and how that man had become his friend and won his
affection. Sir Paul looked positively coarse in Mr. Prohack's frail
Chippendale drawing-room, seeming to need for suitable environment the
pillared marble and gilt of the vast Club. Well, after having eaten many
hundreds of meals and drunk many hundreds of cups of coffee in the
grunting society of Sir Paul, all that Mr. Prohack could be sure of
knowing about Sir Paul was, first, that he had an absolutely unspotted
reputation; second, that he was a very decent, simple-minded, kindly,
ignorant fellow (ignorant, that is, in the matters that interested Mr.
Prohack); third, that he instinctively mistrusted intellect and
brilliance; fourth, that for nearly four years he had been convinced
that Germany would win the war, and fifth, that he was capable of
astounding freaks of generosity. Stay, there was another item,--Sir
Paul's invariable courtesy to the club servants, which courtesy he
somehow contrived to combine with continual grumbling. The club servants
held him in affection. It was probably this sixth item that outweighed
any of the others in Mr. Prohack's favourable estimate of the financier.

And then Mr. Prohack, as in a dream, heard from the lips of Paul Spinner
the words, "oil concessions in Roumania." In a flash, in an earthquake,
in a blinding vision, Mr. Prohack instantaneously understood the origin
of his queer nascent feeling of superiority to old Paul. What he had
previously known subconsciously he now knew consciously. Old Paul who
had no doubt been paying in annual taxes about ten times the amount of
Mr. Prohack's official annual salary; old Paul whose name was the
synonym for millions and the rumours of whose views on the stock-markets
caused the readers of financial papers to tremble; old Paul was after
Mr. Prohack's money! Marvellous, marvellous, thrice marvellous money!...
It was the most astounding, the most glorious thing that ever happened.
Mr. Prohack immediately began to have his misgivings about Sir Paul
Spinner. Simultaneously he felt sorry for old Paul. And such was his
constraint that he made the motion of swallowing, and had all he could
do not to blush.

Mr. Prohack might be a lamb in the City, but he had a highly trained
mind, and a very firm grasp of the mere technique of finance. Therefore
Sir Paul could explain himself succinctly and precisely in technical
terms, and he did so--with much skill and a sort of unconsidered
persuasiveness, re