“Arthur, how clever you are!  Nobody but you would have thought of that.  But isn’t it a bit dangerous, too?  You see—­don’t you?”

Mr. Prohack shook his head.

“I gather you’ve been reading the love-story in The Daily Picture,” said he.  “In The Daily Picture the typist always marries the millionaire.  But outside The Daily Picture I doubt whether these romantic things really happen.  There are sixty-five thousand girls typists in the City alone, besides about a million in Whitehall.  The opportunities for espousing millionaires and ministers of state are countless.  But no girl-typist has been married at St. George’s, Hanover Square, since typewriters were invented.”

CHAPTER XVII

ROMANCE

I

The very next day Mr. Prohack had a plutocratic mood of overbearingness, which led to a sudden change in his location—­the same being transferred to Frinton-on-Sea.  The mood was brought about by a visit to the City, at the summons of Paul Spinner; and the visit included conversations not only with Paul, but with Smathe and Smathe, the solicitors, and with a firm of stockbrokers.  Paul handed over to his crony saleable securities, chiefly in the shape of scrip of the greatest oil-combine and its subsidiaries, for a vast amount, and advised Mr. Prohack to hold on to them, as, owing to the present depression due to the imminence of a great strike, they were likely to be “marked higher” before Mr. Prohack was much older.  Mr. Prohack declined the advice, and he also declined the advice of solicitors and stockbrokers, who were both full of wisdom and of devices for increasing capital values.  What these firms knew about the future, and about the consequences of causes and about “the psychology of the markets” astounded the simple Terror of the departments; and it was probably unanswerable.  But, being full of riches, Mr. Prohack did not trouble to answer it; he merely swept it away with a tyrannical and impatient gesture, which gesture somehow mysteriously established him at once as a great authority on the art of investment.

“Now listen to me,” said he imperiously, and the manipulators of shares listened, recalling to themselves that Mr. Prohack had been a Treasury official for over twenty years and must therefore be worth hearing—­although the manipulators commonly spent many hours a week in asserting, in the press and elsewhere, that Treasury officials comprehended naught of finance.  “Now listen to me.  I don’t care a hang about my capital.  It may decrease or increase, and I shan’t care.  All I care for is my interest.  I want to be absolutely sure that my interest will tumble automatically into my bank on fixed dates.  No other consideration touches me.  I’m not a gambler.  I’m not a usurer.  Industrial development leaves me cold, and if I should ever feel any desire to knit