"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.