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, realising in his rough commonsense that there was no need to drive ideas into Mr. Prohack’s head with a steam-hammer, or to intoxicate him with a heady vapour of superlatives.

In a quarter of an hour Mr. Prohack learnt that Sir Paul was promoting a strictly private syndicate as a preliminary to the formation of a big company for the exploitation of certain options on Roumanian oil-territory which Sir Paul held.  He learnt about the reports of the trial borings.  He learnt about the character and the experience of the expert whom Sir Paul had sent forth to Roumania.  He learnt about the world-supply of oil and the world-demand for oil.  He learnt about the great rival oil-groups that were then dividing the universe of oil.  He had the entire situation clearly mapped on his brain.  Next he obtained some startling inside knowledge about the shortage of liquid capital in the circles of “big money,” and then followed Sir Paul’s famous club disquisition upon the origin of the present unsaleableness of securities and the appalling uneasiness, not to say collapse, of markets.