And not Eve and Sissie alone amazed him.  Oswald amazed him.  Oswald had changed.  His black silk stock had gone the way of his ribboned eye-glass; his hair was arranged differently; he closely resembled an average plain man,—­he, the unique Ozzie!  With all his faults, he had previously been both good-natured and negligent, but his expression was now one of sternness and of resolute endeavour.  Sissie had already metamorphosed him.  Even now he was obediently following her lead and her mood.  Mr. Prohack’s women had evidently determined to revenge themselves for being asked to meet Miss Fancy at lunch, and Ozzie had been set on to assist them.  Further, Mr. Prohack noticed that Sissie was eyeing her mother’s necklace with a reprehending stare.  The next instant he found himself the target of the same stare.  The girl was accusing him of folly, while questioning Ozzie’s definition of the difference between Georgian and neo-Georgian verse.  The girl had apparently become the censor of society at large.

Mysterious cross-currents ran over the table in all directions.  Mr. Prohack looked around the noisy restaurant packed with tables, and wondered whether cross-currents were running invisibly over all the tables, and what was the secret force of fashionable fleeting convention which enabled women with brains far inferior to his own to use it effectively for the fighting of sanguinary battles.

At last, when Miss Fancy had been beaten into silence and the other three were carrying on a brilliant high-browed conversation over the corpse of her up-to-dateness, Mr. Prohack’s nerves reached the point at which he could tolerate the tragic spectacle no more, and he burst out vulgarly, in a man-in-the-street vein, chopping off the brilliant conversation as with a chopper: 

“Now, Miss Fancy, tell us something about yourself.”

The common-sounding phrase seemed to be a magic formula endowed with the power to break an awful spell.  Miss Fancy gathered herself together, forgot that she had been defeated, and inaugurated a new battle.  She began to tell the table not something, but almost everything, about herself, and it soon became apparent that she was no ordinary woman.  She had never had a set-back; in innumerable conversational duels she had always given the neat and deadly retort, and she had never been worsted, save by base combinations deliberately engineered against her—­generally by women, whom as a sex she despised even more than men.  Her sincere belief that no biographical detail concerning Miss Fancy was too small to be uninteresting to the public amounted to a religious creed; and her memory for details was miraculous.  She recalled the exact total of the takings at any given performance in which she was prominent in any city of the United States, and she could also give long extracts from the favourable criticisms of countless important American newspapers,—­by a singular coincidence only unimportant newspapers had ever mingled blame with their praise of her achievements.  She regarded herself with detachment as a remarkable phenomenon, and therefore she could impersonally describe her career without any of the ordinary restraints—­just as a shopman might clothe or unclothe a model in his window.  Thus she could display her heart and its history quite unreservedly,—­did they not belong to the public?