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. Eve 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.
