when they're unhappy they make jokes."

"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."