These words, even if amounting to a just estimate of the situation, were ruthless and terrible.  They might have accomplished some genuine and lasting good if Mr. Prohack had spoken them in a tone corresponding to their import.  But he did not.  His damnable instinct for pleasing people once more got the better of him, and he spoke them in a benevolent and paternal tone, his voice vibrating with compassion and with appreciation of her damnable instinct for dubious and picturesque adventure.  The tone destroyed the significance of the words.

Moreover, not content with the falsifying tone, he rose up from his chair as he spoke, approached the charming and naughty girl, and patted her on the shoulder.  The rebuke, indeed, ended by being more agreeable to the sinner than praise might have been from a man less corroded with duplicity than Mr. Prohack.

Mimi surprised him a second time.

“You’re perfectly right,” she said.  “You always are.”  And she seized his limp hand in hers and kissed it,—­and ran away, leaving him looking at the kissed hand.

Well, he was flattered, and he was pleased; or at any rate something in him, some fragmentary part of him, was flattered and pleased.  Mimi’s gesture was a triumph for a man nearing fifty; but it was an alarming triumph....  Odd that in that moment he should think of Lady Massulam!  His fatal charm was as a razor.  Had he been playing with it as a baby might play with a razor?...  Popinjay?  Coxcomb?  Perhaps, Nevertheless, the wench had artistically kissed his hand, and his hand felt self-complacent, even if he didn’t.

Brool, towards whom Mr. Prohack felt no impulse of good-will, came largely in with a salver on which were the morning letters and the morning papers, including the paper perused by Machin with her early bedside tea and doubtless carefully folded again in its original creases to look virginal.

The reappearance of that sheet had somewhat the quality of a sinister miracle to Mr. Prohack.  He asked no questions about it so that he might be told no lies, but he searched it in vain for a trace of the suffering Machin.  It was, however, full of typographical traces of himself and his family.  The description of the reception was disturbingly journalistic, which adjective, for Mr. Prohack, unfortunately connoted the adjective vulgar.  All the wrong people were in the list of guests, and all the decent quiet people were omitted.  A value of twenty thousand pounds was put upon the necklace, contradicting another part of the report which stated the pearls to be “priceless.”  Mr. Prohack’s fortune was referred to; also his Treasury past; the implication being that the fortune had caused him to leave the Treasury.  His daughter’s engagement to Mr. Morfey was glanced at; and it was remarked that Mr. Morfey—­“known to all his friends and half London as ‘Ozzie’ Morfey”—­was intimately connected with the greatest stage Napoleon in history, Mr. Asprey Chown.  Finally a few words were given to Charlie; who was dubbed “a budding financier already responsible for one highly successful coup and likely to be responsible for several others before much more water has run under the bridges of the Thames.”