Mendes conducted his guest to a big club-house behind the church at the corner of Lombard Street. In the hall he stopped and wrote down Lord Alistair’s name in the visitors’ book with satisfaction. Regard for race is a sentiment deeply rooted in the Semitic mind, and Mendes took a genuine pleasure in the thought that his companion was a descendant of Scottish Kings. They took their seats at a small table in the midst of a vast room filled with similar ones, nearly all of them inconveniently crowded. The lunchers were mostly middle-aged men of prosperous appearance, and their talk seemed to run chiefly on gambling as it is carried on at the legalized Monte Carlo in Chapel Court. They all spoke to each other without formality, and a man who came and sat down at the same table as Mendes and Stuart at once plunged into a story of some speculator who had been gambling in copper, and owing to an unexpected desertion of the market by other speculators found himself suddenly left with some hundreds of tons of ore on his hands, which were actually brought in waggons to his office in Billiter Buildings, where he had one small room and a boy. The idea that a buyer and seller of anything should be called upon actually to handle it evidently appealed to the narrator as a superb joke. Generally speaking the lunches were of a very substantial description, and champagne seemed to be the only wine in much demand. Mendes catered liberally for his guest, and over their coffee offered him a cigar which the Duke of Trent and Colonsay could not have afforded to smoke. But most of the men round them were smoking similar cigars. It was impossible to think that everyone in that crowd was as rich as Mendes. Alistair could only suppose that they represented the winners of the moment, who were spending their gains with a gambler’s recklessness in the belief that their luck would never turn. In this judgment he was not wholly right. The world of the Stock Exchange is as small as other worlds, and those who inhabit it have to consult the opinions of their neighbours. If anything, the keeping up of appearances was more important to these gold-hunters than it is to the village tradesman or the retired officer in his seaside villa. To have ordered a modest lunch or a cheap cigar would have been to hoist a signal of distress, perhaps to bring an unstable fortune tumbling to the ground. Among these earthen pots the solid vessels of wealth floated calmly, sure sooner or later to crush the greater part of their venturesome rivals. As they rose from the table, Mendes moved his head slightly in the direction of the story-teller. “That man will not last six months,” he whispered. “He has gone in for American rails.” “Are they going down, then?” asked the ignorant Stuart, attempting to adopt the jargon he had heard around him. Mendes smiled good-naturedly.