"Hullo?"
"You're sure you won't blurt it out to them when I'm not there?"
He only replied: "I'm sorry you've got such a frightful headache, Marian. You wouldn't have these headaches if you took my advice."
A pause.
"I'm in bed."
"All right. Stay there."
When he had finished his cigarette, he went into the bedroom. Yes, she was veritably in bed.
"You are a pig, Arthur. I wonder how many wives—"
He put his hand over her mouth.
"Stop," he said. "I'm not like you. I don't need to be told what I know already."
"But really—!" She dropped her head on one side and began to laugh, and continued to laugh, rather hysterically, until she could not laugh any more. "Oh, dear! We are the queerest pair!"
"It is possible," said he. "You've forgotten the eau-de-cologne." He handed her the bottle. "It is quite possible that we're the queerest pair, but this is a very serious day in the history of the Prohack family. The Prohack family has been starving, and some one's given it an enormous beefsteak. Now it's highly dangerous to give a beefsteak to a starving person. The consequences might be fatal. That's why it's so serious. That's why I must have time to think."
The sound of Sissie playing a waltz on the piano came up from the drawing-room. Mr. Prohack started to dance all by himself in the middle of the bedroom floor.
CHAPTER V
CHARLIE
I
When Mr. Prohack, in his mature but still rich velvet jacket, came down to dinner, he found his son Charlie leaning against the mantelpiece in a new dark brown suit, and studying The Owner-Driver. Charlie seemed never to read anything but motor-car and light-car and side-car and motor-bicycle periodical literature; but he read it conscientiously, indefatigably, and completely—advertisements and all. He read it as though it were an endless novel of passion and he an idle woman deprived of the society her heart longed for. He possessed a motor-bicycle which he stabled in a mews behind the Square. He had possessed several such machines; he bought, altered, and sold them, apparently always with profit to himself. He had no interest in non-mechanical literature or in any of the arts.
"Your mother's gone to bed with a headache," said Mr. Prohack, with a fair imitation of melancholy.
"Oh!" said the young man apathetically. His face had a wearied, disillusioned expression.
"Is this the latest?" asked his father, indicating the new brown suit. "My respectful congratulations. Very smart, especially at the waist."
For a youth who had nothing in the world but what remained of his wound gratuity and other trifling military emoluments, and what he made out of commerce in motor-bicycles, Charlie spent a lot in clothes. His mother had advised his father to "speak to him about it." But his father had declined to offer any criticism, on the ground that Charlie had fought in Mesopotamia, Italy and France. Moreover, Charlie had scotched any possible criticism by asserting that good clothes were all that stood between him and the ruin of his career. "If I dressed like the dad," he had once grimly and gloomily remarked, "it would be the beginning of the end for me."
"Smart?" he now exclaimed, stepping forward. "Look at that." He advanced his right leg a little. "Look at that crease. See where it falls?" The trouser-crease, which, as all wise men know, ought to have fallen exactly on the centre of the boot-lacing, fell about an inch to the left thereof. "And I've tried this suit on four times! All the bally tailors in London seem to think you've got nothing else to do but call and try on and try on and try on. Never seems to occur to them that they don't know their business. It's as bad as staff work. However, if this fellow thinks I'm going to stick these trousers he'll have the surprise of his life to-morrow morning." The youth spoke in a tone of earnest disgust.
"My boy," said Mr. Prohack, "you have my most serious sympathy. Your life must be terribly complicated by this search for perfection."
"Yes, that's all very well," said Charlie.
"Where's Sissie?"
"Hanged if I know!"
"I heard her playing the piano not five minutes since."
"So did I."
Machin, the house-parlourmaid, then intervened:
"Miss Sissie had a telephone call, and she's gone out, sir."
"Where to?"
"She didn't say, sir. She only said she wouldn't be in for dinner, sir. I made sure she'd told you herself, sir."
The two men, by means of their eyes, transmitted to each other a unanimous judgment upon the whole female sex, and sat down to dine alone in the stricken house. The dinner was extremely frugal, this being the opening day of Mrs. Prohack's new era of intensive economy, but the obvious pleasure of Machin in serving only men brightened up somewhat its brief course. Charlie was taciturn and curt, though not impolite. Mr. Prohack, whose private high spirits not even the amazing and inexcusable absence of his daughter could impair, pretended to a decent woe, and chatted as he might have done to a fellow-clubman on a wet Sunday night at the Club.
At the end of the meal Charlie produced the enormous widow's cruse which he called his cigarette-case and offered his father a cigarette.
"Doing anything to-night?" asked Mr. Prohack, puffing.
"No," answered desperately Charlie, puffing.
"Ring the bell, will you?"
While Charlie went to the mantelpiece Mr. Prohack secreted an apple for his starving wife.
"Machin," said he to the incoming house-parlourmaid, "see if you can find some port."
Charlie raised his fatigued eyebrows.
"Yes, sir," said the house-parlourmaid, vivaciously, and whisked away her skirts, which seemed to remark:
"You're quite right to have port. I feel very sorry for you two attractive gentlemen taking a poor dinner all alone."
Charlie drank his port in silence and Mr. Prohack watched him.
II
