“When I was still uncommonly hard up,” Mr. Porteous continued, “we used to lodge in the same house with a Russian Jew, who was a furrier. That man was interested in money, if you like. It was a passion, an enthusiasm, an ideal. He could have led a comfortable, easy life, and still have made enough to put by something for his old age. But for his high abstract ideal of money he suffered more than Michelangelo ever suffered for his art. He used to work nineteen hours a day, and the other five he slept, lying under his bench, in the dirt, breathing into his lungs the stink and the broken hairs. He is now very rich indeed and does nothing with his money, doesn’t want to do anything, doesn’t know what one does do with it. He desires neither power nor pleasure. His desire for lucre is purely disinterested. He reminds me of Browning’s ‘Grammarian.’ I have a great admiration for him.” Mr. Porteous’s own passion had been for the poems of Notker Balbulus and St. Bernard. It had taken him nearly twenty years to get himself and his family out of the house where the Russian furrier used to lodge. But Notker was worth it, he used to say; Notker was worth even the weariness and the pallor of a wife who worked beyond her strength, even the shabbiness of ill-dressed and none too well-fed children. He had readjusted his monocle and gone on. But there had been occasions when it needed more than the monocle and the careful, distinguished clothes to keep up his _morale_. Still, those times were over now; Notker had brought him at last a kind of fame—even, indirectly, a certain small prosperity. Gumbril Senior turned once more towards his son. “And how do you propose,” he asked, “to make this money?” Gumbril Junior explained. He had thought it all out in the cab on the way from the station. “It came to me this morning,” he said, “in chapel, during service.” “Monstrous,” put in Gumbril Senior, with a genuine indignation, “monstrous these mediæval survivals in schools! Chapel, indeed!” “It came,” Gumbril Junior went on, “like an apocalypse, suddenly, like a divine inspiration. A grand and luminous idea came to me—the idea of Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes.” “And what are Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes?” “A boon to those whose occupation is sedentary”; Gumbril Junior had already composed his prospectus and his first advertisements: “a comfort to all travellers, civilization’s substitute for steatopygism, indispensable to first-nighters, the concert-goers’ friend, the....” “Lectulus Dei floridus,” intoned Mr. Porteous. “Gazophylacium Ecclesiæ, Cithara benesonans Dei, Cymbalum jubilationis Christi, Promptuarium mysteriorum fidei, ora pro nobis. Your small-clothes sound to me very like one of my old litanies, Theodore.” “We want scientific descriptions, not litanies,” said Gumbril Senior. “What _are_ Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes?”