with him!  Of course it’s all up.  And as if that wasn’t enough, a County Council inspector has been round asking about a music and dancing licence.  We shall either have to give up business altogether or else move somewhere else.  Eliza says she knows of another studio.  Well, I shall write her to-night and tell her she can have my share of the fittings and furniture and go where she likes, but I shan’t go with her.  And if she never liked me I can honestly say I never liked her.  And I don’t want to run a dancing studio any more, either.  Why should I, after all?  We were the new poor.  Now we’re the new rich.  Well, we may as well be the new rich.”

Mr. Prohack was now still more shocked.  Nay, he was almost frightened.  And yet he wasn’t either shocked or frightened, in the centre of his soul.  He was rather triumphant,—­not about his daughter with the feet of clay, but about himself.

“But I shan’t give up teaching dancing entirely,” said Sissie.

“No?” He wondered what would come next.

“No!  I shall teach you.”

“Indeed you won’t!” He instinctively recoiled.

“Yes, I shall.  I promised the doctor he could rely on me.  You’ll buy a gramophone, and we’ll have the carpet up in the drawing-room.  Oh!  You startled deer, do you want to run back into the depths of the forest?...  Father, you are the funniest father that ever was.”  She marched to him and put her hand on his shoulder and just twitched his beard.  “I can look after you quite as well as mother can.  We’re pals, aren’t we?”

“Yes.  Like the tiger and the lamb.  You’ve got hold of my silky fleece already.”

IV

Mr. Prohack sat in the dining-room alone.  The room was now heated by an electric radiator which Eve had just bought for the sake of economy.  But her economy was the economy of the rich, for the amount of expensive current consumed by that radiator was prodigious, while the saving it effected in labour, cleanliness and atmospheric purity could certainly not have been measured without a scientific instrument adapted to the infinitely little. (Still, Machin admired and loved it.) Mr. Prohack perceived that all four bars of it were brightly incandescent, whereas three bars would have been ample to keep the room warm.  He ought to get up and turn a bar off....  He had a hundred preoccupations.  His daughter had classed him with the new rich.  He resented the description, but could he honestly reject it?  All his recent troubles sprang from the new riches.  If he had not inherited from a profiteer he would assuredly have been at his office in the Treasury, earning an honest living, at that very moment.  For only sick persons of plenteous independent means are ever prescribed for as he had been prescribed for; the others either go on working and making the best of such health as is left to them, or they die.  If he had not inherited from a profiteer he would not have had a