f a profiteer! Nor was that all!
To become the co-heir with a woman of dubious renown, and with Mr.
Softly Bishop! He knew nothing about the woman, and would think nothing.
But he knew a little about Mr. Softly Bishop. Mr. Bishop, it used to be
known and said in the club, had never had a friend. He had the usual
number of acquaintances, but no relationship more intimate. Mr. Prohack,
in the old days, had not for a long time actively disliked Mr. Bishop;
but he had been surprised at the amount of active dislike which contact
with Mr. Bishop engendered in other members of the club. Why such
dislike? Was it due to his fat, red face, his spectacles, his
conspiratorial manner, tone and gait, the evenness of his temper, his
cautiousness, his mysteriousness? Nobody knew. In the end Mr. Prohack
also had succeeded in disliking him. But Mr. Prohack produced a reason,
and that reason was Mr. Bishop's first name. On it being pointed out to
Mr. Prohack by argufiers that Mr. Bishop was not responsible for his
first name, Mr. Prohack would reply that the mentality of parents
capable of bestowing on an innocent child the Christian name of Softly
was incomprehensible and in a high degree suspicious, and that therefore
by the well-known laws of heredity there must be something devilish odd
in the mentality of their offspring--especially seeing that the
offspring pretended to glory in the Christian name as being a fine old
English name. No! Mr. Prohack might stomach co-heirship with a far-off
dubious woman; but could he stomach co-heirship with Softly Bishop? It
would necessitate friendship with Mr. Bishop. It would bracket him for
ever with Mr. Bishop.

These various considerations, however, had little to do with the immense
inward anarchy that Mr. Prohack's tone had concealed as he musingly
murmured: "Do I really?" The disturbance was due almost exclusively to a
fierce imperial joy in the prospect of immediate wealth. The origin of
the wealth scarcely affected him. The associations of the wealth
scarcely affected him. He understood in a flash the deep wisdom of that
old proverb (whose truth he had often hitherto denied) that money has no
smell. Perhaps there might be forty good reasons against his accepting
the inheritance, but they were all ridiculous. Was he to abandon his
share of the money to Softly Bishop and the vampire-woman? Such a notion
was idiotic. It was contrary to the robust and matter-of-fact
commonsense which always mark