“Your mistress returned?”

“Yes, sir.”  Machin seemed to hesitate, her mind disturbed.

“Where is she?”

“I was just coming to tell you, sir.  She told me to say that she was lying down.”

“Oh!”

Disdaining further to interrogate the servant, he hurried upstairs.  He had to excuse himself to Eve, and he had also to justify to her the placing of eighty thousand pounds in a scheme which she could not possibly understand and for which there was nothing whatever to show.  She would approve, of course; she would say that she had complete confidence in his sagacity, but all the inflections of her voice, all her gestures and glances, would indicate to him that in her opinion he was a singularly ingenuous creature, the natural prey of sharpers, and that the chances of their not being ruined by his incurable simplicity were exceedingly small.  His immense reputation in the Treasury, his sinister fame as the Terror of the departments, would not weigh an atom in her general judgment of the concrete case affecting the fortunes of the Prohack family.  Then she would be brave; she would be bravely resigned to the worst.  She would kiss his innocence.  She would quite unconvincingly assure him, in her own vocabulary, that he was a devil of a fellow and the smartest man in the world.

Further, she would draw in the horns of her secret schemes of expenditure.  She would say that she had intended to do so-and-so and to buy so-and-so, but that perhaps it would be better, in view of the uncertainties of destiny, neither to do nor to buy so-and-so.  In short, she would succeed in conveying to him the idea that to live with him was like being in an open boat with him adrift in the middle of the stormy Atlantic.  She loved to live with him, the compensations were exquisite, and moreover what would be his fate if he were alone?  Still, it was like being in an open boat with him adrift in the middle of the stormy Atlantic.  And she would cling closer to him and point to the red sun setting among black clouds of tempest.  And this would continue until he could throw say about a hundred and sixty thousand pounds into her lap, whereupon she would calmly assert that in her opinion he and she had really been safe all the while on the glassy lake of the Serpentine in a steamer.

“I ought to have thought of all that before,” he said to himself.  “And if I had I should have bought houses, something for her to look at and touch.  And even then she would have suggested that if I hadn’t been a coward I could have done better than houses.  She would have found in The Times every day instances of companies paying twenty and thirty per cent ...  No!  It would have been impossible for me to invest the money without losing her esteem for me as a man of business.  I wish to heaven I hadn’t got any money.  So here goes!”

And he burst with assumed confidence into the bedroom.  And simultaneously, to intensify his unease, the notion that profiteering was profiteering, whether in war or in peace, and the notion that F.F. was a man of lofty altruistic ideals, surged through his distracted mind.