"Yes, darling mother," said Sissie. "You must go away, and father and I will take you."
"Of course!" confirmed Mr. Prohack, with an imitation of pettishness, as though he had been steadily advocating a change of scene for days past; but he had done nothing of the kind.
"Oh!" Eve cried piteously, "that's the one thing I can't do!"
Dr. Veiga laughed. "Afraid of the expense, I suppose?"
"No," Eve answered with seriousness. "My husband has just made a very fortunate investment, which means a profit of at least a hundred thousand pounds--like that!" She snapped her fingers and laughed lightly.
Here was another point to puzzle an expert in human nature. Instead of being extremely incredulous and apprehensive about the vast speculation with Sir Paul, Eve had in truth accepted it for a gold-mine. She did not assume satisfaction; she really was satisfied. Her satisfaction was absurd, and nothing that Mr. Prohack could say would diminish it. She had already begun to spend the financial results of the speculation with enormous verve. For instance, she had hired another Eagle to take the place of the wounded Eagle, without uttering a word to her husband of what she had done. Mr. Prohack could see the dregs of his bank-balance; and in a dream he had had glimpses of a sinister edifice at the bottom of a steep slope, the building being the Bankruptcy Court.
"Is it a railway strike you're afraid of?" demanded Dr. Veiga cruelly.
"I can't leave London until my son Charlie comes back from Glasgow, and he's written me to say he'll be here next week."
A first-rate example, this, of her new secretiveness! She had said absolutely nothing to Mr. Prohack about a letter from Charlie.
"When did you hear that?" Mr. Prohack might well have asked; but he was too loyal to her to betray her secretiveness by such a question. He did not wish the Portuguese quack to know that he, the husband, was kept in the dark about anything whatever. He had his ridiculous dignity, had Mr. Prohack, and all his motives were mixed motives. Not a perfectly pure motive in the whole of his volitional existence!
However, Sissie put the question in her young blundering way. "Oh, mother dear! You never told us!"
"I received the letter the day before yesterday," Eve continued gravely. "And Charlie is certainly not coming home to find me away."