With one thumb in the belt of his cassock he frowned abstractedly at the steel engraving. His broker had advised United Celanese.
Here, in Sumatra Tin, United Celanese, and numberless other remote and dimly imagined companies was the central cause of the Rector’s money troubles. He was an inveterate gambler. Not, of course, that he thought of it as gambling; it was merely a lifelong search for a 'good investment'. On coming of age he had inherited four thousand pounds, which had gradually dwindled, thanks to his 'investments', to about twelve hundred. What was worse, every year he managed to scrape together, out of his miserable income, another fifty pounds which vanished by the same road. It is a curious fact that the lure of a 'good investment' seems to haunt clergymen more persistently
