"I must now have a little repose," said Mr. Prohack.
"We'll leave you," Eve said, eager to be agreeable. "You must be tired, you poor dear. I'm just going out to shop with Sissie. I'm not sure if I shall be in for tea, but I will be if you think you'll be lonely."
"Did you do much entertaining at lunch, young woman?" Mr. Prohack asked.
"Charlie had several people—men—but I really don't know who they were. And Ozzie Morfey came. And permit me to inform you that Charlie was simply knocked flat by my qualities as a hostess. Do you know what he said to me afterwards? He said: 'That lunch was a bit of all right, kid.' Enormous from Charlie, wasn't it?"
Mother and daughter went out arm in arm like two young girls. Beyond question they were highly pleased with themselves and the world. Eve returned after a moment.
"Are you comfortable, dear? I've told Machin you mustn't on any account be disturbed. Charlie's borrowed the car. We shall get a taxi in the Bayswater Road." She bent down and seemed to bury her soft lips in his cheek. She was beginning to have other interests than himself. And since she had nothing now to worry about, in a maternal sense, she had become a child. She was fat—at any rate nobody could describe her as less than plump—and over forty, but a child, an exquisite child. He magnificently let her kiss him. However, he knew that she knew that she was his sole passion. She whispered most intimately and persuasively into his ear:
"Shall we have a look at that house to-morrow morning, just you and I? You'll love the furniture."
"Perhaps," he replied. What else could he reply? He very much desired to have a talk with her about Sissie and the fellow Morfey; but he could not broach the subject because he could not tell her in cold blood that he had seen Sissie in Morfey's arms. To do so would have an effect like setting fire to the home. Unless, of course, Sissie had already confided in her mother? Was it conceivable that Eve had a secret from him? It was certainly conceivable that he had a secret from Eve. Not only was he hiding from her his knowledge of the startling development in the relations between Sissie and Morfey,—he had not even told her that he had seen the house in Manchester Square. He was leading a double life,—consequence of riches! Was she?
As soon as she had softly closed the door he composed himself, for he was in fact considerably exhausted. Remembering a conversation at the club with a celebrated psycho-analyst about the possibilities of auto-suggestion, he strove to empty his mind and then to repeat to himself very rapidly in a low murmur: "You will sleep, you will sleep, you will sleep, you will sleep," innumerable times. But the incantation would not work, probably because he could not keep his mind empty. The mysterious receptacle filled faster than he could empty it. It filled till it flowed over with the flooding realisation of the awful complexity of existence. He longed to maintain its simplicity, well aware that his happiness would result from simplicity alone. But existence flatly refused to be simple. He desired love in a cottage with Eve. He could have bought a hundred cottages, all in ideal surroundings. The mere fact, however, that he was in a position to buy a hundred cottages somehow made it impossible for him to devote himself exclusively to loving Eve in one cottage....
His imagination leaped over intervening events and he pictured the wedding of Sissie as a nightmare of complications—no matter whom she married. He loathed weddings. Of course a girl of Sissie's sense and modernity ought to insist on being married in a registry office. But would she? She would not. For a month previous to marriage all girls cast off modernity and became Victorian. Yes, she would demand real orange-blossom and everything that went with it.... He got as far as wishing that Sissie might grow into an old maid, solely that he might be spared the wearing complications incident to the ceremony of marriage as practised by intelligent persons in the twentieth century. His character was deteriorating, and he could not stop it from deteriorating....