. And if she
never liked me I can honestly say I never liked her. And I don't want to
run a dancing studio any more, either. Why should I, after all? We
_were_ the new poor. Now we're the new rich. Well, we may as well _be_
the new rich."

Mr. Prohack was now still more shocked. Nay, he was almost frightened.
And yet he wasn't either shocked or frightened, in the centre of his
soul. He was rather triumphant,--not about his daughter with the feet of
clay, but about himself.

"But I shan't give up teaching dancing entirely," said Sissie.

"No?" He wondered what would come next.

"No! I shall teach you."

"Indeed you won't!" He instinctively recoiled.

"Yes, I shall. I promised the doctor he could rely on me. You'll buy a
gramophone, and we'll have the carpet up in the drawing-room. Oh! You
startled deer, do you want to run back into the depths of the forest?...
Father, you are the funniest father that ever was." She marched to him
and put her hand on his shoulder and just twitched his beard. "I can
look after you quite as well as mother can. We're pals, aren't we?"

"Yes. Like the tiger and the lamb. You've got hold of my silky fleece
already."

IV

Mr. Prohack sat in the dining-room alone. The room was now heated by an
electric radiator which Eve had just bought for the sake of economy. But
her economy was the economy of the rich, for the amount of expensive
current consumed by that radiator was prodigious, while the saving it
effected in labour, cleanliness and atmospheric purity could certainly
not have been measured without a scientific instrument adapted to the
infinitely little. (Still, Machin admired and loved it.) Mr. Prohack
perceived that all four bars of it were brightly incandescent, whereas
three bars would have been ample to keep the room warm. He ought to get
up and turn a bar off.... He had a hundred preoccupations. His daughter
had classed him with the new rich. He resented the description, but
could he honestly reject it? All his recent troubles sprang from the new
riches. If he had not inherited from a profiteer he would assuredly have
been at his office in the Treasury, earning an honest living, at that
very moment. For only sick persons of plenteous independent means are
ever prescribed for as he had been prescribed for; the others either go
on working and making the best of such health as is left to them, or
they die. If he had not inherited from a profiteer he would not have had
a car