world of reverie.

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo. It is the peculiar snare of
the perplexed orthodox, and soon Mr. Brumley was in a state of nearly
unendurable moral indignation with Sir Isaac for a hundred exaggerations
of what he was and of what conceivably he might have done to his silent
yet manifestly unsuitably mated wife. And now that romantic streak which
is as I have said the first certain symptom of decay in a system of
moral assumptions began to show itself in Mr. Brumley's thoughts and
conversation. "A marriage like that," said Mr. Brumley to Lady
Beach-Mandarin, "isn't a marriage. It flouts the True Ideal of Marriage.
It's slavery--following a kidnapping...."

But this is a wide step from the happy optimism of the Cambridge days.
What becomes of the sanctity of marriage and the institution of the
family when respectable gentlemen talk of something called "True
Marriage," as non-existent in relation to a lady who is already the
mother of four children? I record this lapsing of Mr. Brumley into
romanticism without either sympathy or mitigation. The children, it
presently became apparent, were not "true" children. "Forced upon her,"
said Mr. Brumley. "It makes one ill to think of it!" It certainly very
nearly made him ill. And as if these exercises in distinction had
inflamed his conscience Mr. Brumley wrote two articles in the
_Hebdomadal_ denouncing impure literature, decadence, immorality,
various recent scandalous instances, and the suffragettes, declaring
that woman's place was the home and that "in a pure and exalted monogamy
lies the sole unitary basis for a civilized state." The most remarkable
thing about this article is an omission. That Sir Isaac's monogamy with
any other instances that might be akin to it was not pure and exalted,
and that it needed--shall we call it readjustment? is a view that in
this article Mr. Brumley conspicuously doesn't display. It's as if for a
moment, pen in hand, he had eddied back to his old absolute
positions....

In a very little while Mr. Brumley and Lady Beach-Mandarin had almost
persuaded each other that Sir Isaac was applying physical torture to his
proudly silent wife, and Mr. Brumley was no longer dreaming and glancing
at but steadily facing the possibility of a pure-minded and handsomely
done elopement to "free" Lady Harman, that would be followed in due
course by a marriage, a "true marriage" on a level of understanding far
above any ordinary re