rohack's other house.

He shut his lips, steeled himself, and walked round the Square to the
noble mansion and audaciously rang the bell. He had to wait. He shook
guiltily, as though he, and no member of his family, had sinned. A
little more, and his tongue would have cleaved to the gold of his upper
denture. The double portals swung backwards. Mr. Prohack beheld the
portly form of an intensely traditional butler, and behind the butler a
vista of outer and inner halls and glimpses of the soaring staircase. He
heard, somewhere in the distance of the interior, the ringing laugh of
his daughter Sissie.

The butler looked carelessly down upon him, and, as Mr. Prohack uttered
no word, challenged him.

"Yes, sir?"

"Is Mrs. Prohack at home?"

"No, sir." (Positively.)

"Is Miss Prohack at home?"

"No, sir." (More positively.)

"Oh!"

"Will you leave your name, sir?"

"No."

Abruptly Mr. Prohack turned away. He had had black moments in his life.
This was the blackest.

Of course he might have walked right in, and said to the butler: "Here's
a month's wages. Hook it." But he was a peculiar fellow, verging
sometimes on silliness. He merely turned away. The vertiginous rapidity
of his wife's developments, manoeuvres and transformations had dazed him
into a sort of numbed idiocy. In two days, in a day, with no warning to
him of her extraordinary precipitancy, she had 'flitted'!

At Claridge's, through giving Monsieur Charles, the _maitre d' hotel_,
carte blanche in the ordering of his dinner and then only half-eating
his dinner, Mr. Prohack failed somewhat to maintain his prestige, though
he regained ground towards the end by means of champagne and liqueurs.
The black-and-gold restaurant was full of expensive persons who were
apparently in ignorance of the fact that the foundations of the social
fabric had been riven. They were all gay; the music was gay; everything
was gay except Mr. Prohack--the sole living being in the place who
conformed in face and heart to the historical conception of the British
Sunday.

But Mr. Prohack was not now a man,--he was a grievance; he was the most
deadly kind of grievance, the irrational kind. A superlatively fine
cigar did a little--not much--to solace him. He smoked it with
scientific slowness, and watched the restaurant empty itself.... He was
the last survivor in the restaurant; and fifteen waiters and two hundred
and fifty electric lamps were keeping him in countenance. Th