f course a good deal of
luxury, but not _wicked_ luxury, and to compare our high-minded and
constructive politics with the mere conflict of unscrupulous adventurers
about that semi-oriental throne! It was nonsense!

"This young man must be spanked," said Mr. Brumley and, throwing aside
an open illustrated paper in which a full-length portrait of Sir Edward
Carson faced a picture of the King and Queen in their robes sitting side
by side under a canopy at the Coronation Durbar, he prepared himself to
write in an extremely salutary manner about the follies of the younger
generation, and incidentally to justify his period and his professional
contentment.

Sec.2

One is reminded of those houses into which the white ants have eaten
their way; outwardly still fair and solid, they crumble at the touch of
a hand. And now you will begin to understand those changes of bearing
that so perplexed Lady Harman, that sudden insurgence of flushed
half-furtive passion in the garden, through the thin pretences of a
liberal friendship. His hollow honour had been gripped and had given
way.

He had begun so well. At first Lady Harman had occupied his mind in the
properest way. She was another man's wife and sacred--according to all
honourable standards, and what he wanted was merely to see more of her,
talk to her, interest her in himself, share whatever was available
outside her connubial obligations,--and think as little of Sir Isaac as
possible.

How quickly the imaginative temperament of Mr. Brumley enlarged that to
include a critical hostility to Sir Isaac, we have already recorded.
Lady Harman was no longer simply a charming, suppressed young wife,
crying out for attentive development; she became an ill-treated
beautiful woman--misunderstood. Still scrupulously respecting his own
standards, Mr. Brumley embarked upon the dangerous business of inventing
just how Sir Isaac might be outraging them, and once his imagination had
started to hunt in that field, it speedily brought in enough matter for
a fine state of moral indignation, a white heat of not altogether
justifiable chivalry. Assisted by Lady Beach-Mandarin Mr. Brumley had
soon converted the little millionaire into a matrimonial ogre to keep an
anxious lover very painfully awake at nights. Because by that time and
quite insensibly he had become an anxious lover--with all the gaps in
the thread of realities that would have made him that, quite generously
filled up from the