ell them here."

"Man does not live by bread alone."

She gave the faintest assent.

"This is the work of one pushful, shoving creature, a man named Harman.
Imagine him! Imagine what he must be! Don't you feel his soul defiling
us?--this summit of a stupendous pile of--dough, thinking of nothing
but his miserable monstrous profits, seeing nothing in the delight of
life, the beauty of the world but something that attracts attention,
draws eyes, something that gives him his horrible opportunity of getting
ahead of all his poor little competitors and inserting--_this!_ It's the
quintessence of all that is wrong with the world;--squalid, shameless
huckstering!" He flew off at a tangent. "Four or five years ago they
made this landscape disease,--a knight!"

He looked at her for a sympathetic indignation, and then suddenly
something snapped in his brain and he understood. There wasn't an
instant between absolute innocence and absolute knowledge.

"You see," she said as responsive as though he had cried out sharply at
the horror in his mind, "Sir Isaac is my husband. Naturally ... I ought
to have given you my name to begin with. It was silly...."

Mr. Brumley gave one wild glance at the board, but indeed there was not
a word to be said in its mitigation. It was the crude advertisement of a
crude pretentious thing crudely sold. "My dear lady!" he said in his
largest style, "I am desolated! But I have said it! It isn't a pretty
board."

A memory of epithets pricked him. "You must forgive--a certain touch
of--rhetoric."

He turned about as if to dismiss the board altogether, but she remained
with her brows very faintly knit, surveying the cause of his offence.

"It isn't a _pretty_ board," she said. "I've wondered at times.... It
isn't."

"I implore you to forget that outbreak--mere petulance--because, I
suppose, of a peculiar liking for that particular view. There
are--associations----"

"I've wondered lately," she continued, holding on to her own thoughts,
"what people _did_ think of them. And it's curious--to hear----"

For a moment neither spoke, she surveyed the board and he the tall ease
of her pose. And he was thinking she must surely be the most beautiful
woman he had ever encountered. The whole country might be covered with
boards if it gave us such women as this. He felt the urgent need of some
phrase, to pull the situation out of this pit into which it had fallen.
He was a little unready, his faculties a