Mr. Prohack felt schoolboyish.

“It’s you that she’s upset about, though.  Did you notice she motioned me to give you some of the brandy she was taking?  Very sweet of her, was it not?...  What are you going to do now?”

“I’m going to fetch my daughter.”

“Excellent.  But have something before you go.  You may not know it, but you have been using up nervous tissue, which has to be replaced.”

As he was driving down to Putney in a taxi, Mr. Prohack certainly did feel very tired.  But he was not so tired as not to insist on helping the engine of the taxi.  He pushed the taxi forward with all his might all the way to Putney.  He pushed it till his arms ached, though his hands were in his pockets.  The distance to Putney had incomprehensibly stretched to nine hundred and ninety-nine miles.

He found Sissie in the studio giving a private lesson to a middle-aged gentleman who ought, Mr. Prohack considered, to have been thinking of his latter end rather than of dancing.  He broke up the lesson very abruptly.

“Your mother has had a motor accident.  You must come at once.”

Sissie came.

“Then it must have been about here,” said she, as the taxi approached Putney Bridge on the return journey.

So it must.  He certainly had not thought of the locus of the accident.  He had merely pictured it, in his own mind, according to his own frightened fancy.  Yes, it must have been just about there.  And yet there was no sign of it in the roadway.  Carthew must have had the wounded Eagle removed.  Mr. Prohack sat stern and silent.  A wondrous woman, his wife!  Absurd, possibly, about such matters as investments; but an angel!  Her self-forgetfulness, her absorption in him,—­staggering!  The accident was but one more proof of it.  He was greatly alarmed about her, for the doctor had answered for nothing.  He seemed to have a thousand worries.  He had been worried all his life, but the worries that had formed themselves in a trail to the inheritance were worse worries than the old simple ones.  No longer did the thought of the inheritance brighten his mind.  He somehow desired to go back to former days.  Glancing askance at Sissie, he saw that she too was stern.  He resumed the hard pushing of the taxi.  It was not quite so hard as before, because he knew that Sissie also was pushing her full share.

CHAPTER X

THE THEORY OF IDLENESS

I

Within the next seven days Mr. Prohack had reason to lose confidence in himself as an expert in human nature.  “After all,” he reflected, “I must have been a very simple-minded man to have thought that I thoroughly understood another human being.  Every human being is infinite, and will beat your understanding in the end.”

The reference of course was to his wife.  Since the automobile accident she had become another person and a more complex person.  The climax, or what seemed to be the climax, came one cold morning when she and Mr. Prohack and Sissie and Dr. Veiga were sitting together in the little boudoir beyond the bedroom.  They were packed in there because Eve (otherwise Marian) had taken a fancy to the sofa.