ded of her four daughters she said it was
precisely the thought of how they too would grow up to womanhood that
had made her strike her blow. The statements were rather the outcome of
her evening with Lady Beach-Mandarin than her own unaided discoveries,
but she had honestly assimilated them, and she expressed them with a
certain simple dignity.

Sir Isaac made a pathetic appearance before the court, and Lady Harman
was shocked to see how worn he was with distress at her scandalous
behaviour. He looked a broken man. That curious sense of personal
responsibility, which had slumbered throughout the Black Strand
struggle, came back to her in a flood, and she had to grip the edge of
the dock tightly to maintain her self-control. Unaccustomed as he was to
public speaking, Sir Isaac said in a low, sorrow-laden voice, he had
provided himself with a written statement dissociating himself from the
views his wife's rash action might seem to imply, and expressing his own
opinions upon woman's suffrage and the relations of the sexes generally,
with especial reference to contemporary literature. He had been writing
it most of the night. He was not, however, permitted to read this, and
he then made an unstudied appeal for the consideration and mercy of the
court. He said Lady Harman had always been a good mother and a faithful
wife; she had been influenced by misleading people and bad books and
publications, the true significance of which she did not understand, and
if only the court would regard this first offence leniently he was
ready to take his wife away and give any guarantee that might be
specified that it should not recur. The magistrate was sympathetic and
kindly, but he pointed out that this window-breaking had to be stamped
out, and that it could only be stamped out by refusing any such
exception as Sir Isaac desired. And so Sir Isaac left the court widowed
for a month, a married man without a wife, and terribly distressed.

All this and more one might tell in detail, and how she went to her
cell, and the long tedium of her imprisonment, and how deeply Snagsby
felt the disgrace, and how Miss Alimony claimed her as a convert to the
magic of her persuasions, and many such matters--there is no real
restraint upon a novelist fully resolved to be English and Gothic and
unclassical except obscure and inexplicable instincts. But these obscure
and inexplicable instincts are at times imperative, and on this occasion
they insist th