nder 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.

Mr. Melchizidek possessed the strange gift of condescending majestically
to Mr. Prohack while licking his boots. He listened to Mr. Prohack as to
an autocrat while giving Mr. Prohack to understand that Mr. Prohack knew
not the first elements of sartorial elegance. At intervals he gazed
abstractedly at the gold framed and crowned portraits that hung on the
walls and at the inscriptions similarly framed and crowned and hung, and
it was home in upon Mr. Prohack that the inscriptions in actual practice
referred to Mr. Melchizidek, and that this same Melchizidek, fawning
and masterful, had seen monarchs in their shirt sleeves and spoken to
princes with pins in his mouth, and made marks in white chalk between
the shoulder-blades of grand-dukes; and that revolutions and cataclysms
were nothing to Mr. Melchizidek.

When Mr. Melchizidek had decided by hypnotic suggestion and magic power
what Mr. Prohack desired in the way of stuffs and patterns, he led Mr.
Prohack mysteriously to a small chamber, and a scribe followed them
carrying pencil and paper, and Mr. Prohack removed, with assistance, his
shabby coat and his waistcoat, and Mr. Melchizidek measured him in
unexampled detail and precision, and the scribe, writing, intoned aloud
all Mr. Prohack's dimensions. And all the time Mr. Prohack was asking in
his heart: "How much will these clothes cost?" And he, once the Terror
of the departments, who would have held up the war to satisfy his
official inquisitiveness on a question of price,--he dared not ask how
much the clothes would cost. He felt that in that unique establishment
money was simply not mentioned,-