And not Eve and Sissie alone amazed him. Oswald amazed him. Oswald had changed. His black silk stock had gone the way of his ribboned eye-glass; his hair was arranged differently; he closely resembled an average plain man,--he, the unique Ozzie! With all his faults, he had previously been both good-natured and negligent, but his expression was now one of sternness and of resolute endeavour. Sissie had already metamorphosed him. Even now he was obediently following her lead and her mood. Mr. Prohack's women had evidently determined to revenge themselves for being asked to meet Miss Fancy at lunch, and Ozzie had been set on to assist them. Further, Mr. Prohack noticed that Sissie was eyeing her mother's necklace with a reprehending stare. The next instant he found himself the target of the same stare. The girl was accusing him of folly, while questioning Ozzie's definition of the difference between Georgian and neo-Georgian verse. The girl had apparently become the censor of society at large. Mysterious cross-currents ran over the table in all directions. Mr. Prohack looked around the noisy restaurant packed with tables, and wondered whether cross-currents were running invisibly over all the tables, and what was the secret force of fashionable fleeting convention which enabled women with brains far inferior to his own to use it effectively for the fighting of sanguinary battles. At last, when Miss Fancy had been beaten into silence and the other three were carrying on a brilliant high-browed conversation over the corpse of her up-to-dateness, Mr. Prohack's nerves reached the point at which he could tolerate the tragic spectacle no more, and he burst out vulgarly, in a man-in-the-street vein, chopping off the brilliant conversation as with a chopper: "Now, Miss Fancy, tell us something about yourself."