquis of
Salisbury is ashamed of the founders of the Cecil family.

What more natural, therefore, than that Mr. Lucullus Fyshe, before
serving the soda to the Duke, should try it on somebody else? And what
better person could be found for this than Mr. Furlong, the saintly
young rector of St. Asaph's, who had enjoyed the kind of expensive
college education calculated to develop all the faculties. Moreover, a
rector of the Anglican Church who has been in the foreign mission field
is the kind of person from whom one can find out, more or less
incidentally, how one should address and converse with a duke, and
whether you call him, "Your Grace," or "His Grace," or just "Grace," or
"Duke," or what. All of which things would seem to a director of the
People's Bank and the president of the Republican Soda Co. so trivial
in importance that he would scorn to ask about them.

So that was why Mr. Fyshe had asked Mr. Furlong to lunch with him, and
to dine with him later on in the same day at the Mausoleum Club to meet
the Duke of Dulham. And Mr. Furlong, realizing that a clergyman must be
all things to all men and not avoid a man merely because he is a duke,
had accepted the invitation to lunch, and had promised to come to
dinner, even though it meant postponing the Willing Workers' Tango
Class of St. Asaph's until the following Friday.

Thus it had come about that Mr. Fyshe was seated at lunch, consuming a
cutlet and a pint of Moselle in the plain downright fashion of a man so
democratic that he is practically a revolutionary socialist, and
doesn