After tea he took a bath because he could think of nothing else to do.  The bath, as baths will, inspired him with an idea.  He set out on foot to Manchester Square, and having reached the Square cautiously followed the side opposite to the noble mansion.  The noble mansion blazed with lights through the wintry trees.  It resembled the set-piece of a pyrotechnic display.  Mr. Prohack shivered in the dank evening.  Then he observed that blinds and curtains were being drawn in the noble mansion, shutting out from its superb nobility the miserable, crude, poverty-stricken world.  With the exception of the glow in the fan light over the majestic portals, the noble mansion was now as dark as Mr. Prohack’s other house.

He shut his lips, steeled himself, and walked round the Square to the noble mansion and audaciously rang the bell.  He had to wait.  He shook guiltily, as though he, and no member of his family, had sinned.  A little more, and his tongue would have cleaved to the gold of his upper denture.  The double portals swung backwards.  Mr. Prohack beheld the portly form of an intensely traditional butler, and behind the butler a vista of outer and inner halls and glimpses of the soaring staircase.  He heard, somewhere in the distance of the interior, the ringing laugh of his daughter Sissie.

The butler looked carelessly down upon him, and, as Mr. Prohack uttered no word, challenged him.

“Yes, sir?”

“Is Mrs. Prohack at home?”

“No, sir.” (Positively.)

“Is Miss Prohack at home?”

“No, sir.” (More positively.)

“Oh!”

“Will you leave your name, sir?”

“No.”

Abruptly Mr. Prohack turned away.  He had had black moments in his life.  This was the blackest.

Of course he might have walked right in, and said to the butler:  “Here’s a month’s wages.  Hook it.”  But he was a peculiar fellow, verging sometimes on silliness.  He merely turned away.  The vertiginous rapidity of his wife’s developments, manoeuvres and transformations had dazed him into a sort of numbed idiocy.  In two days, in a day, with no warning to him of her extraordinary precipitancy, she had ‘flitted’!

At Claridge’s, through giving Monsieur Charles, the maitre d’ hotel, carte blanche in the ordering of his dinner and then only half-eating his dinner, Mr. Prohack failed somewhat to maintain his prestige, though he regained ground towards the end by means of champagne and liqueurs.  The black-and-gold restaurant was full of expensive persons who were apparently in ignorance of the fact that the foundations of the social fabric had been riven.  They were all gay; the music was gay; everything was gay except Mr. Prohack—­the sole living being in the place who conformed in face and heart to the historical conception of the British Sunday.