"I hear you've come into half a million, Arthur," said Paul Spinner, after he had shown himself very friendly and optimistic about Mr. Prohack's health and given the usual bulletin about his own carbuncles and the shortcomings of the club.
"I don't," agreed Paul. "Things get about pretty fast in the City and we can size them up fairly well; and I should say, putting two and two together, that a hundred and fifty thousand would be nearer the mark."
If Paul Spinner had suggested fifty thousand, Mr. Prohack would have corrected him, but being full of base instincts he had no impulse to correct the larger estimate, which was just as inaccurate.
"Well, well! It's a most romantic story and I congratulate you on it. No such luck ever happened to me." Sir Paul made this remark in a tone to indicate that he had had practically no luck himself. And he really believed that he had had no luck, though the fact was that he touched no enterprise that failed. Every year he signed a huger cheque for super-tax, and every year he signed it with a gesture signifying that he was signing his own ruin.
This distressing illusion of Sir Paul's was probably due to his carbuncles, which of all pathological phenomena are among the most productive of a pessimistic philosophy. The carbuncles were well known up and down Harley Street. They were always to be cured and they never were cured. They must have cost their owner about as much as his motor-car for upkeep--what with medical fees, travelling and foreign hotels--and nobody knew whether they remained uncured because they were incurable or because the medical profession thought it would be cruel at one stroke to deprive itself of a regular income and Sir Paul of his greatest hobby. The strange thing was that Sir Paul with all his powerful general sagacity and shrewdness, continued firmly, despite endless disappointments, in the mystical faith that one day the carbuncles would be abolished.
"I won't beat about the bush," said he. "We know one another. I came here to talk frankly and I'll talk frankly."
"You go right ahead," Mr. Prohack benevolently encouraged him.
"First of all I should like to give you just the least hint of warning against that fellow Softly Bishop. I daresay you know something' about him--"