Mrs. Prohack was now genuinely reproachful, and the first conjugal joy-ride might have suffered from a certain constraint had it taken place.  It did not, however, take place.  Just as Carthew was holding out the rug (which Eve’s prodigious thoroughness had remembered to buy) preparatory to placing it on the knees of his employers, a truly gigantic automobile drove up to the door, its long bonnet stopping within six inches of the Eagle’s tail-lantern.  The Eagle looked like nothing at all beside it.  Mr. Prohack knew that leviathan.  He had many times seen it in front of the portals of his principal club.  It was the car of his great club crony, Sir Paul Spinner, the “city magnate.”

Sir Paul, embossed with carbuncles, got out, and was presently being presented to Eve,—­for the friendship between Mr. Prohack and Sir Paul had been a purely club friendship.  Like many such friendships it had had no existence beyond the club, and neither of the cronies knew anything of real interest about the domestic circumstances of the other.  Sir Paul was very apologetic to Eve, but he imperiously desired an interview with Mr. Prohack at once.  Eve most agreeably and charmingly said that she would take a little preliminary airing in the car by herself, and return for her husband.  Mr. Prohack would have preferred her to wait for him; but, though Eve was sagacious enough at all normal times, when she got an idea into her head that idea ruthlessly took precedence of everything else in the external world.  Moreover the car was her private creation, and she was incapable of resisting its attractions one minute longer.

II

“I hear you’ve come into half a million, Arthur,” said Paul Spinner, after he had shown himself very friendly and optimistic about Mr. Prohack’s health and given the usual bulletin about his own carbuncles and the shortcomings of the club.

“But you don’t believe it, Paul.”

“I don’t,” agreed Paul.  “Things get about pretty fast in the City and we can size them up fairly well; and I should say, putting two and two together, that a hundred and fifty thousand would be nearer the mark.”

“It certainly is,” said Mr. Prohack.

If Paul Spinner had suggested fifty thousand, Mr. Prohack would have corrected him, but being full of base instincts he had no impulse to correct the larger estimate, which was just as inaccurate.

“Well, well!  It’s a most romantic story and I congratulate you on it.  No such luck ever happened to me.”  Sir Paul made this remark in a tone to indicate that he had had practically no luck himself.  And he really believed that he had had no luck, though the fact was that he touched no enterprise that failed.  Every year he signed a huger cheque for super-tax, and every year he signed it with a gesture signifying that he was signing his own ruin.