her housekeeping allowance.  Never again should there be a question about a new frock for his daughter.  He was conscious, before anything else, of a triumphant protective and spoiling tenderness for his women.  He would be absurd with his women.  He would ruin their characters with kindness and with invitations to be capricious and exacting and expensive and futile.  They nobly deserved it.  He wanted to shout and to sing and to tell everybody that he would not in future stand any d——­d nonsense from anybody.  He would have his way.

“Why!” thought he, pulling himself up.  “I’ve developed all the peculiarities of a millionaire in about a minute and a half.”

And again, he cried to himself, in the vast and imperfectly explored jungle that every man calls his heart: 

“Ah!  I could not have borne to give up either of my clubs!  No!  I was deceiving myself.  I could not have done it!  I could not have done it!  Anything rather than that.  I see it now....  By the way, I wonder what all the fellows will say when they know!  And how shall I break it to them?  Not to-day!  Not to-day!  To-morrow!”

At the moment when Mr. Prohack ought to have been resuming his ill-remunerated financial toil for the nation at the Treasury, Bishop suggested in his offhand murmuring style that they might pay a visit to the City solicitor who was acting in England for him and the Angmering estate.  Mr. Prohack opposingly suggested that national duty called him elsewhere.

“Does that matter—­now?” said Bishop, and his accents were charged with meaning.

Mr. Prohack saw that it did not matter, and that in future any nation that did not like his office-hours would have to lump them.  He feared greatly lest he might encounter some crony-member on his way out of the club with Bishop.  If he did, what should he say, how should he carry off the situation? (For he was feeling mysteriously guilty, just as he had felt guilty an hour earlier.  Not guilty as the inheritor of profiteering in particular, but guilty simply as an inheritor.  It might have been different if he had come into the money in reasonable instalments, say of five thousand pounds every six months.  But a hundred thousand unearned increment at one coup...!) Fortunately the cronies were still in the smoking-room.  He swept Bishop from the club, stealthily, swiftly.  Bishop had a big motor-car waiting at the door.

III

He offered no remark as to the car, and Mr. Prohack offered no remark.  But Mr. Prohack was very interested in the car—­he who had never been interested in cars.  And he was interested in the clothes and in the deportment of the chauffeur.  He was indeed interested in all sorts of new things.  The window of a firm of house-agents who specialised in country houses, the jewellers’ shops, the big hotels, the advertisements of theatres and concerts, the establishments of trunk-makers and of historic second-hand booksellers and of equally historic wine-merchants.  He saw them all with a fresh eye.  London suddenly opened to him its possibilities as a bud opens its petals.