"And whose fault is it if I'm funny? Answer, you witch."

"I don't know," Eve murmured tremblingly and not quite articulately.

"It's your fault. Do you know that you gave me the fright of my life
to-night, going out without saying where you were going to? Do you know
that you put me into such a state that I've been telephoning to
police-stations to find out whether there'd been any street accidents
happening to a woman of your description? I was so upset that I daren't
even go upstairs and call Sissie."

"You said you'd only been back five minutes when I came," Eve observed
in a somewhat firmer voice.

"I did," said Mr. Prohack. "But that was neither more nor less than a
downright lie. You see I was in such a state that I had to pretend, to
both you and myself, that things aren't what they are.... And then,
without the slightest warning, you suddenly arrive without a scratch on
you. You aren't hurt. You aren't even dead. It's a scandalous shame that
a woman should be able, by merely arriving in a taxi, to put a sensible
man into such a paroxysm of satisfaction as you put me into a while ago.
It's not right. It's not fair. Then you try to depress me with bluggy
stories of your son's horrible opulence, and when you discover you can't
depress me you burst into tears and accuse me of being funny. What did
you expect me to be? Did you expect me to groan because you aren't lying
dead in a mortuary? If I'm funny, you are at liberty to attribute it to
hysteria, the hysteria of joy. But I wish you to understand that these
extreme revulsions of feeling which you impose on me are very dangerous
for a plain man who is undergoing a rest-cure."