e had made
quite a favourable sensation by his handling of Sissie's tendency to a
hard austerity.

Nevertheless, when Charles shut the door of the chamber and they were
enclosed together, Mr. Prohack could feel his mighty heart beating in a
manner worthy of a schoolgirl entering an examination room. The chamber
had apparently been taken bodily out of a doll's house and furnished
with furniture manufactured for pigmies. It was very full, presenting
the aspect of a room in a warehouse. Everything in it was 'bijou,' in
the trade sense, and everything harmonised in a charming Japanese manner
with everything else, except an extra truckle-bed, showing crude iron
feet under a blazing counterpane borrowed from a Russian ballet, which
second bed had evidently just been added for the purposes of conjugal
existence. The dressing-table alone was unmistakably symptomatic of a
woman. Some of Ozzie's wondrous trousers hung from stretchers behind the
door, and the inference was that these had been displaced from the
wardrobe in favour of Sissie's frocks. It was all highly curious and
somewhat pathetic; and Mr. Prohack, contemplating, became anew a
philosopher as he realised that the tiny apartment was the true
expression of his daughter's individuality and volition. She had imposed
this crowded inconvenience upon her willing spouse,--and there was the
grandiose Charles, for whom the best was never good enough, sitting down
nonchalantly on the truckle-bed; and it appeared to Mr. Prohack only a
few weeks ago that the two children had been playing side by side in the
same nursery and giving never a sign that their desires and destinies
would be so curious. Mr. Prohack felt absurdly helpless. True, he was
the father, but he knew that he had nothing whatever to do, beyond
trifling gifts of money and innumerable fairly witty sermons--divided
about equally between the pair, with the evolution of those mysterious
and fundamentally uncontrollable beings, his son and his daughter. The
enigma of life pressed disturbingly upon him, as he took the other bed,
facing Charles, and he wondered whether Sissie in her feminine passion
for self-sacrifice insisted on sleeping in the truckle-contraption
herself, or whether she permitted Ozzie to be uncomfortable.

V

"I just came along," Charlie opened simply, "because Lady M. was so
positive that I ought to see you--she said that you very much wanted me
to come. It isn't as if I wanted to bother you,