"Or take Golf," said Mr. Carmody, side-stepping and attacking from another angle. "The only good golf course in Worcestershire at present is at Stourbridge. Worcestershire needs more golf courses. You know how popular Golf is nowadays." "Not so popular as Oil. Oil," said Mr. Molloy, with the air of one making an epigram, "is Oil." Mr. Carmody stopped himself just in time from saying what he thought of Oil. To relieve his feelings he ground his heel into the soft gravel of the path, and had but one regret, that Mr. Molloy's most sensitive toe was not under it. Half turning in the process of making this bitter gesture, he perceived that Providence, since the days of Job always curious to know just how much a good man can bear, had sent Ronald Overbury Fish to add to his troubles. Young Mr. Fish was sauntering up behind his customary eleven inches of cigarette holder, his pink face wearing that expression of good-natured superiority which, ever since their first meeting, had afflicted Mr. Carmody sorely. From the list of Mr. Carmody's troubles, recently tabulated, Ronnie Fish was inadvertently omitted. Although to Lady Julia Fish, his mother, this young gentleman, no doubt, was all the world, Lester Carmody had found him nothing but a pain in the neck. Apart from the hideous expense of entertaining a man who took twice of nearly everything, and helped himself unblushingly to more port, he chafed beneath his guest's curiously patronizing manner. He objected to being treated as a junior--and, what was more, as a half-witted junior--by solemn young men with pink faces. "What's the argument?" asked Ronnie Fish, anchoring self and cigarette holder at Mr. Carmody's side. Mr. Molloy smiled genially. "No argument, brother," he replied with that bluff heartiness which Lester Carmody had come to dislike so much. "I was merely telling our good friend and host here that the best investment under the broad blue canopy of God's sky is Oil." "Quite right," said Ronnie Fish. "He's perfectly correct, my dear Carmody." "Our good host was trying to interest me in golf courses." "Don't touch 'em," said Mr. Fish. "I won't," said Mr. Molloy. "Give me Oil. Oil's oil. First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of its countrymen, that's what Oil is. The Universal Fuel of the Future." "Absolutely," said Ronnie Fish. "What did Gladstone say in '88? You can fuel some of the people all the time, and you can fuel all the people some of the time, but you can't fuel all the people all of the time. He was forgetting about Oil. Probably he meant coal." "Coal?" Mr. Molloy laughed satirically. You could see he despised the stuff. "Don't talk to me about Coal." This was another disappointment for Mr. Carmody. Cinemas _de luxe_ and golf courses having failed, Coal was just what he had been intending to talk about. He suspected its presence beneath the turf of the park, and would have been glad to verify his suspicions with the aid of someone else's capital.