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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 of the boot-lacing, fell about an inch to the left thereof. "And I've tried this suit on four times! All the bally tailors in London seem to think you've got nothing else to do but call and try on and try on and try on. Never seems to occur to them that they don't know their business. It's as bad as staff work. However, if this fellow thinks I'm going to stick these trousers he'll have the surprise of his life to-morrow morning." The youth spoke in a tone of 

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