tched 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.

Eve was relating to the admired and trusted doctor all her peculiar
mental and moral symptoms. She was saying that she could no l