Lewin Rodwell was silent--but only for a few seconds. "Well, never mind; he's gone. We must reduce the staff--it is quite imperative in these days. What about those six others? Staff reduction will mean increased profits, you know." "They all have notice. I'm sorry about Carew. He has an invalid wife and seven children. His salary is only two pounds fifteen." "I'm afraid we can't help that, Charlesworth," replied the man who posed in the West End as the great self-denying patriot who hobnobbed with Cabinet Ministers. "We must reduce the staff, if we're going to pay a dividend. He'll get work--munition-making or something. Sentiment is out of place in these war-days." And yet, only two days before, the speaker had made a brilliant speech at a Mansion House meeting in which he had beaten the patriotic drum loudly, and appealed to all employers of labour to increase wages because of the serious rise in food-prices. Charlesworth knew this, but made no remark. It was not to his interest to thwart the great Lewin Rodwell, or his place-seeking sycophant Sir Boyle Huntley, who had been put by his friend into the position he now held. Truly the City is a strange, complex world of unpatriotic, hard-hearted money-seeking--a world where the Anglo-German or the swindling financier waxes rich quickly, and where the God-fearing Englishman goes to a Rowton House ousted by the "peaceful penetration" of our "dear kind friends" the Germans. Those who have known the City for the past ten years or so know full well--ay, they know, alas! too well--the way in which Germany has prepared us for the financial aspect of the war. In the light of current events much has been made plain that was hitherto shrouded in mystery. We have seen plainly the subtle methods of the enemy. Lewin Rodwell and his catspaw, Sir Boyle, were only typical of dozens of others in that little area from Temple Bar to Aldgate, the men who were working for Germany both prior to the war and after. Charlesworth, to do him full credit, was an honest Englishman. Yet such a man was bound to be employed by our enemies as a safeguard against inquiry, and in order to avert suspicion. City men, like Charlesworth, might be patriotic to the backbone, yet when it became a matter of choosing between bread-and-cheese and starvation, as in his own case, the matter of living at Wimbledon on two thousand a year appealed to him, in preference to cold mutton and lodgings in Bloomsbury. Germans, with or without assumed English names, controlled our finances, our professions, our hotels, nay, our very lives, wherefore it was hardly surprising that we were unable, in the first few months of war, to rid ourselves of that disease known as "German measles."