financial soundness of old Paul's proposition; but he
hesitated, for reasons unconnected with finance or with domesticity,
about accepting it. And he conceived the idea (which none but a very
peculiar man would have conceived) of discussing the matter with some
enemy of old Paul's. Now old Paul had few enemies. Mr. Prohack, however,
could put his hand on one,--Mr. Francis Fieldfare--the editor of an
old-established and lucrative financial weekly, and familiar to readers
of that and other organs as "F.F." Mr. Fieldfare's offices were quite
close to Mr. Prohack's principal club, of which Mr. Fieldfare also was a
member, and Mr. Fieldfare had the habit of passing into the club about
noon and reading the papers for an hour, lunching early, and leaving the
club again just as the majority of the members were ordering their
after-lunch coffee. Mr. Fieldfare pursued this course because he had a
deep instinct for being in the minority. Mr. Prohack looked at his
watch. The resolution of every man is limited in quantity. Only in mad
people is resolution inexhaustible. Mr. Prohack had no more resolution
than becomes an average sane fellow, and his resolution to wait for his
wife had been seriously tried by the energetic refusal to go with
Spinner to see Smathe. It now suddenly gave out.

"Pooh!" said Mr. Prohack. "I've waited long enough for her. She'll now
have to wait a bit for me."

And off he went by taxi to his club. The visit, he reflected, would
serve the secondary purpose of an inconspicuous re-entry into club-life
after absence from it.

He thought:

"They may have had an accident with that car. One day she's certain to
have an accident anyhow,--she's so impulsive."

Of course Mr. Fieldfare was not in the morning-room of the club as he
ought to have been. That was bound to happen. Mr. Prohack gazed around
at the monumental somnolence of the great room, was ignored, and backed
out into the hall, meaning to return home. But in the hall he met F.F.
just arriving. It surprised and perhaps a little pained Mr. Prohack to
observe that F.F. had evidently heard neither of his illness nor of his
inheritance.

Mr. Fieldfare was a spare, middle-aged man, of apparently austere habit;
short, shabby; a beautiful, resigned face, burning eyes, and a soft
voice. He was weighed down, and had been weighed down for thirty years,
by a sense of the threatened immediate collapse of society--of all
societies, and by the solemn illusion tha