discreet
moment. Something indescribably confidential came into his manner. "I
doubt if Sir Isaac will quite like to 'ave them left about, me
lady--after you done with them."

She was in a mood of discovery. She sat in the room that was all
furnished in pink (her favourite colour) and read a bitter, malicious,
coarsely written and yet insidiously credible account of her husband's
business methods. Something within herself seemed to answer, "But didn't
you know this all along?" That large conviction that her wealth and
position were but the culmination of a great and honourable social
service, a conviction that had been her tacit comfort during much
distasteful loyalty seemed to shrivel and fade. No doubt the writer was
a thwarted blackmailer; even her accustomed mind could distinguish a
twang of some such vicious quality in his sentences; but that did not
alter the realities he exhibited and exaggerated. There was a
description of how Sir Isaac pounced on his managers that was manifestly
derived from a manager he had dismissed. It was dreadfully like him.
Convincingly like him. There was a statement of the wages he paid his
girl assistants and long extracts from his codes of rules and schedules
of fines....

When she put down the paper she was suddenly afflicted by a vivid vision
of Susan Burnet's father, losing heart and not knowing what to do. She
had an unreasonable feeling that Susan Burnet's father must have been a
small, kindly, furry, bunnyish, little man. Of course there had to be
progress and the survival of the fittest. She found herself weighing
what she imagined Susan Burnet's father to be like, against the ferrety
face, stooping shoulders and scheming whistle of Sir Isaac.

There were times now when she saw her husband with an extreme
distinctness.

Sec.9

As this cold and bracing realization that all was not right with her
position, with Sir Isaac's business procedure and the world generally,
took possession of Lady Harman's thoughts there came also with it and
arising out of it quite a series of new moods and dispositions. At times
she was very full of the desire "to do something," something that would,
as it were, satisfy and assuage this growing uneasiness of
responsibility in her mind. At times her consuming wish was not to
assuage but escape from this urgency. It worried her and made her feel
helpless, and she wanted beyond anything else to get back to that
child's world where all experience