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.

"Arthur," said she, "I never told you that you'd forgotten to wind up
that clock on Sunday night. It stopped this evening while you were out,
and I had to wind it and I only guessed what the time was."

CHAPTER XII

THE PRACTICE OF IDLENESS

I

At ten minutes to eleven the next morning Mr. Prohack rushed across the
pavement, and sprang head-first into the original Eagle (now duly
repaired) with the velocity and agility of a man long accustomed to the
fact that seconds are more precious than six-pences and minutes than
banknotes. And Carthew slammed the door on him like a conjuror
performing the final act of a trick before an audience of three thousand
people.

Mr. Pr