"If I were you I shouldn't rush at it," said Mr. Prohack.

"But we must rush at it—or lose it. And I've no intention of losing it. Viola has to make her arrangements at once."

"I wonder what your mother will say when you ask her."

"I shan't ask her. I shall tell her. Nobody can decide this thing for me. I have to decide it for myself, and I've decided it. As for what mother says—" Sissie frowned and then smiled, "that's your affair."

"My affair!" Mr. Prohack exclaimed in real alarm. "What on earth do you mean?"

"Well, you and she are so thick together. You're got to live with her. I haven't got to live with her."

"I ask you, what on earth do you mean?"

"But surely you've understood, father, that I shall have to live at the studio. Somebody has to be on the spot, and there are two bedrooms. But of course you'll be able to put all that right with mother, dad. You'll do it for your own sake; but a bit for mine, too." She giggled nervously, ran round the table and kissed her parent. "I'm frightfully obliged for the fifty pounds," she said. "You and the mater will be fearfully happy together soon if Charlie doesn't come back. Ta-ta! I must be off now."

"Where?"

"To Eliza's of course. We shall probably go straight down to Putney together and see Viola and fix everything up. I know Viola's had at least one other good offer. I may sleep at the studio. If not, at Eliza's. Anyhow it will be too late for me to come back here."

"I absolutely forbid you to go off like this."

"Yes, do, father. You forbid for all you're worth if it gives you any pleasure. But it won't be much use unless you can carry me upstairs and lock me in my room. Oh! Father, you are a great pretender. You know perfectly well you're delighted with me."

"Indeed I'm not! I suppose you'll have the decency to see your mother before you go?"

"What! And wake her! You said she wasn't to be disturbed 'on any account.'"

"I deny that I said 'on any account.'"

"I shouldn't dream of disturbing her. And you'll tell her so much better than I could. You can do what you like with her."



IV

"Where's my dessert?" demanded Mrs. Prohack, anxiously and resentfully, when her husband at length reached the bedroom. "I'm dying of hunger, and I've got a real headache now. Oh! Arthur how absurd all this is! At least it would be if I wasn't so hungry."

"Sissie ate all the dessert," Mr. Prohack answered timidly. He no longer felt triumphant, careless and free. Indeed for some minutes he had practically forgotten that he had inherited ten thousand a year. "The child ate it every bit, so I couldn't bring any. Shall I ring for something else?"

"And why," Mrs. Prohack continued, "why have you been so long? And what's all this business of taxis rushing up to the door all the evening?"

"Marian," said Mr. Prohack, ignoring her gross exaggeration of the truth as to the taxis. "I'd better tell you at once. Charlie's gone to Glasgow on his own business and Sissie's just run down to Viola Ridle's studio about a new scheme of some kind that she's thinking of. For the moment we're alone in the world."

"It's always the same," she remarked with indignation, when with forced facetiousness he had given her an extremely imperfect and bowdlerized account of his evening. "It's always the same. As soon as I'm laid up in bed, everything goes wrong. My poor boy, I cannot imagine what you've been doing. I suppose I'm very silly, but I can't understand it."

Nor could Mr. Prohack himself, now that he was in the sane conjugal atmosphere of the bedroom.



CHAPTER VII

THE SYMPATHETIC QUACK

I

The next morning Mr. Prohack had a unique shock, for he was awakened by his wife coming into the bedroom. She held a big piece of cake in her hand. Never before had Mrs. Prohack been known to rise earlier than her husband. Also, the hour was eight-twenty, whereas never before had Mr. Prohack been known, on a working-day, to rise later than eight o'clock. He realised with horror that it would be necessary for him to hurry. Still, he did not jump up. He was not a brilliant sleeper, and he had had a bad night, which had only begun to be good at the time when as a rule he woke finally for the day. He did not feel very well, despite the fine sensation of riches which rushed reassuringly into his arms the moment consciousness returned.

"Arthur," said Mrs. Prohack, who was in her Chinese robe, "do you know that girl hasn't been home all night. Her bed hasn't been slept in!"

"Neither has mine," answered Mr. Prohack. "What girl?"

"Sissie, of course."

"Ah! Sissie!" murmured Mr. Prohack as if he had temporarily forgotten that such a girl existed. "Didn't I tell you last night she mightn't be back?"

"No, you didn't! And you know very well you didn't!"

"Honestly," said Mr. Prohack (meaning "dishonestly" as most people do in similar circumstances), "I thought I did."

"Do you suppose I should have slept one wink if I'd thought Sissie wasn't coming home?"

"Yes, I do. The death of Nelson wouldn't keep you awake. And now either I shall be late at the office, or else I shall go without my breakfast. I think you might have wakened me."

Mrs. Prohack, munching the cake despite all her anxieties, replied in a peculiar tone:

"What does it matter if you are late for the office?"

Mr. Prohack reflected that all women were alike in a lack of conscience where the public welfare was concerned. He was rich: therefore he was entitled to neglect his duty to the nation! A pleasing argument! Mr. Prohack sat up, and Mrs. Prohack had a full view of his face for the first time that morning.

"Arthur," she exclaimed, absolutely and in an instant forgetting both cake and daughter. "You're ill!"

He thought how agreeable it was to have a wife who was so marvellously absorbed in his being. There was something uncanny, something terrible, in it.

"Oh, no I'm not," he said. "I swear I'm not. I'm very tired, but I'm not ill. Get out of my way."

"But your face is as yellow as a cheese," protested Eve, frightened.

"It may be," said Mr. Prohack.

"You won't get up."

"I shall get up."

Eve snatched her hand-mirror from the dressing-table, and gave it to him with a menacing gesture. He admitted to himself that the appearance of his face was perhaps rather alarming at first sight; but really he did not feel ill; he only felt tired.

"It's nothing. Liver." He made a move to emerge from the bed. "Exercise is all I want."

He saw Eve's lips tremble; he saw tears hanging in her eyes; these phenomena induced in him the sensation of having somehow committed a solecism or a murder. He withdrew the move to emerge. She was hurt and desperate. He at once knew himself defeated. He thought how annoying it was to have a woman in the house who was so marvellously absorbed in his being. She was wrong; but her unreasoning desperation triumphed over his calm sagacity.

"Telephone for Dr. Veiga," said Mrs. Prohack to Machin, for whom she had rung. "V-e-i-g-a. Bruton Street. He's in the book. And ask him to come along as soon as he can to see Mr. Prohack."

Now Mr. Prohack had heard of, but never seen, Dr. Veiga. He had more than once listened to the Portuguese name on Eve's lips, and the man had been mentioned more than once at the club. Mr. Prohack knew that he was, if not a foreigner, of foreign descent, and hence he did not like him. Mr. Prohack took kindly to foreign singers and cooks, but not to foreign doctors. Moreover he had doubts about the fellow's professional qualifications. Therefore he strongly resented his wife's most singular and startling order to Machin, and as soon as Machin had gone he expressed himself:

"Anyway," he said curtly, after several exchanges, "I shall see my own doctor, if I see any doctor at all—which is doubtful."

Eve's response was to kiss her husband—a sisterly rather than a wifely kiss. And she said, in a sweet, noble voice:

"It's I that want Dr. Veiga's opinion about you, and I must insist on having it. And what's more, you know I've never cared for your friend Dr. Plott. He never seems to be interested. He scarcely listens to what you have to say. He scarcely examines you. He just makes you think your health is of no importance at all, and it doesn't really matter whether you're ill or well, and that you may get better or you mayn't, and that he'll humour you by sending you a bottle of something."

"Stuff!" said Mr. Prohack. "He's a first-rate fellow. No infernal nonsense about him! And what do you know about Veiga? I should like to be informed."

"I met him at Mrs. Cunliff's. He cured her of cancer."

"You told me Mrs. Cunliff hadn't got cancer at all."

"Well, it was Dr. Veiga who found out she hadn't, and stopped the operation just in time. She says he saved her life, and she's quite right. He's wonderful."

Mrs. Prohack was now sitting on the bed. She gazed at her husband's features with acute apprehension and yet with persuasive grace.

"Oh! Arthur!" she murmured, "you are a worry to me!"

Mr. Prohack, not being an ordinary Englishman, knew himself beaten—for the second time that morning. He dared not trifle with his wife in her earnest, lofty mood.

"I bet you Veiga won't come," said Mr. Prohack.

"He will come," said Mrs. Prohack blandly.

"How do you know?"

"Because he told me he'd come at once if ever I asked him. He's a perfect dear."

"Oh! I know the sort!" Mr. Prohack said sarcastically. "And you'll see the fee he'll charge!"

"When it's a question of health money doesn't matter."

"It doesn't matter when you've got the money. You'd never have dreamed of having Veiga this time yesterday. You wouldn't even have sent for old Plott."

Mrs. Prohack merely kissed her husband again, with a kind of ineffable resignation. Then Machin came in with her breakfast, and said that Dr. Veiga would be round shortly, and was told to telephone to the Treasury that her master was ill in bed.

"And what about my breakfast?" the victim enquired with irony. "Give me some of your egg."

"No, dearest, egg is the very last thing you should have with that colour."

"Well, if you'd like to know, I don't want any breakfast. Couldn't eat any."

"There you are!" Mrs. Prohack exclaimed triumphantly. "And yet you swear you aren't ill! That just shows.... It will be quite the best thing for you not to take anything until Dr. Veiga's been."

Mr. Prohack, helpless, examined the ceiling, and decided to go to the office in the afternoon. He tried to be unhappy but couldn't. Eye was too funny, too delicious, too exquisitely and ingenuously "firm," too blissful in having him at her mercy, for him to be unhappy.... To say nothing of the hundred thousand pounds! And he knew that Eve also was secretly revelling in the hundred thousand pounds. Dr. Veiga was her first bite at it.

* * * * *

II

Considering that he was well on the way to being a fashionable physician, Dr. Veiga arrived with surprising promptitude. Mr. Prohack wondered what hold Eve had upon him and how she had acquired it. He was prejudiced against the fellow before he came into the bedroom, simply because Eve, on hearing the noise of a car and a doorbell, had hurried downstairs, and a considerable interval had elapsed between the doctor's entrance into the house and his appearance at the bedside. Mr. Prohack guessed easily that those two had been plotting against him. Strange how Eve could be passionately loyal and basely deceitful simultaneously! The two-faced creature led the doctor forward with a candid smile that partook equally of the smile of a guardian angel and the smile of a cherub. She was an unparalleled comedian.

Dr. Veiga was fattish and rather shabby; about sixty years of age. He spoke perfectly correct English with a marked foreign accent. His demeanour was bland, slightly familiar, philosophical and sympathetic. Dr. Plott's eyes would have said: "This is my thirteenth visit this morning, and I've eighteen more to do, and it's all very tedious. Why do you people let yourselves get ill—if it's a fact that you really are ill? I don't think you are, but I'll see." Dr. Veiga's eyes said: "How interesting your case is! You've had no luck this time. We must make the best of things; but also we must face the truth. God knows I don't want to boast, but I expect I can put you right, with the help of your own strong commonsense."

Mr. Prohack, a connoisseur in human nature, noted the significances of the Veiga glance, but he suspected that there might also be something histrionic in it. Dr. Veiga examined heart, pulse, tongue. He tapped the torso. He asked many questions. Then he took an instrument out of a leather case which he carried, and fastened a strap round Mr. Prohack's forearm and attached it to the instrument, and presently Mr. Prohack could feel the strong pulsations of the blood current in his arm.

"Dear, dear!" said Dr. Veiga. "175. Blood pressure too high. Much too high! Must get that down."

Eve looked as though the end of the world had been announced, and even Mr. Prohack had qualms. Ten minutes earlier Mr. Prohack had been a strong, healthy man a trifle unwell in a bedroom. He was suddenly transformed into a patient in a nursing-home.

"A little catarrh," said Dr. Veiga.

"I've got no catarrh," said Mr. Prohack, with conviction.

"Yes, yes. Catarrh of the stomach. Probably had it for years. The duodenum is obstructed. A little accident that easily happens."

He addressed himself as it were privately to Mrs. Prohack. "The duodenum is no thicker than that." He indicated the pencil with which he was already writing in a pocket-book. "We'll get it right."

"What is the duodenum?" Mr. Prohack wanted to cry out. But he was too ashamed to ask. It was hardly conceivable that he, so wise, so prudent, had allowed over forty years to pass in total ignorance of this important item of his own body. He felt himself to be a bag full of disconcerting and dangerous mysteries. Or he might have expressed it that he had been smoking in criminal nonchalance for nearly half a century on the top of a powder magazine. He was deeply impressed by the rapidity and assurance of the doctor's diagnosis. It was wonderful that the queer fellow could in a few minutes single out an obscure organ no bigger than a pencil and say: "There is the ill." The fellow might be a quack, but sometimes quacks were men of genius. His shame and his alarm quickly vanished under the doctor's reassuring and bland manner. So much so that when Dr. Veiga had written out a prescription, Mr. Prohack said lightly:

"I suppose I can get up, though."

To which Dr. Veiga amiably replied:

"I shall leave that to you. Perhaps if I tell you you'll be lucky if you don't have jaundice...! But I think you will be lucky. I'll try to look in again this afternoon."

These last words staggered both Mr. and Mrs. Prohack.

"I've been expecting this for years. I knew it would come." Mrs. Prohack breathed tragically.

And even Mr. Prohack reflected aghast:

"My God! Doctor calling twice a day!"

True, "duodenum" was a terrible word.

Mrs. Prohack gazed at Dr. Veiga as at a high priest, and waited to be vouchsafed a further message.

"Anyhow, if I find it impossible to call, I'll telephone in any case," said Dr. Veiga.

Some slight solace in this!

Mrs. Prohack, like an acolyte, personally attended the high priest as far as the street, listening with acute attention to his recommendations. When she returned she had put on a carefully bright face. Evidently she had decided, or had been told, that cheerfulness was essential to ward off jaundice.

"Now that's what I call a doctor," said she. "To think of your friend Plott...! I've telephoned for a messenger boy to go to the chemist's."

"You're at liberty to call the man a doctor," answered Mr. Prohack. "And I'm at liberty to call him a fine character actor."

"I knew the moment you sat up it was jaundice," said Mrs. Prohack.

"Well," said Mr. Prohack. "I lay you five to one I don't have jaundice. Not that you'd ever pay me if you lost."

Mrs. Prohack said:

"When I saw you were asleep at after eight o'clock this morning I knew there must be something serious. I felt it. However, as the doctor says, if we take it seriously it will soon cease to be serious."

"He's not a bad phrase-maker," said Mr. Prohack.

In the late afternoon Dr. Veiga returned like an old and familiar acquaintance, with his confident air of saying: "We can manage this affair between us—I am almost sure." Mr. Prohack felt worse; and the room, lighted by one shaded lamp, had begun to look rather like a real sick-room. Mr. Prohack, though he mistrusted the foreign accent, the unprofessional appearance, and the adventurous manner, was positively glad to see his new doctor, and indeed felt that he had need of succour.

"Yes," said Dr. Veiga, after investigation. "My opinion is that you'll escape jaundice. In four or five days you ought to be as well as you were before the attack. I don't say how well you were before."

Mr. Prohack instantly felt better.

"It will be very awkward if I can't get back to the office early next week," said he.

"I'm sure it will," Dr. Veiga agreed. "And it might be still more awkward if you went back to the office early next week, and then never went any more."

"What do you mean?"

Dr. Veiga smiled understandingly at Mrs. Prohack, as though he and she were the only grown-up persons in the room.

"Look here," he addressed the patient. "I see I shall have to charge you a fee for telling you what you know as well as I do. The fact is I get my living by doing that. How old are you?"

"Forty-six."

"Every year of the war counts double. So you're over fifty. A difficult age. You can run an engine ten hours a day for fifty years. But it's worn; it's second-hand. And if you keep on running it ten hours a day you'll soon discover how worn it is. But you can run it five hours a day for another twenty years with reasonable safety and efficiency. That's what I wanted to tell you. You aren't the man you were, Mr. Prohack. You've lost the trick of getting rid of your waste products. You say you feel tired. Why do you feel tired? Being tired simply means being clogged. The moment you feel tired your waste products are beginning to pile up. Look at those finger joints! Waste products! Friction! Why don't you sleep well? You say the more tired you are the worse you sleep: and you seem surprised. But you're only surprised because you haven't thought it out. Morpheus himself wouldn't sleep if his body was a mass of friction-producing waste products from top to toe. You aren't a body and soul, Mr. Prohack. You're an engine—I wish you'd remember that and treat yourself like one. The moment you feel tired, stop the engine. If you don't, it'll stop itself. It pretty nearly stopped to-day. You need lubrication too. The best lubricant is a tumbler of hot water four times a day. And don't take coffee, or any salt except what your cook puts into the dishes. Don't try to be cleverer than nature. Don't think the clock is standing still. It isn't. If you treat yourself as well as you treat your watch, you'll bury me. If you don't, I shall bury you. All that I've told you I know by heart, because I'm saying it to men of your age every day of my life."

Mr. Prohack felt like a reprimanded schoolboy. He feared the wrath to come.

"Don't you think my husband ought to take a long holiday?" Eve put in.

"Well, of course he ought," said Dr. Veiga, opening both mouth and eyes in protest against such a silly question.

"Six months?"

"At least."

"Where ought he to go?"

"Doesn't matter. Portugal, the Riviera, Switzerland. But it's not the season yet for any of these places. If he wants to keep on pleasant terms with nature he'll get out his car and motor about his own country for a month or two. After that he might go to the Continent. But of course he won't. I know these official gentlemen. If you ask them to disturb their routine they'll die first. They really would sooner die. Very natural of course. Routine is their drug."

"My husband will take six months holiday," said Eve quietly. "I suppose you could give the proper certificate? You see in these Government departments...."

"I'll give you the certificate to-morrow."

Mr. Prohack was pretending to be asleep, or at least to be too fatigued and indifferent to take notice of this remarkable conversation. But as soon as Dr. Veiga had blandly departed under the escort of Eve, he slipped out of bed and cautiously padded to the landing where there was a bookcase.

"Duodenum. Duodenum. Must be something to do with twelve." Then he found a dictionary and brought it back into the bedroom and consulted it. "So it's twelve inches long, is it?" he murmured. He had just time to plunge into bed and pitch the dictionary under the bed before his wife returned.

* * * * *

III

She was bending over him.

"Darling!"

He opened his deceiving eyes. Her face was within a foot of his.

"How do you feel now?"

"I feel," said he, "that this is the darnedest swindle that ever was. If I hadn't come into a fortune I should have been back at the office the day after to-morrow. In about eight hours, with the help of that Portuguese mountebank, you've changed me from a sane normal man into a blooming valetudinarian who must run all over the earth in search of health. I've got to 'winter' somewhere, have I? You'll see. It's absolutely incredible. It's more like Maskelyne and Cook's than anything I ever came across." He yawned. He knew that it was the disturbed duodenum that caused him to yawn, and that also gave him a dry mouth and a peculiar taste therein.

"Yes, darling," Eve smiled above him the smile of her impenetrable angelicism. "Yes, darling. You're better."

The worst was that she had beaten him on the primary point. He had asserted that he was not ill. She had asserted that he was. She had been right; he wrong. He could not deny, even to himself, that he was ill. Not gravely, only somewhat. But supposing that he was gravely ill! Supposing that old Plott would agree with all that Veiga had said! It was conceivable. Misgivings shot through him.

And Eve had him at her sweet mercy. He was helpless. She was easily the stronger. He perceived then, what many a husband dies without having perceived, that his wife had a genuine individual existence and volition of her own, that she was more than his complement, his companion, the mother of his children.

She lowered her head further and gave him a long, fresh, damp kiss. They were very intimate, with an intimacy that her enigmatic quality could not impair. He was annoyed, aggrieved, rebellious, but extremely happy in a weak sort of way. He hated and loved her, he despised and adored her, he reprehended and admired her—all at once. What specially satisfied him was that he had her to himself. The always-impinging children were not there. He liked this novel solitude of two.

"Darling, where is Charlie staying in Glasgow?"

"Why?"

"I want to write to him."

"Post's gone, my poor child."

"Then I shall telegraph."

"What about?"

"Never mind."

"I shan't tell you the address unless you promise to show me the telegram. I intend to be master in my own house even if I am dying."

Thus he saw the telegram, which ran: "Father ill in bed what is the best motor car to buy. Love. Mother." The telegram astounded Mr. Prohack.

"Have you taken leave of your senses?" he cried. Then he laughed. What else was there to do? What else but the philosopher's laugh was adequate to the occasion?

While Eve with her own unrivalled hand was preparing the bedroom for the night, Machin came in with a telegram. Without being asked to do so Eve showed it to the sufferer: "Tell him to buck up. Eagle six cylinder. Everything fine here. Charles."

"I think he might have sent his love," said Eve.

Mr. Prohack no longer attempted to fight against the situation, which was like a net winding itself round him.



CHAPTER VIII

SISSIE'S BUSINESS

I

One evening, ten days later, Mr. Prohack slipped out of his own house as stealthily as a thief might have slipped into it. He was cured provisionally. The unseen, unfelt, sinister duodenum no longer mysteriously deranged his whole engine. Only a continual sensation of slight fatigue indicated all the time that he was not cleverer than nature and that he was not victoriously disposing of his waste products. But he could walk mildly about; his zest for smoking had in part returned; and to any uninstructed observer he bore a close resemblance to a healthy man.

Four matters worried him, of which three may be mentioned immediately. He could not go to the Treasury. His colleague Hunter had amiably called the day after his seizure, and Mrs. Prohack had got hold of Hunter. Her influence over sane and well-balanced males was really extraordinary. Mr. Prohack had remained in perfect ignorance of the machinations of these two for eight days, at the end of which period he received by post an official document informing him that My Lords of the Treasury had granted him six months' leave of absence for reasons of ill-health. Dr. Veiga had furnished the certificate unknown to the patient. The quick despatch of the affair showed with what celerity a government department can function when it is actuated from the inside. The leave of absence for reasons of ill-health of course prevented Mr. Prohack from appearing at his office. How could he with decency appear at his office seemingly vigorous when it had been officially decided that he was too ill to work? And Mr. Prohack desired greatly to visit the Treasury. The habit of a life-time had been broken in a moment, and since Mr. Prohack was the creature of that habit he suffered accordingly. He had been suffering for two days. This was the first matter that worried Mr. Prohack.

The second matter had to do with his clubs. He was cut off from his clubs. Partly for the same reason as that which cut him off from the Treasury—for both his clubs were full of Civil Servants—and partly because he was still somehow sensitive concerning the fact of his inheritance. He would have had a similar objection to entering his clubs in Highland kilt. The explanation was obvious. He hated to be conspicuous. His inheritance was already (through Mr. Softly Bishop) the talk of certain official and club circles, and Mr. Prohack apprehended that every eye would be curiously upon him if he should set foot in a club. He could not bear that, and he could not bear the questions and the pleasantries. One day he would have to bear them—but not yet.

The third matter that worried him was that he could not, even in secret, consult his own doctor. How could he go to old Plott and say: "Plott, old man, I've been ill and my wife insisted upon having another doctor, but I've come to ask you to tell me whether or not the other doctor's right?" The thing was impossible. Yet he badly wanted to verify Veiga by Plott. He still mistrusted Veiga, though his mistrust lessened daily, despite his wish to see it increase.

Mrs. Prohack had benevolently suggested that he should run down to his club, but on no account for a meal—merely "for a change." He had declined, without giving the reason, and she had admitted that perhaps he was right.

He attributed all the worries to his wife.

"I pay a fine price for that woman," he thought as he left the house, "a rare fine price!" But as for her price, he never haggled over it. She, just as she existed in her awful imperfection, was his first necessary of life. She had gone out after dinner to see an acquaintance about a house-maid (for already she was reorganising the household on a more specious scale); she was a mile off at least; but she would have disapproved of him breaking loose into his clubs at night, and so the Terror of the departments stole forth, instead of walking forth, intimidated by that moral influence which she left behind her. Undoubtedly since the revolt of the duodenum her grip of him had sensibly tightened.

Not that Mr. Prohack was really going to a club. He had deceitfully told himself that he might stroll down to his principal club, for the sake of exercise (his close friends among the members were lunchers not diners), but the central self within himself was aware that no club would see him that evening.

A taxi approached in the darkness; he knew by its pace that it was empty. He told the driver to drive to Putney. In the old days of eleven days ago he would not have dared to tell a taxi-driver to drive to Putney, for the fare would have unbalanced his dizzy private weekly budget; and even now he felt he was going the deuce of a pace. Even now he would prudently not have taken a taxi had not part of the American hundred thousand pounds already materialised. Mr. Softly Bishop had been to see him on the previous day, and in addition to being mysteriously sympathetic about his co-heir's ill-health had produced seven thousand pounds of the hundred thousand. A New York representative had cabled fourteen thousand, not because Mr. Prohack was in a hurry for seven, but because Mr. Softly Bishop was in a hurry for seven. And Mr. Softly Bishop had pointed out something which Mr. Prohack, Treasury official, had not thought of. He had pointed out that Mr. Prohack might begin immediately to spend just as freely as if the hundred thousand were actually in hand.

"You see," said he, "the interest has been accumulating over there ever since Angmering's death, and it will continue to accumulate until we get all the capital; and the interest runs up to about a couple of hundred a week for each of us."

Now Mr. Prohack had directed the taxi to his daughter's dance studio, and perhaps it was the intention to do so that had made him steal ignobly out of the house. For Eve would assuredly have rebelled. A state of war existed between Eve and her daughter, and Mr. Prohack's intelligence, as well as his heart, had ranged him on Eve's side. Since Sissie's departure, the girl had given no sign whatever to her parents. Mrs. Prohack had expected to see her on the next day after her defection. But there was no Sissie, and there was no message from Sissie. Mrs. Prohack bulged with astounding news for Sissie, of her father's illness and inheritance. But Mrs. Prohack's resentful pride would not make the first move, and would not allow Mr. Prohack to make it. They knew, at second-hand through a friend of Viola Ridle's, that Sissie was regularly active at the studio; also Sissie had had the effrontery to send a messenger for some of her clothes—without even a note! The situation was incredible, and waxed daily in incredibility. Sissie's behaviour could not possibly be excused.

This was the fourth and the chief matter that worried Mr. Prohack. He regarded it sardonically as rather a lark; but he was worried to think of the girl making a fool of herself with her mother. Her mother was demonstrably in the right. To yield to the chit's appalling heartlessness would be bad tactics and it would be humiliating. Nevertheless Mr. Prohack had directed the taxi-driver to the dance-studio at Putney. On the way it suddenly occurred to him, almost with a shock, that he was a rich man, secure from material anxieties, and that therefore he ought to feel light-hearted. He had been losing sight of this very important fact for quite some time.

* * * * *

II

The woman in the cubicle near the door was putting a fresh disc on to a gramophone and winding up the instrument. She was a fat, youngish woman, in a parlourmaid's cap and apron, and Mr. Prohack had a few days earlier had a glimpse of her seated in his own hall waiting for a package of Sissie's clothes.

"Very sorry, sir," said she, turning her head negligently from the gramophone and eyeing him seriously. "I'm afraid you can't go in if you're not in evening dress." Evidently from her firm, polite voice, she knew just what she was about, did that young woman. She added: "The rule's very strict on Fridays."

At the same moment a bell rang once. The woman immediately released the catch of the gramophone and lowered the needle on to the disc, and Mr. Prohack heard music, but not from the cubicle. There was a round hole in the match-board partition, and the trumpet attachment of the gramophone disappeared beyond the hole.

"This affair is organised," thought Mr. Prohack, decidedly impressed by the ingenuity of the musical arrangement and by the promptness of the orchestral director in obeying the signal of the bell.

"My name is Prohack," said he. "I'm Miss Prohack's father."

This important announcement ought to have startled the sangfroid of the guardian, but it did not. She merely said, with a slight mechanical smile:

"As soon as this dance is over, sir, I'll let Miss Prohack know she's wanted." She did not say: "Sir, a person of your eminence is above rules. Go right in."

Two girls in all-enveloping dark cloaks entered behind him. "Good-evening, Lizzie," one of them greeted the guardian. And Lizzie's face relaxed into a bright genuine smile.

"Good-evening, miss. Good-evening, miss."

The two girls vanished rustlingly through a door over which was hung a piece of cardboard with the written words: "Ladies' cloakroom." In a few moments they emerged, white and fluffy apparitions, eager, self-conscious, and they vanished through another door. Mr. Prohack judged from their bridling and from their whispers to each other that they belonged to the class which ministers to the shopping-class. He admitted that they looked very nice and attractive; but he had the sensation of having blundered into a queer, hitherto unknown world, and of astonishment and qualms that his daughter should be a ruler in that world.

Lizzie stood up and peeped through a little square window in the match-boarding. As soon as she had finished peeping Mr. Prohack took liberty to peep also, and the dance-studio was revealed to him. Somehow he could scarcely believe that it was not a hallucination, and that he was really in Putney, and that his own sober house in which Sissie had been reared still existed not many miles off.

For Mr. Prohack, not continuously but at intervals, possessed a disturbing faculty that compelled him to see the phenomena of human life as they actually were, and to disregard entirely the mere names of things,—which mere names by the magic power of mere names usually suffice to satisfy the curiosity of most people and to allay their misgivings if any. Mr. Prohack now saw (when he looked downwards) a revolving disc which was grating against a stationary needle and thereby producing unpleasant rasping sounds. But it was also producing a quite different order of sounds. He did not in the least understand, and he did not suppose that anybody in the dance-studio understood, the delicate secret mechanism by which these other sounds were produced. All he knew was that by means of the trumpet attachment they were transmitted through the wooden partition and let loose into the larger air of the studio, where the waves of them had a singular effect on the brains of certain bright young women and sombre young and middle-aged men who were arranged in clasped couples: with the result that the brains of the women and men sent orders to their legs, arms, eyes, and they shifted to and fro in rhythmical movements. Each woman placed herself very close—breast against breast—to each man, yielding her volition absolutely to his, and (if the man was the taller) often gazing up into his face with an ecstatic expression of pleasure and acquiescence. The physical relations between the units of each couple would have caused censorious comment had the couple been alone or standing still; but the movement and the association of couples seemed mysteriously to lift the whole operation above criticism and to endow it with a perfect propriety. The motion of the couples, and their manner of moving, over the earth's surface were extremely monotonous; some couples indeed only walked stiffly to and fro; on the other hand a few exhibited variety, lightness and grace, in manoeuvres which involved a high degree of mutual trust and comprehension. While only some of the faces were ecstatic, all were rapt. The ordinary world was shut out of this room, whose inhabitants had apparently abandoned themselves with all their souls to the performance of a complicated and solemn rite.

Odd as the spectacle was, Mr. Prohack enjoyed it. He enjoyed the youth and the prettiness and the litheness of the brightly-dressed girls and the stern masculinity of the men, and he enjoyed the thought that both girls and men had had the wit to escape from the ordinary world into this fantastic environment created out of four walls, a few Chinese lanterns, some rouge, some stuffs, some spangles, friction between two pieces of metal, and the profoundest instinct of nature. Beyond everything he enjoyed the sight of the lithest and most elegant of the girls, whom he knew to be Eliza Brating and who was dancing with a partner whose skill obviously needed no lessons. He would have liked to see his daughter Sissie in Eliza's place, but Sissie was playing the man's role to a stout and nearly middle-aged lady, whose chief talent for the rite appeared to be an iron determination.

Mr. Prohack was in danger of being hypnotised by the spectacle, but suddenly the conflict between the disc and the needle grew more acute, and Lizzie, the guardian, dragged the needle sharply from the bosom of its antagonist. The sounds ceased, and the brains of the couples in the studio, no longer inspired by the sounds, ceased to inspire the muscles of the couples, and the rite suddenly finished. Mr. Prohack drew breath.

"To think," he reflected, "that this sort of thing is seriously going on all over London at this very instant, and that many earnest persons are making a livelihood from it, and that nobody but me perceives how marvellous, charming, incomprehensible and disconcerting it is!"

He said to the guardian:

"There doesn't seem to be much 'lesson' about this business. Everybody here seems to be able to dance all right."

To which Lizzie replied with a sagacious, even ironic, smile:

"You see, sir, on these gala nights they all do their very best."

"Father!"

Sissie had arrived upon him. Clearly she was preoccupied, if not worried, and the unexpected sight of her parent forced her, as it were, unwillingly from one absorbing train of ideas into another. She was startled, self-conscious, nervous. Still, she jumped at him and kissed him,—as if in a dream.

"Nothing the matter, is there?"

"Nothing."

"I'm frightfully busy to-night. Just come in here, will you?"

And she took him into the ladies' cloakroom—an apartment the like of which he had never before seen. It had only one chair, in front of a sort of dressing-table covered with mysterious apparatus and instruments.

Mr. Prohack inspected his daughter as though she had been somebody else's daughter.

"Well," said he. "You look just like a real business woman, except the dress."

She was very attractive, very elegant, comically young (to him), and very business-like in her smart, short frock, stockings, and shoes.

"Can't you understand," she objected firmly, "that this is my business dress, just as much as a black frock and high collar would be in an office?"

He gave a short, gentle laugh.

"I don't know what you're laughing at, dad," she reproached him, not unkindly. "Anyhow, I'm glad some one's come at last. I was beginning to think that my home had forgotten all about me. Even when I sent up for some clothes no message came back."

The life-long experience of Mr. Prohack had been that important and unusual interviews rarely corresponded with the anticipation of them, and the present instance most sharply confirmed his experience. He had expected to be forgiving an apologetic daughter, but the reality was that he found himself in the dock. He hesitated for words, and Sissie went on:

"Here have I been working myself to death reorganising this place after Viola went—and I can tell you it needed reorganising! Haven't had a minute in the mornings, and of course there are the lessons afternoon and evening. And no one's been down to see how I was getting on, or even written. I do think it's a bit steep. Mother might have known that if I had had any spare time I should have run up."

"I've been rather queer," he excused himself and the family. "And your mother's been looking after me, and of course you know Charlie's still in Glasgow."

"I don't know anything," she corrected him. "But you needn't tell me that if you've been unwell mother's been looking after you. Does she ever do anything else? Are you better? What was it? You look all right."

"Oh! General derangement. I haven't been to the office since you decamped." He did not feel equal to telling her that he would not be returning to the office for months. She had said that he looked all right, and her quite honest if hasty verdict on his appearance gave him a sense of guilt, and also renewed suspicions of Dr. Veiga.

"Not been to the office!" The statement justly amazed the girl, almost shocked her. But she went on in a fresh, satirical accent recalling Mr. Prohack's own: "You must have been upset! But of course you're highly nervous, dad, and I expect the excitement of the news of your fortune was too much for you. I know exactly how you get when anything unusual happens."

She had heard of the inheritance!

"I was going to tell you about that little affair," he said awkwardly. "So you knew! Who told you?"

"Nobody in my family at any rate," she answered. "I heard of it from an outsider, and of course from sheer pride I had to pretend that I knew all about it. And what's more, father, you knew when you gave me that fifty pounds, only you wouldn't let on. Don't deny it.... Naturally I'm glad about it, very glad. And yet I'm not. I really rather regret it for you and mother. You'll never be as happy again. Riches will spoil my poor darling mother."

"That remains to be seen, Miss Worldly Wisemiss," he retorted with unconvincing lightness. He was disturbed, and he was impressed, by her indifference to the fortune. It appeared not to concern or to interest her. She spoke not merely as one who objected to unearned wealth but as one to whom the annals of the Prohack family were henceforth a matter of minor importance. It was very strange, and Mr. Prohack had to fight against a feeling of intimidation. The girl whom he had cherished for over twenty years and whom he thought he knew to the core, was absolutely astounding him by the revelation of her individuality. He didn't know her. He was not her father. He was helpless before her.

"How are things here?" he demanded, amiably inquisitive, as an acquaintance.

"Excellent," said she. "Jolly hard work, though."

"Yes, I should imagine so. Teaching men dancing! By Jove!"

"There's not so much difficulty about teaching men. The difficulty's with the women. Father, they're awful. You can't imagine their stupidity."

Lizzie glanced into the room. She simply glanced, and Sissie returned the glance.

"You'll have to excuse me a bit, father," said Sissie. "I'll come back as quick as I can. Don't go." She departed hurriedly.

"I'd better get out of this anyhow," thought Mr. Prohack, surveying the ladies' cloakroom. "If one of 'em came in I should have to explain my unexplainable presence in this sacred grot."

* * * * *



III

Having received no suggestion from his daughter as to how he should dispose of himself while awaiting her leisure, Mr. Prohack made his way back to the guardian's cubicle. And there he discovered a chubby and intentionally-young man in the act of gazing through the small window into the studio exactly as he himself had been gazing a few minutes earlier.

"Hello, Prohack!" exclaimed the chubby and intentionally-young man, with the utmost geniality and calmness.

"How d'ye do?" responded Mr. Prohack with just as much calmness and perhaps ten per cent less geniality. Mr. Prohack was a peculiar fellow, and that on this occasion he gave rather less geniality than he received was due to the fact that he had never before spoken to the cupid in his life and that he was wondering whether membership of the same club entirely justified so informal a mode of address—without an introduction and outside the club premises. For, like all modest men, Mr. Prohack had some sort of a notion of his own dignity, a sort of a notion that occasionally took him quite by surprise. Mr. Prohack did not even know the surname of his aggressor. He only knew that he never overheard other men call him anything but "Ozzie." Had not Mr. Prohack been buried away all his life in the catacombs of the Treasury and thus cut off from the great world-movement, he would have been fully aware that Oswald Morfey was a person of importance in the West End of London, that he was an outstanding phenomenon of the age, that he followed very closely all the varying curves of the great world-movement, that he was constantly to be seen on the pavements of Piccadilly, Bond Street, St. James's Street, Pall Mall and Hammersmith, that he was never absent from a good first night or a private view of very new or very old pictures or a distinguished concert or a poetry-reading or a fashionable auction at Christie's, that he received invitations to dinner for every night in the week and accepted all those that did not clash with the others, that in return for these abundant meals he gave about once a month a tea-party in his trifling Japanese flat in Bruton Street, where the sandwiches were as thin as the sound of the harpsichord which eighteenth century ladies played at his request; and that he was in truth what Mr. Asprey Chown called "social secretary" to Mr. Asprey Chown.

Mr. Prohack might be excused for his ignorance of this last fact, for the relation between Asprey Chown and Ozzie was never very clearly defined—at any rate by Ozzie. He had no doubt learned, from an enforced acquaintance with the sides of motor-omnibuses, that Mr. Asprey Chown was a theatre-manager of some activity, but he certainly had not truly comprehended that Mr. Asprey Chown was head of one of the two great rival theatrical combines and reputed to be the most accomplished showman in the Western hemisphere, with a jewelled finger in notable side-enterprises such as prize-fights, restaurants, and industrial companies. The knowing ones from whom naught is hidden held that Asprey Chown had never given a clearer proof of genius than in engaging this harmless and indefatigable parasite of the West End to be his social secretary. The knowing ones said further that whereas Ozzie was saving money, nobody could be sure that Asprey Chown was saving money. The engagement had a double effect—it at once put Asprey Chown into touch with everything that could be useful to him for the purposes of special booming, and it put Ozzie into touch with half the theatrical stars of London—in an age when a first-rate heroine of revue was worth at least two duchesses and a Dame in the scale of social values.

Mr. Oswald Morfey, doubtless in order to balance the modernity of his taste in the arts, wore a tight black stock and a wide eyeglass ribbon in the daytime, and in the evening permitted himself to associate a soft silk shirt with a swallow-tail coat. It was to Mr. Prohack's secondary (and more exclusive) club that he belonged. Inoffensive though he was, he had managed innocently to offend Mr. Prohack. "Who is the fellow?" Mr. Prohack had once asked a friend in the club, and having received no answer but "Ozzie," Mr. Prohack had added: "He's a perfect ass," and had given as a reason for this harsh judgment: "Well, I can't stick the way he walks across the hall."

In the precincts of the dance-studio Mr. Oswald Morfey said in that simple, half-lisping tone and with that wide-open child-like glance that characterised most of his remarks:

"A very prosperous little affair here!" Having said this, he let his eyeglass fall into the full silkiness of his shirt-front, and turned and smiled very amicably and agreeably on Mr. Prohack, who could not help thinking: "Perhaps after all you aren't such a bad sort of an idiot."

"Yes," said Mr. Prohack. "Do you often get as far as Putney?" For Mr. Oswald Morfey, enveloped as he unquestionably was in the invisible aura of the West End, seemed conspicuously out of place in a dance-studio in a side-street in Putney, having rather the air of an angelic visitant.

"Well, now I come to think of it, I don't!" Mr. Morfey answered nearly all questions as though they were curious, disconcerting questions that took him by surprise. This mannerism was universally attractive—until you got tired of it.

Mr. Prohack was now faintly attracted by it,—so that he said, in a genuine attempt at good-fellowship:

"You know I can't for the life of me remember your name. You must excuse me. My memory for names is not what it was. And I hate to dissemble, don't you?"

The announcement was a grave shock to Mr. Oswald Morfey, who imagined that half the taxi-drivers in London knew him by sight. Nevertheless he withstood the shock like a little man of the world, and replied with miraculous and sincere politeness: "I'm sure there's no reason why you should remember my name." And he vouchsafed his name.

"Of course! Of course!" exclaimed Mr. Prohack, with a politeness equally miraculous, for the word "Morfey" had no significance for the benighted official. "How stupid of me!"

"By the way," said Mr. Morfey in a lower, confidential tone. "Your Eagle will be ready to-morrow instead of next week."

"My Eagle?"

"Your new car."

It was Mr. Prohack's turn to be staggered, and to keep his nerve. Not one word had he heard about the purchase of a car since Charlie's telegram from Glasgow. He had begun to think that his wife had either forgotten the necessity of a car or was waiting till his more complete recovery before troubling him to buy it. And he had taken care to say nothing about it himself, for he had discovered, upon searching his own mind, that his interest in motor-cars was not an authentic interest and that he had no desire at all to go motoring in pursuit of health. And lo! Eve had been secretly engaged in the purchase of a car for him! Oh! A remarkable woman, Eve: she would stop at nothing when his health was in question. Not even at a two thousand pound car.

"Ah, yes!" said Mr. Prohack, with as much tranquillity as though his habit was to buy a car once a week or so. "To-morrow, you say? Good!" Was the fellow then a motor-car tout working on commission?

"You see," said Ozzie, "my old man owns a controlling interest in the Eagle Company. That's how I happen to know."

"I see," murmured Mr. Prohack, speculating wildly in private as to the identity of Ozzie's old man.

When Ozzie with a nod and a smile and a re-fixing of his monocle left the cubicle to enter the studio, he left Mr. Prohack freshly amazed at the singularities of the world and of women, even the finest women. How disturbing to come down to Putney in a taxi-cab in order to learn from a stranger that you have bought a two thousand pound car which is to come into your possession on the morrow! The dangerousness, the excitingness, of being rich struck Mr. Prohack very forcibly.

A few minutes later he beheld a sight which affected him more deeply, and less pleasantly, than anything else in an evening of thunderclaps. Through the little window he saw Sissie dancing with Ozzie Morfey. And although Sissie was not gazing upward ecstatically into Ozzie's face—she could not because they were of a size—and although her features had a rather stern, fixed expression, Mr. Prohack knew, from his knowledge of her, that Sissie was in a secret ecstasy of enjoyment while dancing with this man. He did not like her ecstasy. Was it possible that she, so sensible and acute, had failed to perceive that the fellow was a perfect ass? For in spite of his amiability, a perfect ass the fellow was. The sight of his Sissie held in the arms of Ozzie Morfey revolted Mr. Prohack. But he was once again helpless. And the most sinister suspicions crawled into his mind. Why was the resplendent, the utterly correct Ozzie dancing in a dancing studio in Putney? Certainly he was not there to learn dancing. He danced to perfection. The feet of the partners seemed to be married into a mystic unity of direction. The performance was entrancing to watch. Could it be possible that Ozzie was there because Sissie was there? Darker still, could it be possible that Sissie had taken a share in the studio for any reason other than a purely commercial reason?

"He thinks you're a darling," said Sissie to her father afterwards when he and she and Eliza Brating, alone together in the studio, were informally consuming buns and milk in the corner where the stove was.

The talk ran upon dancers, and whether Ozzie Morfey was not one of the finest dancers in London. Was Sissie's tone quite natural? Mr. Prohack could not be sure. Eliza Brating said she must go at once in order not to miss the last tram home. Mr. Prohack, without thinking, said that he would see her home in his taxi, which had been ruthlessly ticking his fortune away for much more than an hour.

"Kiss mother for me," said Sissie, "and tell her that she's a horrid old thing and I shall come along and give her a piece of my mind one of these days." And she gave him the kiss for her mother.

And as she kissed him, Mr. Prohack was very proud of his daughter—so efficient, so sound, so straight, so graceful.

"She's all right, anyway," he reflected. And yet she could be ecstatic in the arms of that perfect ass! And in the taxi: "Fancy me seeing home this dancing-mistress!" Eliza lived at Brook Green. She was very elegant, and quite unexceptionable until she opened her mouth. She related to him how her mother, who had once been a premier sujet in the Covent Garden ballet, was helpless from sciatica. But she related this picturesque and pride-causing detail in a manner very insipid, naive, and even vulgar, (After all there was a difference between First Division and Second Division in the Civil Service!) She was boring him terribly before they reached Brook Green. She took leave with a deportment correct but acquired at an age too late. Still, he had liked to see her home in the taxi. She was young, and she was an object pleasing to the eye. He realised that he was not accustomed to the propinquity of young women. What would his cronies at the Club say to the escapade?... Odd, excessively odd, that the girl should be Sissie's partner, in a business enterprise of so odd a character!... The next thing was to meet Eve after the escapade. Should he keep to the defensive, or should he lead off with an attack apropos of the Eagle car?



CHAPTER IX

COLLISION

I

After an eventful night Mr. Prohack woke up late to breakfast in bed. Theoretically he hated breakfast in bed, but in practice he had recently found that the inconveniences to himself were negligible compared to the intense and triumphant pleasure which his wife took in seeing him breakfast in bed, in being fully dressed while he was in pyjamas and dressing-gown, and in presiding over the meal and over him. Recently Marian had formed the habit of rising earlier and appearing to be very busy upon various minute jobs at an hour when, a few weeks previously, she would scarcely have decided that day had given place to night. Mr. Prohack, without being able precisely to define it, thought that he understood the psychology of the change in this unique woman. Under ordinary circumstances he would have been worried by his sense of fatigue, but now, as he had nothing whatever to do, he did not much care whether he was tired or not. Neither the office nor the State would suffer through his lack of tone.

The events of the night had happened exclusively inside Mr. Prohack's head. Nor were they traceable to the demeanour of his wife when he returned home from the studio. She had mysteriously behaved to him as though nocturnal excursions to disgraceful daughters in remote quarters of London were part of his daily routine. She had been very sweet and very incurious. Whereon Mr. Prohack had said to himself: "She has some diplomatic reason for being an angel." And even if she had not been an angel, even if she had been the very reverse of an angel, Mr. Prohack would not have minded, and his night would not have been thereby upset; for he regarded her as a beautiful natural phenomenon is regarded by a scientist, lovingly and wonderingly, and he was incapable of being irritated for more than a few seconds by anything that might be done or said by this forest creature of the prime who had strayed charmingly into the twentieth century. He was a very fortunate husband.

No! The eventfulness of the night originated in reflection upon the relations between Sissie and Ozzie Morfey. If thoughts could take physical shape and solidity, the events of the night would have amounted to terrible collisions and catastrophes in the devil-haunted abysses of Mr. Prohack's brain. The forces of evil were massacring all opponents between three and four a.m. It was at this period Mr. Prohack was convinced that Sissie, in addition to being an indescribably heartless daughter, was a perfect fool hoodwinked by a perfect ass, and that Ozzie's motive in the affair was not solely or chiefly admiration for Sissie, but admiration of the great fortune which, he had learnt, had fallen into the lap of Sissie's father. After five o'clock, according to the usual sequence, the forces of evil lost ground, and at six-thirty, when the oblong of the looking-glass glimmered faintly in the dawn, Mr. Prohack said roundly: "I am an idiot," and went to sleep.

"Now, darling," said Eve when he emerged from the bathroom. "Don't waste any more time. I want you to give me your opinion about something downstairs."

"Child," said Mr. Prohack. "What on earth do you mean—'wasting time'? Haven't you insisted, and hasn't your precious doctor insisted, that I must read the papers for an hour in bed after I've had my breakfast in bed? Talk about 'wasting time' indeed!"

"Yes, of course darling," Eve concurred, amazingly angelic. "I don't mean you've been wasting time; only I don't want you to waste any more time."

"My mistake," said Mr. Prohack.

From mere malice and wickedness he spun out the business of dressing to nearly its customary length, and twice Eve came uneasily into the bedroom to see if she could be of assistance to him. No nurse could have been so beautifully attentive. During one of her absences he slipped furtively downstairs into the drawing-room, where he began to strum on the piano, though the room was yet by no means properly warm. She came after him, admirably pretending not to notice that he was behaving unusually. She was attired for the street, and she carried his hat and his thickest overcoat.

"You're coming out," said she, holding up the overcoat cajolingly.

"That's just where you're mistaken," said he.

"But I want to show you something."

"What do you want to show me?"

"You shall see when you come out."

"Is it by chance the bird of the mountains that I am to see?"

"The bird of the mountains? My dear Arthur! What are you driving at now?"

"Is it the Eagle car?" And as she staggered speechless under the blow he proceeded: "Ah! Did you think you could deceive me with your infantile conspiracies and your tacit deceits and your false smiles?"

She blushed.

"Some one's told you. And I do think it's a shame!"

"And who should have told me? Who have I seen? I suppose you think I picked up the information at Putney last night. And haven't you opened all my letters since I was ill, on the pretext of saving me worry? Shall I tell you how I know? I knew from your face. Your face, my innocent, can't be read like a book. It can be read like a newspaper placard, and for days past I've seen on it, 'Extra special. Exciting purchase of a motor-car by a cunning wife.'" Then he laughed. "No, chit. That fellow Oswald Morfey, let it out last night."

When she had indignantly enquired how Oswald Morfey came to be mixed up in her private matters, she said:

"Well, darling, I hope I needn't tell you that my sole object was to save you trouble. The car simply had to be bought, and as quickly as possible, so I did it. Need I tell you—"

"You needn't, certainly," Mr. Prohack agreed, and going to the window he lifted the curtain. Yes. There stood a real car, a landaulette, with the illustrous eagle on the front of its radiator, and a real chauffeur by its side. The thing seemed entirely miraculous to Mr. Prohack; and he was rather impressed by his wife's daring and enterprise. After all, it was somewhat of an undertaking for an unworldly woman to go out alone into the world and buy a motor-car and engage a chauffeur, not to mention clothing the chauffeur. But Mr. Prohack kept all his imperturbability.

"Isn't it lovely?"

"Is it paid for?"

"Oh, no!"

"Didn't you have to pay any deposit?"

"Of course I didn't. I gave your name, and that was sufficient. We needn't keep it if we don't like it after the trial run."

"And is it insured?"

"Of course, darling."

"And what about the licence?"

"Oh! The Eagle Company saw to all those stupid things for me."

"And how many times have you forged my signature while I've been lying on a bed of pain?"

"The fact is, darling, I made the purchase in my own name. Now come along. We're going round the park."

The way she patted his overcoat when she had got it on to him...! The way she took him by the hand and pulled him towards the drawing-room door...! She had done an exceedingly audacious deed, and her spirits rose as she became convinced from his demeanour that she had not pushed audacity too far. (For she was never absolutely sure of him.)

"Wait one moment," said Mr. Prohack releasing himself and slipping back to the window.

"What's the matter?"

"I merely desired to look at the chauffeur's face. Is it a real chauffeur? Not an automaton?"

"Arthur!"

"You're sure he's quite human?" Mrs. Prohack closed the piano, and then stamped her foot.

"Listen," said Mr. Prohack. "I'm about to trust my life to the mysterious being inside that uniform. Did you imagine that I would trust my life to a perfect stranger? In another half hour he and I may be lying in hospital side by side. And I don't even know his name! Fetch him in, my dove, and allow me to establish relations with him. But confide to me his name first." The expression on Mrs. Prohack's features was one of sublime forbearance under ineffable provocation.

"This is Carthew," she announced, bringing the chauffeur into the drawing-room.

Carthew was a fairly tall, fairly full-bodied, grizzled man of about forty; he carried his cap and one gauntleted glove in one gloved hand, and his long, stiff green overcoat slanted down from his neck to his knees in an unbroken line. He had the impassivity of a policeman.

"Good morning, Carthew," Mr. Prohack began, rising. "I thought that you and I would like to make one another's acquaintance."

"Yes, sir."

Mr. Prohack held out his hand, which Carthew calmly took.

"Will you sit down?"

"Thank you, sir."

"Have a cigarette?" Carthew hesitated.

"Do you mind if I have one of my own, sir?"

"These are Virginian."

"Oh! Thank you, sir." And Carthew took a cigarette from Mr. Prohack's case.

"Light?"

"After you, sir."

"No, no."

"Thank you, sir."

Carthew coughed, puffed, and leaned back a little in his chair. At this point Mrs. Prohack left the room. (She said afterwards that she left the room because she couldn't have borne to be present when Carthew's back broke the back of the chair.)

Carthew sat silent.

"Well," said Mr. Prohack. "What do you think of the car? I ought to tell you I know nothing of motors myself, and this is the first one I've ever had."

"The Eagle is a very good car, sir. If you ask me I should say it was light on tyres and a bit thirsty with petrol. It's one of them cars as anybody can drive—if you understand what I mean. I mean anybody can make it go. But of course that's only the beginning of what I call driving."

"Just so," agreed Mr. Prohack, drawing by his smile a very faint smile from Carthew. "My son seems to think it's about the best car on the market."

"Well, sir, I've been mixed up with cars pretty well all my life—I mean since I was twenty—"

"Have you indeed!"

"I have, sir—" Carthew neatly flicked some ash on the carpet, and Mr. Prohack thoughtfully did the same—"I have, sir, and I haven't yet come across the best car on the market, if you understand what I mean."

"Perfectly," said Mr. Prohack.

Carthew sat silent.

"But it's a very good car. Nobody could wish for a better. I'll say that," he added at length.

"Had many accidents in your time?"

"I've been touched, sir, but I've never touched anything myself. You can have an accident while you're drawn up alongside the kerb. It rather depends on how many fools have been let loose in the traffic, doesn't it, sir, if you understand what I mean."

"Exactly," said Mr. Prohack.

Carthew sat silent.

"I gather you've been through the war," Mr. Prohack began again.

"I was in the first Territorial regiment that landed in France, and I got my discharge July 1919."

"Wounded?"

"Well, sir, I've been blown up twice and buried once and pitched into the sea once, but nothing ever happened to me."

"I see you don't wear any ribbons."

"It's like this, sir. I've seen enough ribbons on chests since the armistice. It isn't as if I was one of them conscripts."

"No," murmured Mr. Prohack thoughtfully; then brightening: "And as soon as you were discharged you went back to your old job?"

"I did and I didn't, sir. The fact is, I've been driving an ambulance for the City of London, but as soon as I heard of something private I chucked that. I can't say as I like these Corporations. There's a bit too much stone wall about them Corporations, for my taste."

"Family man?" asked Mr. Prohack lightly. "I've two children myself and both of them can drive."

"Really, sir, I am a family man, as ye might say, but my wife and me, we're best apart."

"Sorry to hear that. I didn't want to—"

"Oh, not at all, sir! That's all right. But you see—the war—me being away and all that—I've got the little boy. He's nine."

"Well," said Mr. Prohack, jumping up nervously, "suppose we go and have a look at the car, shall we?"

"Certainly, sir," said Carthew, throwing the end of his cigarette into the fender, and hastening.

"My dove," said Mr. Prohack to his wife in the hall. "I congratulate you on your taste in chauffeurs. Carthew and I have laid the foundations of a lasting friendship."

"I really wonder you asked him to smoke in the drawing-room," Mrs. Prohack critically observed.

"Why? He saved England for me; and now I'm trusting my life to him."

"I do believe you'd like there to be a revolution in this country."

"Not at all, angel! And I don't think there'll be one. But I'm taking my precautions in case there should be one."

"He's only a chauffeur."

"That's very true. He was doing some useful work, driving an ambulance to hospitals. But we've stopped that. He's now only a chauffeur to the idle rich."

"Oh, Arthur! I wish you wouldn't try to be funny on such subjects. You know you don't mean it."

Mrs. Prohack was now genuinely reproachful, and the first conjugal joy-ride might have suffered from a certain constraint had it taken place. It did not, however, take place. Just as Carthew was holding out the rug (which Eve's prodigious thoroughness had remembered to buy) preparatory to placing it on the knees of his employers, a truly gigantic automobile drove up to the door, its long bonnet stopping within six inches of the Eagle's tail-lantern. The Eagle looked like nothing at all beside it. Mr. Prohack knew that leviathan. He had many times seen it in front of the portals of his principal club. It was the car of his great club crony, Sir Paul Spinner, the "city magnate."

Sir Paul, embossed with carbuncles, got out, and was presently being presented to Eve,—for the friendship between Mr. Prohack and Sir Paul had been a purely club friendship. Like many such friendships it had had no existence beyond the club, and neither of the cronies knew anything of real interest about the domestic circumstances of the other. Sir Paul was very apologetic to Eve, but he imperiously desired an interview with Mr. Prohack at once. Eve most agreeably and charmingly said that she would take a little preliminary airing in the car by herself, and return for her husband. Mr. Prohack would have preferred her to wait for him; but, though Eve was sagacious enough at all normal times, when she got an idea into her head that idea ruthlessly took precedence of everything else in the external world. Moreover the car was her private creation, and she was incapable of resisting its attractions one minute longer.

II

"I hear you've come into half a million, Arthur," said Paul Spinner, after he had shown himself very friendly and optimistic about Mr. Prohack's health and given the usual bulletin about his own carbuncles and the shortcomings of the club.

"But you don't believe it, Paul."

"I don't," agreed Paul. "Things get about pretty fast in the City and we can size them up fairly well; and I should say, putting two and two together, that a hundred and fifty thousand would be nearer the mark."

"It certainly is," said Mr. Prohack.

If Paul Spinner had suggested fifty thousand, Mr. Prohack would have corrected him, but being full of base instincts he had no impulse to correct the larger estimate, which was just as inaccurate.

"Well, well! It's a most romantic story and I congratulate you on it. No such luck ever happened to me." Sir Paul made this remark in a tone to indicate that he had had practically no luck himself. And he really believed that he had had no luck, though the fact was that he touched no enterprise that failed. Every year he signed a huger cheque for super-tax, and every year he signed it with a gesture signifying that he was signing his own ruin.

This distressing illusion of Sir Paul's was probably due to his carbuncles, which of all pathological phenomena are among the most productive of a pessimistic philosophy. The carbuncles were well known up and down Harley Street. They were always to be cured and they never were cured. They must have cost their owner about as much as his motor-car for upkeep—what with medical fees, travelling and foreign hotels—and nobody knew whether they remained uncured because they were incurable or because the medical profession thought it would be cruel at one stroke to deprive itself of a regular income and Sir Paul of his greatest hobby. The strange thing was that Sir Paul with all his powerful general sagacity and shrewdness, continued firmly, despite endless disappointments, in the mystical faith that one day the carbuncles would be abolished.

"I won't beat about the bush," said he. "We know one another. I came here to talk frankly and I'll talk frankly."

"You go right ahead," Mr. Prohack benevolently encouraged him.

"First of all I should like to give you just the least hint of warning against that fellow Softly Bishop. I daresay you know something' about him—"

"I know nothing about him, except the way he looks down his nose. But no man who looks down his nose the way he looks down his nose is going to influence me in the management of my financial affairs. I'm only an official; I should be a lamb in the City; but I have my safeguards, old chap. Thanks for the tip all the same."

Sir Paul Spinner laughed hoarsely, as Mr. Prohack had made him laugh hundreds of times in the course of their friendship. And Mr. Prohack was aware of a feeling of superiority to Sir Paul. The feeling grew steadily in his breast, and he was not quite sure how it originated. Perhaps it was due to a note of dawning obsequiousness in Sir Paul's laugh, reminding Mr. Prohack of the ancient proverb that the jokes of the exalted are always side-splitting.

"As I say," Sir Paul proceeded, "you and I know each other."

Mr. Prohack nodded, with a trace of impatience against unnecessary repetition. Yet he was suddenly struck with the odd thought that Sir Paul certainly did not know him, but only odd bits of him; and he was doubtful whether he knew Sir Paul. He saw an obese man of sixty sitting in the very chair that a few moments ago had been occupied by Carthew the chauffeur, a man with big purplish features and a liverish eye, a man smoking a plutocratic and heavenly cigar and eating it at the same time, a man richly dressed and braided and jewelled, a man whose boots showed no sign of a crease, an obvious millionaire of the old type, in short a man who was practically all prejudices and waste-products. And he wondered why and how that man had become his friend and won his affection. Sir Paul looked positively coarse in Mr. Prohack's frail Chippendale drawing-room, seeming to need for suitable environment the pillared marble and gilt of the vast Club. Well, after having eaten many hundreds of meals and drunk many hundreds of cups of coffee in the grunting society of Sir Paul, all that Mr. Prohack could be sure of knowing about Sir Paul was, first, that he had an absolutely unspotted reputation; second, that he was a very decent, simple-minded, kindly, ignorant fellow (ignorant, that is, in the matters that interested Mr. Prohack); third, that he instinctively mistrusted intellect and brilliance; fourth, that for nearly four years he had been convinced that Germany would win the war, and fifth, that he was capable of astounding freaks of generosity. Stay, there was another item,—Sir Paul's invariable courtesy to the club servants, which courtesy he somehow contrived to combine with continual grumbling. The club servants held him in affection. It was probably this sixth item that outweighed any of the others in Mr. Prohack's favourable estimate of the financier.

And then Mr. Prohack, as in a dream, heard from the lips of Paul Spinner the words, "oil concessions in Roumania." In a flash, in an earthquake, in a blinding vision, Mr. Prohack instantaneously understood the origin of his queer nascent feeling of superiority to old Paul. What he had previously known subconsciously he now knew consciously. Old Paul who had no doubt been paying in annual taxes about ten times the amount of Mr. Prohack's official annual salary; old Paul whose name was the synonym for millions and the rumours of whose views on the stock-markets caused the readers of financial papers to tremble; old Paul was after Mr. Prohack's money! Marvellous, marvellous, thrice marvellous money!... It was the most astounding, the most glorious thing that ever happened. Mr. Prohack immediately began to have his misgivings about Sir Paul Spinner. Simultaneously he felt sorry for old Paul. And such was his constraint that he made the motion of swallowing, and had all he could do not to blush.

Mr. Prohack might be a lamb in the City, but he had a highly trained mind, and a very firm grasp of the mere technique of finance. Therefore Sir Paul could explain himself succinctly and precisely in technical terms, and he did so—with much skill and a sort of unconsidered persuasiveness, realising in his rough commonsense that there was no need to drive ideas into Mr. Prohack's head with a steam-hammer, or to intoxicate him with a heady vapour of superlatives.

In a quarter of an hour Mr. Prohack learnt that Sir Paul was promoting a strictly private syndicate as a preliminary to the formation of a big company for the exploitation of certain options on Roumanian oil-territory which Sir Paul held. He learnt about the reports of the trial borings. He learnt about the character and the experience of the expert whom Sir Paul had sent forth to Roumania. He learnt about the world-supply of oil and the world-demand for oil. He learnt about the great rival oil-groups that were then dividing the universe of oil. He had the entire situation clearly mapped on his brain. Next he obtained some startling inside knowledge about the shortage of liquid capital in the circles of "big money," and then followed Sir Paul's famous club disquisition upon the origin of the present unsaleableness of securities and the appalling uneasiness, not to say collapse, of markets.

"What we want is stability, old boy. We want to be left alone. We're being governed to death. Social reform is all right. I believe in it, but everything depends on the pace. Change there ought to be, but it mustn't be like a transformation scene in a pantomime."

And so on.

Mr. Prohack was familiar with it all. He expected the culminating part of the exposition. But Sir Paul curved off towards the navy and the need of conserving in British hands a more than adequate gush of oil for the navy. Mr. Prohack wished that Sir Paul could have left out the navy. And then the Empire was reached. Mr. Prohack wished that Sir Paul could have left out the Empire. Finally Sir Paul arrived at the point.

"I've realised all I can in reason and I'm eighty thousand short. Of course I can get it, get it easily, but not without giving away a good part of my show in quarters that I should prefer to keep quite in the dark. I thought of you—you're clean outside all that sort of thing, and also I know you'd lie low. You might make a hundred per cent; you might make two hundred per cent. But I'll guarantee you this—you won't lose, whatever happens. Of course your capital may not be liquid. You mayn't be able to get at it. I don't know. But I thought it was just worth mentioning to you, and so I said to myself I'd look in here on my way to the City."

Sir Paul Spinner touting for a miserable eighty thousand pounds!

"Hanged if I know how my capital is!" said Mr. Prohack.

"I suppose your lawyer knows. Smathe, isn't it?... I heard so."

"How soon do you want an answer, yes or no?" Mr. Prohack asked, with a feeling that he had his back to the wall and old Paul had a gun.

"I don't want an answer now, anyhow, old boy. You must think it over. You see, once we've got the thing, I shall set the two big groups bidding against each other for it, and we shall see some fun. And I wouldn't ask them for cash payments. Only for payment in their own shares—which are worth more than money."

"Want an answer to-morrow?"

"Could you make it to-night?" Sir Paul surprisingly answered. "And assuming you say yes—I only say assuming—couldn't you run down with me to Smathe's now and find out about your capital? That wouldn't bind you in any way. I'm particularly anxious you should think it over very carefully. And, by the way, better keep these papers to refer to. But if you can't get at your capital, no use troubling further. That's the first thing to find out."

"I can't go to Smathe's now," Mr. Prohack stammered.

"Why not?"

"Because I'm going out with my wife in the car."

"But, my dear old boy, it's a big thing, and it's urgent."

"Yes, I quite see that. But I've got to go with Marian. I'll tell you what I can do. I'll telephone Smathe that you're coming down to see him yourself, and he must tell you everything. That'll be best. Then I'll let you know my decision later."

As they parted, Sir Paul said:

"We know each other, and you may take it from me it's all right. I'll say no more. However, you think it over."

"Oh! I will!"

Old Paul touting for eighty thousand pounds! A wondrous world! A stupefying world!

Mr. Prohack, who didn't know what to do with a hundred thousand pounds, saw himself the possessor of a quarter of a million, and was illogically thrilled by the prospect. But the risk! Supposing that honest Paul was wrong for once, or suppose he was carried off in the night by a carbuncle,—Mr. Prohack might find himself a pauper with a mere trifle of twenty thousand pounds to his name.

As soon as he had telephoned he resumed his hat and coat and went out on to the pavement to look for his car, chauffeur and wife. There was not a sign of them.

* * * * *

III

Mr. Prohack was undeniably a very popular man. He had few doubts concerning the financial soundness of old Paul's proposition; but he hesitated, for reasons unconnected with finance or with domesticity, about accepting it. And he conceived the idea (which none but a very peculiar man would have conceived) of discussing the matter with some enemy of old Paul's. Now old Paul had few enemies. Mr. Prohack, however, could put his hand on one,—Mr. Francis Fieldfare—the editor of an old-established and lucrative financial weekly, and familiar to readers of that and other organs as "F.F." Mr. Fieldfare's offices were quite close to Mr. Prohack's principal club, of which Mr. Fieldfare also was a member, and Mr. Fieldfare had the habit of passing into the club about noon and reading the papers for an hour, lunching early, and leaving the club again just as the majority of the members were ordering their after-lunch coffee. Mr. Fieldfare pursued this course because he had a deep instinct for being in the minority. Mr. Prohack looked at his watch. The resolution of every man is limited in quantity. Only in mad people is resolution inexhaustible. Mr. Prohack had no more resolution than becomes an average sane fellow, and his resolution to wait for his wife had been seriously tried by the energetic refusal to go with Spinner to see Smathe. It now suddenly gave out.

"Pooh!" said Mr. Prohack. "I've waited long enough for her. She'll now have to wait a bit for me."

And off he went by taxi to his club. The visit, he reflected, would serve the secondary purpose of an inconspicuous re-entry into club-life after absence from it.

He thought:

"They may have had an accident with that car. One day she's certain to have an accident anyhow,—she's so impulsive."

Of course Mr. Fieldfare was not in the morning-room of the club as he ought to have been. That was bound to happen. Mr. Prohack gazed around at the monumental somnolence of the great room, was ignored, and backed out into the hall, meaning to return home. But in the hall he met F.F. just arriving. It surprised and perhaps a little pained Mr. Prohack to observe that F.F. had evidently heard neither of his illness nor of his inheritance.

Mr. Fieldfare was a spare, middle-aged man, of apparently austere habit; short, shabby; a beautiful, resigned face, burning eyes, and a soft voice. He was weighed down, and had been weighed down for thirty years, by a sense of the threatened immediate collapse of society—of all societies, and by the solemn illusion that he more clearly than anybody else understood the fearful trend of events.

Mr. Prohack had once, during the war, remarked on seeing F.F. glance at the tape in the Club: "Look at F.F. afraid lest there may be some good news." Nevertheless he liked F.F.

As editor of a financial weekly, F.F. naturally had to keep well under control his world-sadness. High finance cannot prosper in an atmosphere of world-sadness, and hates it. F.F. ought never to have become the editor of a financial weekly; but he happened to be an expert statistician, an honest man and a courageous man, and an expert in the pathology of stock-markets, and on this score his proprietors excused the slight traces of world-sadness occasionally to be found in the paper. He might have left his post and obtained another; but to be forced by fate to be editor of a financial weekly was F.F.'s chief grievance in life, and he loved a good grievance beyond everything.

"But, my dear fellow," said F.F. with his melancholy ardent glance, when Mr. Prohack had replied suitably to his opening question. "I'd no idea you'd been unwell. I hope it isn't what's called a breakdown."

"Oh, no!" Mr. Prohack laughed nervously. "But you know what doctors are. A little rest has been prescribed."

F.F. gazed at him softly compassionate, as if to indicate that nothing but trouble could be expected under the present political regime. They examined the tape together.

"Things can't go on much longer like this," observed F.F. comprehensively, in front of the morning's messages from the capitals of the world.

"Still," said Mr. Prohack, "we've won the war, haven't we?"

"I suppose we have," said F.F. and sighed.

Mr. Prohack felt that he had no more time for preliminaries, and in order to cut them short started some ingenious but quite inexcusable lying.

"You didn't chance to see old Paul Spinner going out as you came in?"

"No," answered F.F. "Why?"

"Nothing. Only a man in the morning-room was wanting to know if he was still in the Club, and I told him I'd see."

"I hear," said F.F. after a moment, and in a lower voice, "I hear he's getting up some big new oil scheme."

"Ah!" murmured Mr. Prohack, delighted at so favourable a coincidence, with a wonderful imitation of casualness. "And what may that be?"

"Nobody knows. Some people would give a good deal to know. But if I'm any judge of my Spinner they won't know till he's licked off all the cream. It's marvellous to me how Spinner and his sort can keep on devoting themselves to the old ambitions while the world's breaking up. Marvellous!"

"Money, you mean?"

"Personal aggrandisement."

"Well," answered Mr. Prohack, with a judicial, detached air. "I've always found Spinner a very decent agreeable chap."

"Oh, yes! Agreed! Agreed! They're all too confoundedly agreeable for anything, all that lot are."

"But surely he's honest?"

"Quite. As straight a man as ever breathed, especially according to his own lights. All his enterprises are absolutely what is known as 'sound.' They all make rich people richer, and in particular they make him richer, though I bet even he's been feeling the pinch lately. They all have."

"Still, I expect old Spinner desires the welfare of the country just as much as any one else. It's not all money with him."

"No. But did you ever know Spinner touch anything that didn't mean money in the first place? I never did. What he and his lot mean by the welfare of the country is the stability of the country as it is. They see the necessity for development, improvement in the social scheme. Oh, yes! They see it and admit it. Then they go to church, or they commune with heaven on the golf-course, and their prayer is: 'Give us needed change, O Lord, but not just yet.'"

The pair moved to the morning-room.

"Look here," said Mr. Prohack, lightly, ignoring the earnestness in F.F.'s tone. "Supposing you had a bit of money, say eighty thousand pounds, and the chance to put it into one of old who-is-it's schemes, what would you do?"

"I should be ashamed to have eighty thousand pounds," F.F. replied with dark whispering passion. "And in any case nothing would induce me to have any dealings with the gang."

"Are they all bad?"

"They're all bad, all! They are all anti-social. All! They are all a curse to the country and to all mankind." F.F. had already rung the bell, and he now beckoned coldly to the waitress who entered the room. "Everybody who supports the present Government is guilty of a crime against human progress. Bring me a glass of that brown sherry I had yesterday—you know the one—and three small pieces of cheese."

Mr. Prohack went away to the telephone, and got Paul Spinner at Smathe's office.

"I only wanted to tell you that I've decided to come into your show, if Smathe can arrange for the money. I've thought it all over carefully, and I'm yours, old boy."

He hung up the receiver immediately.

* * * * *

IV

The excursion to the club had taken longer than Mr. Prohack had anticipated, and when he got back home it was nearly lunch-time. No sign of an Eagle car or any other car in front of the house! Mr. Prohack let himself in. The sounds of a table being set came from the dining-room. He opened the door there. Machin met him at the door. Each withdrew from the other, avoiding a collision.

"Your mistress returned?"

"Yes, sir." Machin seemed to hesitate, her mind disturbed.

"Where is she?"

"I was just coming to tell you, sir. She told me to say that she was lying down."

"Oh!"

Disdaining further to interrogate the servant, he hurried upstairs. He had to excuse himself to Eve, and he had also to justify to her the placing of eighty thousand pounds in a scheme which she could not possibly understand and for which there was nothing whatever to show. She would approve, of course; she would say that she had complete confidence in his sagacity, but all the inflections of her voice, all her gestures and glances, would indicate to him that in her opinion he was a singularly ingenuous creature, the natural prey of sharpers, and that the chances of their not being ruined by his incurable simplicity were exceedingly small. His immense reputation in the Treasury, his sinister fame as the Terror of the departments, would not weigh an atom in her general judgment of the concrete case affecting the fortunes of the Prohack family. Then she would be brave; she would be bravely resigned to the worst. She would kiss his innocence. She would quite unconvincingly assure him, in her own vocabulary, that he was a devil of a fellow and the smartest man in the world.

Further, she would draw in the horns of her secret schemes of expenditure. She would say that she had intended to do so-and-so and to buy so-and-so, but that perhaps it would be better, in view of the uncertainties of destiny, neither to do nor to buy so-and-so. In short, she would succeed in conveying to him the idea that to live with him was like being in an open boat with him adrift in the middle of the stormy Atlantic. She loved to live with him, the compensations were exquisite, and moreover what would be his fate if he were alone? Still, it was like being in an open boat with him adrift in the middle of the stormy Atlantic. And she would cling closer to him and point to the red sun setting among black clouds of tempest. And this would continue until he could throw say about a hundred and sixty thousand pounds into her lap, whereupon she would calmly assert that in her opinion he and she had really been safe all the while on the glassy lake of the Serpentine in a steamer.