He felt resentful toward his dead friend Josiah Cholderton. If there be a safe pastime, one warranted to lead a man into no trouble and to entangle him in no scandals, it would seem to lie in editing the Journal of a Member of Parliament, a Commercial Delegate, an Inventor of the Hygroxeric Method of Dressing Wool. Josiah Cholderton had—not quite for the first time—played him false. But never so badly as this before!
"Good gracious me!" he muttered. "The thing is nothing more nor less than an imputation on the legitimacy of the son and heir!"
That same afternoon he went over to the Imperium to vote at the election of members. It struck him as one of the small coincidences of life that among the candidates who faced the ballot was a Colonel Wilmot Edge, R.E.
"Any relation, I wonder?" mused Mr Neeld as he dropped in an affirmative ball. But it may be added, since not even the secrets of club ballots are to be held sacred, that he bestowed one of a different sort on a certain Mr William Iver, who was described as a "Contractor," and whose name was familiar and conspicuous on the hoardings that screened new buildings in London, and was consequently objectionable to Mr Neeld's fastidious mind.
"I don't often blackball," he remarked to Lord Southend as they were sitting down to whist, "but, really, don't you think the Imperium should maintain—er—a certain level?"
"Iver's a devilish rich fellow and not a bad fellow either," grunted my lord.