“But it’s horribly serious.”

“Horribly.”

Mrs. Prohack slipped off the arm of the chair.  Her body seemed to vibrate within the Chinese gown, and she effervesced into an ascending and descending series of sustained laughs.

“That’s hysteria,” said Mr. Prohack.  “And if you don’t stop I shall be reluctantly compelled to throw the coffee over you.  Water would be better, but there is none.”

Then Eve ceased suddenly.

“To think,” she remarked with calmness, “that you’re called the Terror of the Departments, and you’re a great authority on finance, and you’ve been in the Government service for nearly twenty-five years, and always done your duty—­”

“Child,” Mr. Prohack interrupted her.  “Don’t tell me what I know.  And try not to be surprised at any earthly phenomena.  There are people who are always being astonished by the most familiar things.  They live on earth as if they’d just dropped from Mars on to a poor foreign planet.  It’s not a sign of commonsense.  You’ve lived on earth now for—­shall we say?—­some twenty-nine or thirty years, and if you don’t know the place you ought to.  I assure you that there is nothing at all unusual in our case.  We are perfectly innocent; we are even praiseworthy; and yet—­we shall have to suffer.  It’s quite a common case.  You’ve read of thousands and millions of such cases; you’ve heard of lots personally; and you’ve actually met a few.  Well, now, you yourself are a case.  That’s all.”

Mrs. Prohack said impatiently: 

“I consider the Government’s treated you shamefully.  Why, we’re much worse off than we were before the war.”

“The Government has treated me shamefully.  But then it’s treated hundreds of thousands of men shamefully.  All Governments do.”

“But we have a position to keep up!”

“True.  That’s where the honest poor have the advantage of us.  You see, we’re the dishonest poor.  We’ve been to the same schools and universities and we talk the same idiom and we have the same manners and like the same things as people who spend more in a month or a week than we spend in a year.  And we pretend, and they pretend, that they and we are exactly the same.  We aren’t, you know.  We’re one vast pretence.  Has it occurred to you, lady, that we’ve never possessed a motor-car and most certainly never shall possess one?  Yet look at the hundreds of thousands of cars in London alone!  And not a single one of them ours!  This detail may have escaped you.”

“I wish you wouldn’t be silly, Arthur.”

“I am not silly.  On the contrary, my real opinion is that I’m the wisest man you ever met in your life—­not excepting your son It remains that we’re a pretence.  A pretence resembles a bladder.  It may burst.  We probably shall burst.  Still, we have one great advantage over the honest poor, who sometimes have no income at all; and also over the rich, who never can tell how big their incomes are going to be. We know exactly where we are.  We know to the nearest sixpence.”