Life was enlarged to a bewildering, a maddening maze of neckties.  Mr. Prohack considered in his heart that one of the needs of the day was an encyclopaedia of neckties.  As he bought neckties he felt as foolish as a woman buying cigars.  Any idiot could buy a suit, but neckties baffled the intelligence of the Terror of the departments, though he had worn something in the nature of a necktie for forty years.  The neckties which he bought inspired him with fear—­the fear lest he might lack the courage to wear them.  In a nightmare he saw himself putting them on in his bedroom and proceeding downstairs to breakfast, and then, panic-stricken, rushing back to the bedroom to change into one of his old neckties.

And when he had bought neckties he apprehended that neckties without shirts were like butter without bread, and he bought shirts.  And then he surmised that shirts without collars would be indecent.  And when he had bought collars a still small voice told him that the logical foundation of all things was socks, and that really he had been trying to build a house from the fourth story downwards.  Fortunately he had less hesitation about the socks, for he could comfort himself with the thought that socks did not jump to the eye as neckties did, and that by constant care their violence might even be forever concealed from the gaze of his household.  He sighed with relief at the end of the sock episode.  But he had forgotten braces, as to which he surrendered unconditionally to the frock-coated judge.  He brooked the most astounding braces, for none but Eve would see them, and he could intimidate Eve.

“Shall we make you a quarter of a dozen pairs to measure, sir?”

This extraordinary question miraculously restored all Mr. Prohack’s vanished aplomb.  That at the end of the greatest war in the history of the earth, amid decapitated empires and cities of starvation, braces should be made to measure,—­this was too much for Mr. Prohack, who had not dreamed that braces ever had been made to measure.  It shocked him back into sense.

“No!” he said coldly, and soon afterwards left the shop.

Miss Winstock, in the car, sat for the statue of wistful melancholy.

“Heavens!” breathed Mr. Prohack to himself.  “The little thing is taking me seriously.  With all her experience of the queer world, and all her initiative and courage, she is taking me seriously!” He was touched; his irony became sympathetic, and he thought:  “How young the young are!”

Her smile as he rejoined her had pathos in it.  The totality of her was delicious.