“Why not?”

“Well, I thought you might be upset and wonder what on earth was going on.”

“What was going on?” Mr. Prohack repeated, gazing at her childlike maternal serious face, whose wistfulness affected him in an extraordinary way.  “What on earth are you insinuating?”

No!  It was inconceivable that this pulsating girl perched on the sofa should be the mother of the mature and independent Charles.

“Charlie’s staying at the Grand Babylon Hotel,” said Eve, as though she were saying that Charlie had forged a cheque or blown up the Cenotaph.

Even the imperturbable man of the world in front of her momentarily blenched at the news.

“More fool him!” observed Mr. Prohack.

“Yes, and he’s got a bedroom and a private sitting-room and a bathroom, and a room for a secretary—­”

“Hence a secretary,” Mr. Prohack put in.

“Yes, and a secretary.  And he dictates things to the secretary all the time, and the telephone’s always going,—­yes, even at this time of night.  He must be spending enormous sums.  So of course I hurried back to tell you.”

“You did quite right, my pet,” said Mr. Prohack.  “A good wife should share these tit-bits with her husband at the earliest possible moment.”

He was really very like what in his more conventional moments he would have said a woman was like.  If Eve had taken the affair lightly he would without doubt have remonstrated, explaining that such an affair ought by no means to be taken lightly.  But seeing that she took it very seriously, his instinct was to laugh at it, though in fact he was himself extremely perturbed by this piece of news, which confirmed, a hundredfold and in the most startling manner, certain sinister impressions of his own concerning Charlie’s deeds in Glasgow.  And he assumed the gay attitude, not from a desire to reassure his wife, but from mere contrariness.  Positively the strangest husband that ever lived, and entirely different from normal husbands!

Then he saw tears hanging in Eve’s eyes,—­tears not of resentment against his lack of sympathy, tears of bewilderment and perplexity.  She simply did not understand his attitude.  And he sat down close by her on the sofa and solaced her with three kisses.  She was singularly attractive in her alternations of sagacity and helplessness.

“But it’s awful,” she whimpered.  “The boy must be throwing money away at the rate of twenty or twenty-five pounds a day.”

“Very probably,” Mr. Prohack agreed.

“Where’s he getting it from?” she demanded.  “He must be getting it from somewhere.”

“I expect he’s made it.  He’s rather clever, you know.”

“But he can’t have made money like that.”

“People do, sometimes.”

“Not honestly,—­you know what I mean, Arthur!” This was an earthquaking phrase to come from a mother’s lips.

“And yet,” said Mr. Prohack, “everything Charlie did used to be right for you.”