He took them, in their natural sequence, one by one.
Old Squills meant well, no doubt, but he had been damned impertinent....
And why had Old Squills dragged in his sister, Sylvia ?...

He had paid as much attention to her as any brother does to any sister....

And how had she repaid him?
Head lowered doggedly against the sleet which was now falling thickly, he shouldered his way forward, brooding on his "honour," on his sister, on Dysart.
He had not been home in weeks; he did not know of his sister's departure with Bunny Gray.

She had left a letter at home for him, because she knew no other addresses except his clubs; and inquiry over the telephone elicited the information that he had not been to any of them.
But he was going to one of them now.

He needed something to kill that vichy; he'd have one more honest drink in spite of all the Old Squills and Mulqueens in North America! At the Cataract Club there were three fashion-haunting young men drinking hot Scotches: Dumont, his empurpled skin distended with whiskey and late suppers, and all his former brilliancy and wit cankered and rotten with it, and his slim figure and clean-cut face fattened and flabby with it; Myron Kelter, thin, elegant, exaggerated, talking eternally about women and his successes with the frailer ones--Myron Kelter, son of a gentleman, eking out his meagre income by fetching, carrying, pandering to the rich, who were too fastidious to do what they paid him for doing in their behalf; and the third, Forbes Winton, literary dilettante, large in every feature and in waistcoat and in gesture--large, hard, smooth--very smooth, and worth too many millions to be contradicted when misstating facts to suit the colour of his too luxuriant imagination.
These greeted Quest in their several and fashionably wearied manners, inviting his soul to loaf.
Later he had a slight dispute with Winton, who surveyed him coldly, and insolently repeated his former misstatement of a notorious fact.
"What rot!" said Quest; "I leave it to you, Kelter; am I right or not ?" Kelter began a soft and soothing discourse which led nowhere at first but ended finally in a re-order for four hot Scotches.
Then Dumont's witty French blood--or the muddied dregs which were left of it--began to be perversely amusing at Quest's expense.