“I don’t know how long I shall be.”

“That doesn’t matter, truly.  I haven’t got anything else in the world to do, as Mr. Carrel Quire is away.”

Mr. Prohack left Miss Winstock in the car.

The establishment into which Mr. Prohack disappeared was that of his son’s tailors.  He slipped into it with awe, not wholly because the tailors were his son’s tailors, but in part because they were tailors to various august or once-august personages throughout Europe.  Till that day Mr. Prohack had bought his clothes from an insignificant though traditional tailor in Maddox Street, to whom he had been taken as a boy by his own father.  And he had ordered his clothes hastily, negligently, anyhow, in intervals snatched from meal-hours or on the way from one more important appointment to another more important appointment.  Indeed he had thought no more of ordering a suit than of ordering a whiskey and soda.  Nay, he had on one occasion fallen incredibly low, and his memory held the horrid secret for ever,—­on one occasion he had actually bought a ready-made suit.  It had fitted him, for he was slimmish and of a good stock size, but he had told nobody, not even his wife, of this shocking defection from the code of true British gentlemanliness,—­and he had never repeated the crime; the secret would die with him.  And now he was devoting the top of the morning to the commandment of a suit.  The affair was his chief business, and he had come to it in a great car whose six cylinders were working harmoniously for nothing else, and with the aid of an intelligent and experienced and expert human being whose sole object in life that morning was to preside over Mr. Prohack’s locomotion to and from the tailors’!

Mr. Prohack perceived that he was only beginning to comprehend the wonder of existence.  The adepts at the tailors’, however, seemed to see nothing wonderful in the matter.  They showed no surprise that he had written to make an appointment with a particular adept named Melchizidek, who had been casually mentioned weeks earlier by Charles as the one man in London who really comprehended waistcoats.  They took it as a matter of course that Mr. Prohack had naught else to do with the top of the morning but order clothes, and that while he did so he should keep a mature man and a vast and elaborate machine waiting for him in the street outside.  And Mr. Melchizidek’s manner alone convinced Mr. Prohack that what he had told his family, and that what he had told Miss Winstock in the car, was strictly true and not the invention of his fancy—­namely that the appointment was genuinely of high importance.