“Next desk, please,” said a mouth over a high collar and a green tie, behind the grating, and a disdainful hand pushed the cheque back towards Priam.

“Next desk!” repeated Priam, dashed but furious.

“This is the A to M desk,” said the mouth.

Then Priam understood the solitary letters, and he rushed, with a new accession of fury, to the adjoining cage, where another disdainful hand picked up the cheque and turned it over, with an air of saying, “Fishy, this!”

And, “It isn’t endorsed!” said another mouth over another high collar and green tie.  The second disdainful hand pushed the cheque back again to Priam, as though it had been a begging circular.

“Oh, if that’s all!” said Priam, almost speechless from anger.  “Have you got such a thing as a pen?”

He was behaving in an extremely unreasonable manner.  He had no right to visit his spleen on a perfectly innocent bank that paid twenty-five per cent to its shareholders and a thousand a year each to its directors, and what trifle was left over to its men in rages.  But Priam was not like you or me.  He did not invariably act according to reason.  He could not be angry with one man at once, nor even with one building at once.  When he was angry he was inclusively and miscellaneously angry; and the sun, moon, and stars did not escape.

After he had endorsed the cheque the disdainful hand clawed it up once more, and directed upon its obverse and upon its reverse a battery of suspicions; then a pair of eyes glanced with critical distrust at so much of Priam’s person as was visible.  Then the eyes moved back, the mouth opened, in a brief word, and lo! there were four eyes and two mouths over the cheque, and four for an instant on Priam.  Priam expected some one to call for a policeman; in spite of himself he felt guilty—­or anyhow dubious.  It was the grossest insult to him to throw doubt on the cheque and to examine him in that frigid, shamelessly disillusioned manner.

“You are Mr. Leek?” a mouth moved.

“Yes” (very slowly).

“How would you like this?”

“I’ll thank you to give it me in notes,” answered Priam haughtily.

When the disdainful hand had counted twice every corner of a pile of notes, and had dropped the notes one by one, with a peculiar snapping sound of paper, in front of Priam, Priam crushed them together and crammed them without any ceremony and without gratitude to the giver, into the right pocket of his trousers.  And he stamped out of the building with curses on his lips.

Still, he felt better, he felt assuaged.  To cultivate and nourish a grievance when you have five hundred pounds in your pocket, in cash, is the most difficult thing in the world.

A Visit to the Tailors’