"No?" He wondered what would come next.

"No! I shall teach you."

"Indeed you won't!" He instinctively recoiled.

"Yes, I shall. I promised the doctor he could rely on me. You'll buy a
gramophone, and we'll have the carpet up in the drawing-room. Oh! You
startled deer, do you want to run back into the depths of the forest?...
Father, you are the funniest father that ever was." She marched to him
and put her hand on his shoulder and just twitched his beard. "I can
look after you quite as well as mother can. We're pals, aren't we?"

"Yes. Like the tiger and the lamb. You've got hold of my silky fleece
already."


IV

Mr. Prohack sat in the dining-room alone. The room was now heated by an
electric radiator which Eve had just bought for the sake of economy. But
her economy was the economy of the rich, for the amount of expensive
current consumed by that radiator was prodigious, while the saving it
effected in labour, cleanliness and atmospheric purity could certainly
not have been measured without a scientific instrument adapted to the
infinitely little. (Still, Machin admired and loved it.) Mr. Prohack
perceived that all four bars of it were brightly incandescent, whereas
three bars would have been ample to keep the room warm. He ought to get
up and turn a bar off.... He had a hundred preoccupations. His daughter