“Nobody ever did know that,” said Mr. Prohack easily, though he also was far from easy in his mind about the bridal symptoms.

VII

“Can Charlie speak to you for a minute?” The voice was Eve’s, diplomatic, apologetic.  Her smiling and yet serious face, peeping in through the bedroom door, seemed to say:  “I know we’re asking a great favour and that your life is hard.”

“All right,” said Mr. Prohack, as a gracious, long-suffering autocrat, without moving his eyes from the book he was reading.

He had gone to bed.  He had of late got into the habit of going to bed.  He would go to bed on the slightest excuse, and would justify himself by pointing out that Voltaire used to do the same.  He was capable of going to bed several times a day.  It was early evening.  The bed, though hired for a year only, was of extreme comfortableness.  The light over his head was in exactly the right place.  The room was warm.  The book, by a Roman Emperor popularly known as Marcus Aurelius, counted among the world’s masterpieces.  It was designed to suit the case of Mr. Prohack, for its message was to the effect that happiness and content are commodities which can be manufactured only in the mind, from the mind’s own ingredients, and that if the mind works properly no external phenomena can prevent the manufacture of the said commodities.  In short, everything was calculated to secure Mr. Prohack’s felicity in that moment.  But he would not have it.  He said to himself:  “This book is all very fine, immortal, supreme, and so on.  Only it simply isn’t true.  Human nature won’t work the way this book says it ought to work; and what’s more the author was obviously afraid of life, he was never really alive and he was never happy.  Finally the tendency of the book is mischievously anti-social.”  Thus did Mr. Prohack seek to destroy a reputation of many centuries and to deny opinions which he himself had been expressing for many years.

“I don’t want to live wholly in myself,” said Mr. Prohack.  “I want to live a great deal in other people.  If you do that you may be infernally miserable but at least you aren’t dull.  Marcus Aurelius was more like a potato than I should care to be.”

And he shoved the book under the pillow, turned half-over from his side to the flat of his back, and prepared with gusto for the evil which Charlie would surely bring.  And indeed one glance at Charlie’s preoccupied features confirmed his prevision.

“You’re in trouble, my lad,” said he.

“I am,” said Charlie.

“And the hour has struck when you want your effete father’s help,” Mr. Prohack smiled benevolently.

“Put it like that,” said Charlie amiably, taking a chair and smoothing out his trousers.

“I suppose you’ve seen the references to yourself in the papers?”

“Yes.”

“Rather sarcastic, aren’t they?”