“She’s all right, anyway,” he reflected.  And yet she could be ecstatic in the arms of that perfect ass!  And in the taxi:  “Fancy me seeing home this dancing-mistress!” Eliza lived at Brook Green.  She was very elegant, and quite unexceptionable until she opened her mouth.  She related to him how her mother, who had once been a premier sujet in the Covent Garden ballet, was helpless from sciatica.  But she related this picturesque and pride-causing detail in a manner very insipid, naive, and even vulgar, (After all there was a difference between First Division and Second Division in the Civil Service!) She was boring him terribly before they reached Brook Green.  She took leave with a deportment correct but acquired at an age too late.  Still, he had liked to see her home in the taxi.  She was young, and she was an object pleasing to the eye.  He realised that he was not accustomed to the propinquity of young women.  What would his cronies at the Club say to the escapade?...  Odd, excessively odd, that the girl should be Sissie’s partner, in a business enterprise of so odd a character!...  The next thing was to meet Eve after the escapade.  Should he keep to the defensive, or should he lead off with an attack apropos of the Eagle car?

CHAPTER IX

COLLISION

I

After an eventful night Mr. Prohack woke up late to breakfast in bed.  Theoretically he hated breakfast in bed, but in practice he had recently found that the inconveniences to himself were negligible compared to the intense and triumphant pleasure which his wife took in seeing him breakfast in bed, in being fully dressed while he was in pyjamas and dressing-gown, and in presiding over the meal and over him.  Recently Marian had formed the habit of rising earlier and appearing to be very busy upon various minute jobs at an hour when, a few weeks previously, she would scarcely have decided that day had given place to night.  Mr. Prohack, without being able precisely to define it, thought that he understood the psychology of the change in this unique woman.  Under ordinary circumstances he would have been worried by his sense of fatigue, but now, as he had nothing whatever to do, he did not much care whether he was tired or not.  Neither the office nor the State would suffer through his lack of tone.

The events of the night had happened exclusively inside Mr. Prohack’s head.  Nor were they traceable to the demeanour of his wife when he returned home from the studio.  She had mysteriously behaved to him as though nocturnal excursions to disgraceful daughters in remote quarters of London were part of his daily routine.  She had been very sweet and very incurious.  Whereon Mr. Prohack had said to himself:  “She has some diplomatic reason for being an angel.”  And even if she had not been an angel, even if she had been the very reverse