“That remains to be seen, Miss Worldly Wisemiss,” he retorted with unconvincing lightness.  He was disturbed, and he was impressed, by her indifference to the fortune.  It appeared not to concern or to interest her.  She spoke not merely as one who objected to unearned wealth but as one to whom the annals of the Prohack family were henceforth a matter of minor importance.  It was very strange, and Mr. Prohack had to fight against a feeling of intimidation.  The girl whom he had cherished for over twenty years and whom he thought he knew to the core, was absolutely astounding him by the revelation of her individuality.  He didn’t know her.  He was not her father.  He was helpless before her.

“How are things here?” he demanded, amiably inquisitive, as an acquaintance.

“Excellent,” said she.  “Jolly hard work, though.”

“Yes, I should imagine so.  Teaching men dancing!  By Jove!”

“There’s not so much difficulty about teaching men.  The difficulty’s with the women.  Father, they’re awful.  You can’t imagine their stupidity.”

Lizzie glanced into the room.  She simply glanced, and Sissie returned the glance.

“You’ll have to excuse me a bit, father,” said Sissie.  “I’ll come back as quick as I can.  Don’t go.”  She departed hurriedly.

“I’d better get out of this anyhow,” thought Mr. Prohack, surveying the ladies’ cloakroom.  “If one of ’em came in I should have to explain my unexplainable presence in this sacred grot.”

* * * * *

III

Having received no suggestion from his daughter as to how he should dispose of himself while awaiting her leisure, Mr. Prohack made his way back to the guardian’s cubicle.  And there he discovered a chubby and intentionally-young man in the act of gazing through the small window into the studio exactly as he himself had been gazing a few minutes earlier.

“Hel_lo_, Prohack!” exclaimed the chubby and intentionally-young man, with the utmost geniality and calmness.

“How d’ye do?” responded Mr. Prohack with just as much calmness and perhaps ten per cent less geniality.  Mr. Prohack was a peculiar fellow, and that on this occasion he gave rather less geniality than he received was due to the fact that he had never before spoken to the cupid in his life and that he was wondering whether membership of the same club entirely justified so informal a mode of address—­without an introduction and outside the club premises.  For, like all modest men, Mr. Prohack had some sort of a notion of his own dignity, a sort of a notion that occasionally took him quite by surprise.  Mr. Prohack did not even know the surname of his aggressor.  He only knew that he never overheard other men call him anything but “Ozzie.”  Had not Mr. Prohack been buried away all his life in the catacombs of the Treasury and thus cut off from the great world-movement,