the place seemed unoccupied, but on more careful inspection you saw midgets creeping about, or seated in easy-chairs that had obviously been made to hold two of them; these midgets were the members of the club, dwarfed into dolls by its tremendous dimensions.  A strange and sinister race!  They looked as though in the final stages of decay, and wherever their heads might rest was stretched a white cloth, so that their heads might not touch the spots sanctified by the heads of the mighty departed.  They rarely spoke to one another, but exchanged regards of mutual distrust and scorn; and if by chance they did converse it was in tones of weary, brusque disillusion.  They could at best descry each other but indistinctly in the universal pervading gloom—­a gloom upon which electric lamps, shining dimly yellow in their vast lustres, produced almost no impression.  The whole establishment was buried in the past, dreaming of its Titantic yore, when there were doubtless giants who could fill those fauteuils and stick their feet on those mantelpieces.

It was in such an environment that Mr. Oxford gave Priam to eat and to drink off little ordinary plates and out of tiny tumblers.  No hint of the club’s immemorial history in that excessively modern and excellent repast—­save in the Stilton cheese, which seemed to have descended from the fine fruity days of some Homeric age, a cheese that Ulysses might have inaugurated.  I need hardly say that the total effect on Priam’s temperament was disastrous. (Yet how could the diplomatic Mr. Oxford have guessed that Priam had never been in a club before?) It induced in him a speechless anguish, and he would have paid a sum as gigantic as the club—­he would have paid the very cheque in his pocket—­never to have met Mr. Oxford.  He was a far too sensitive man for a club, and his moods were incalculable.  Assuredly Mr. Oxford had miscalculated the result of his club on Priam’s humour; he soon saw his error.

“Suppose we take coffee in the smoking-room?” he said.

The populous smoking-room was the one part of the club where talking with a natural loudness was not a crime.  Mr. Oxford found a corner fairly free from midgets, and they established themselves in it, and liqueurs and cigars accompanied the coffee.  You could actually see midgets laughing outright in the mist of smoke; the chatter narrowly escaped being a din; and at intervals a diminutive boy entered and bawled the name of a midget at the top of his voice, Priam was suddenly electrified, and Mr. Oxford, very alert, noticed the electrification.

Mr. Oxford drank his coffee somewhat quickly, and then he leaned forward a little over the table, and put his moon-like face nearer to Priam’s, and arranged his legs in a truly comfortable position beneath the table, and expelled a large quantity of smoke from his cigar.  It was clearly the preliminary to a scene of confidence, the approach to the crisis to which he had for several hours been leading up.