family has been starving, and some one's given it an
enormous beefsteak. Now it's highly dangerous to give a beefsteak to a
starving person. The consequences might be fatal. That's why it's so
serious. That's why I must have time to think."

The sound of Sissie playing a waltz on the piano came up from the
drawing-room. Mr. Prohack started to dance all by himself in the middle
of the bedroom floor.

CHAPTER V

CHARLIE

I

When Mr. Prohack, in his mature but still rich velvet jacket, came down
to dinner, he found his son Charlie leaning against the mantelpiece in a
new dark brown suit, and studying _The Owner-Driver_. Charlie seemed
never to read anything but motor-car and light-car and side-car and
motor-bicycle periodical literature; but he read it conscientiously,
indefatigably, and completely--advertisements and all. He read it as
though it were an endless novel of passion and he an idle woman deprived
of the society her heart longed for. He possessed a motor-bicycle which
he stabled in a mews behind the Square. He had possessed several such
machines; he bought, altered, and sold them, apparently always with
profit to himself. He had no interest in non-mechanical literature or in
any of the arts.

"Your mother's gone to bed with a headache," said Mr. Prohack, with a
fair imitation of melancholy.

"Oh!" said the young man apathetically. His face had a wearied,
disillusioned expression.

"Is this the latest?" asked his father, indicating the new brown suit.
"My respectful congratulations. Very smart, especially at the waist."

For a youth who had nothing in the world but what remained of his wound
gratuity and other trifling military emoluments, and what he made out of
commerce in motor-bicycles, Charlie spent a lot in clothes. His mother
had advised his father to "speak to him about it." But his father had
declined to offer any criticism, on the ground that Charlie had fought
in Mesopotamia, Italy and France. Moreover, Charlie had scotched any
possible criticism by asserting that good clothes were all that stood
between him and the ruin of his career. "If I dressed like the dad," he
had once grimly and gloomily remarked, "it would be the beginning of the
end for me."

"Smart?" he now exclaimed, stepping forward. "Look at that." He advanced
his right leg a little. "Look at that crease. See where it falls?" The
trouser-crease, which, as all wise men know, ought to have fallen
exactly on the centre