person, who jumped up and approached Mr. Prohack somewhat effusively.

"How d'ye do, Prohack?"

"Well, _Bishop_!" Mr. Prohack responded. "It's _you_!"

It was another Bishop, a Bishop whom he had forgotten, a Bishop who had
resigned from the club earlier and disappeared. Mr. Prohack did not like
him. Mr. Prohack said to himself: "This fellow is after something, and I
always knew he was an adventurer."

"Funny feeling it gives you to be asked to wait in the hall of a club
that you used to belong to!" said Bishop.

The apparently simple words, heavy with sinister significance, sank
like a depth-charge into Mr. Prohack's consciousness.

"Among other things," said Mr. Prohack to himself, "this fellow is very
obviously after a free lunch."

Now Mr. Prohack suffered from a strange form of insincerity, which he
had often unsuccessfully tried to cure, partly because it advantaged
unsympathetic acquaintances at his expense, and partly because his wife
produced unanswerable arguments against it with mortal effect. Although
an unconceited man (as men go), and a very honest man, he could not help
pretending to like people whom he did not like. And he pretended with a
histrionic skill that deceived everybody--sometimes even himself. There
may have been some good-nature in this moral twist of his; but he well
knew that it originated chiefly in three morbid desires,--the desire to
please, the desire to do the easiest thing, and the desire to nourish