CHAPTER

     I the new poor
    II from the dead
   III the law
    IV Eve’s headache
     V Charlie
    VI Sissie
   VII the sympathetic quack
  VIII Sissie’s business
    IX collision
     X the theory of idleness
    XI neurasthenia cured
   XII the practice of idleness
  XIII further idleness
   XIV end of an idle day
    XV the heavy father
   XVI transfer of Mimi
  XVII romance
 XVIII A homeless night
   XIX the reception
    XX the silent tower
   XXI Eve’s martyrdom
  XXII Mr. Prohack’s triumph
 XXIII the yacht

CHAPTER I

THE NEW POOR

I

Arthur Charles Prohack came downstairs at eight thirty, as usual, and found breakfast ready in the empty dining-room.  This pleased him, because there was nothing in life he hated more than to be hurried.  For him, hell was a place of which the inhabitants always had an eye on the clock and the clock was always further advanced than they had hoped.

The dining-room, simply furnished with reproductions of chaste Chippendale, and chilled to the uncomfortable low temperature that hardy Britons pretend to enjoy, formed part of an unassailably correct house of mid-Victorian style and antiquity; and the house formed part of an unassailably correct square just behind Hyde Park Gardens.  (Taxi-drivers, when told the name of the square, had to reflect for a fifth of a second before they could recall its exact situation.)

Mr. Prohack was a fairly tall man, with a big head, big features, and a beard.  His characteristic expression denoted benevolence based on an ironic realisation of the humanity of human nature.  He was forty-six years of age and looked it.  He had been for more than twenty years at the Treasury, in which organism he had now attained a certain importance.  He was a Companion of the Bath.  He exulted in the fact that the Order of the Bath took precedence of those bumptious Orders, Star of India, St. Michael and St. George, Indian Empire, Royal Victorian and British Empire; but he laughed at his wife for so exulting.  If the matter happened to be mentioned he would point out that in the table of precedence Companions of the Bath ranked immediately below Masters in Lunacy.

He was proud of the Treasury’s war record.  Other departments of State had swollen to amazing dimensions during the war.  The Treasury, while its work had been multiplied a hundredfold, had increased its personnel by only a negligible percentage.  It was the cheapest of all the departments, the most efficient, and the most powerful.  The War Office, the Admiralty, and perhaps one other department presided over by a personality whom the Prime Minister feared, did certainly defy and even ignore the Treasury.