“You are doubtless right, lady,” Mr. Prohack agreed.  “You always could judge better than I could myself when I had had enough, and what would be the ultimate consequences of my eating.  And as for your lessons in manners, what an ill-bred lout I was before I met you, and what an impossible person I should have been had you not taken me in hand night and day for all these years!  It isn’t that I’m worse than the average husband; it is merely that wives are the sole repositories of the civilising influence.  Were it not for them we should still be tearing steaks to pieces with our fingers.  I daresay I have eaten enough—­anyhow I’ve had far more than anybody else—­and even if I hadn’t, it would not be at all nice of me not to pretend that I hadn’t.  And after all, if the worst comes to the worst, I can always have a slice of cold beef and a glass of beer when I get home, can’t I?”

Sissie, though blushing ever so little, maintained an excellent front.  She certainly looked dainty and charming,—­more specifically so than she had ever looked; indeed, utterly the young bride.  She was in morning dress, to comply with her own edict against formality, and also to mark her new, enthusiastic disapproval of the modern craze for luxurious display; but it was a delightful, if inexpensive, dress.  She had taken considerable trouble over the family dinner, devising, concocting, cooking, and presiding over it from beginning to end, and being consistently bright, wise, able, and resourceful throughout—­an apostle of chafing-dish cookery determined to prove that chafing-dish cookery combined efficiency, toothsomeness and economy to a degree never before known.  And she had neatly pointed out more than once that waste was impossible under her system and that, servants being dispensed with, the great originating cause of waste had indeed been radically removed.  She had not informed her guests of the precise cost in money of the unprecedentedly cheap and nourishing meal, but she had come near to doing so; and she would surely have indicated that there had been neither too much nor too little, but just amply sufficient, had not her absurd and contrarious father displayed a not uncharacteristic lack of tact at the closing stage of the ingenious collation.

Moreover, she seemed, despite her generous build, to have somehow fitted herself to the small size of the flat.  She did not dwarf it, as clumsier women are apt to dwarf their tiny homes in the centre of London.  On the contrary she gave to it the illusion of spaciousness; and beyond question she had in a surprisingly short time transformed it from a bachelor’s flat into a conjugal nest, cushiony, flowery, knicknacky, and perilously seductive to the eye without being too reassuring to the limbs.

Mr. Prohack was accepting a cigarette, having been told that Ozzie never smoked cigars, when there was a great ring which filled the entire flat as the last trump may be expected to fill the entire earth, and Mr. Prohack dropped the cigarette, muttering: