Mr. Prohack said ingratiatingly: 

“And whose fault is it if I’m funny?  Answer, you witch.”

“I don’t know,” Eve murmured tremblingly and not quite articulately.

“It’s your fault.  Do you know that you gave me the fright of my life to-night, going out without saying where you were going to?  Do you know that you put me into such a state that I’ve been telephoning to police-stations to find out whether there’d been any street accidents happening to a woman of your description?  I was so upset that I daren’t even go upstairs and call Sissie.”

“You said you’d only been back five minutes when I came,” Eve observed in a somewhat firmer voice.

“I did,” said Mr. Prohack.  “But that was neither more nor less than a downright lie.  You see I was in such a state that I had to pretend, to both you and myself, that things aren’t what they are....  And then, without the slightest warning, you suddenly arrive without a scratch on you.  You aren’t hurt.  You aren’t even dead.  It’s a scandalous shame that a woman should be able, by merely arriving in a taxi, to put a sensible man into such a paroxysm of satisfaction as you put me into a while ago.  It’s not right.  It’s not fair.  Then you try to depress me with bluggy stories of your son’s horrible opulence, and when you discover you can’t depress me you burst into tears and accuse me of being funny.  What did you expect me to be?  Did you expect me to groan because you aren’t lying dead in a mortuary?  If I’m funny, you are at liberty to attribute it to hysteria, the hysteria of joy.  But I wish you to understand that these extreme revulsions of feeling which you impose on me are very dangerous for a plain man who is undergoing a rest-cure.”

Eve raised her arms about Mr. Prohack’s neck, lifted herself up by them, and silently kissed him.  Then she sank back to her former position.

“I’ve been a great trial to you lately, haven’t I?” she breathed.

“Not more so than usual,” he answered.  “You know you always abuse your power.”

“But I have been queer?”

“Well,” judicially, “perhaps you have.  Perhaps five per cent or so above your average of queerness.”

“Didn’t the doctor say what I’d got was traumatic neurasthenia?”

“That or something equally absurd.”

“Well, I haven’t got it any more.  I’m cured.  You’ll see.”

Just then the dining-room clock entered upon its lengthy business of chiming the hour of midnight.  And as it faintly chimed Mr. Prohack, supporting his wife, had a surpassing conviction of the beauty of existence and in particular of his own good fortune—­though the matter of his inheritance never once entered his mind.  He gazed down at Eve’s ingenuous features, and saw in them the fastidious fineness which had caused her to recoil so sensitively from her son’s display at the Grand Babylon.  Yes, women had a spiritual beauty to which men could not pretend.