ve what
he says."

"I may have been a little mistaken," Miss Winstock admitted with light
sadness. "I won't say I wasn't. You know how you are in an accident."

"I've never been in an accident in my life," Mr. Prohack objected.

"If you had, you'd sympathise with me."

At this moment the Eagle drew up at the desired destination in Conduit
Street. Mr. Prohack looked at his watch.

"I'm sorry to seem inhospitable," he said, "but my appointment is
extremely important. I cannot wait."

"Can _I_ wait?" Miss Winstock suggested. "I'm quite used to waiting for
Mr. Carrel Quire. If I might wait in the car till you came out.... You
see I want to come to an understanding."

"I don't know how long I shall be."

"That doesn't matter, truly. I haven't got anything else in the world to
do, as Mr. Carrel Quire is away."

Mr. Prohack left Miss Winstock in the car.

The establishment into which Mr. Prohack disappeared was that of his
son's tailors. He slipped into it with awe, not wholly because the
tailors were his son's tailors, but in part because they were tailors to
various august or once-august personages throughout Europe. Till that
day Mr. Prohack had bought his clothes from an insignificant though
traditional tailor in Maddox Street, to whom he had been taken as a boy
by his own father. And he had ordered his clothes hastily, negligently,
anyhow, in intervals snatched from meal-hours or on the way from one
more important appointment to another more important appointment. Indeed
he had thought no more of ordering a suit than of ordering a whiskey and
soda. Nay, he had on one occasion fallen incredibly low, and his memory
held the horrid secret for ever,--on one occasion he had actually bought
a ready-made suit. It had fitted him, for he was slimmish and of a good
stock size, but he had told nobody, not even his wife, of this shocking
defection from the code of true British gentlemanliness,--and he had
never repeated the crime; the secret would die with him. And now he was
devoting the top of the morning to the commandment of a suit. The affair
was his chief business, and he had come to it in a great car whose six
cylinders were working harmoniously for nothing else, and with the aid
of an intelligent and experienced and expert human being whose sole
object in life that morning was to preside over Mr. Prohack's locomotion
to and from the tailors'!

Mr. Prohack perceived that he was only beginning to comprehend the
wo