had still to
explore. Lady Harman he considered was married wrongly and disastrously
and this he held to be essentially the fault of Sir Isaac--with perhaps
some slight blame attaching to Lady Harman's mother. The only path of
escape he could conceive as yet for Lady Harman lay through the chivalry
of some other man. That a woman could possibly rebel against one man
without the sympathy and moral maintenance of another was still outside
the range of Mr. Brumley's understanding. It is still outside the range
of most men's understandings--and of a great many women's. If he
generalized at all from these persuasions it was in the direction that
in the interest of "true marriage" there should be greater facilities
for divorce and also a kind of respectable-ization of divorce. Then
these "false marriages" might be rectified without suffering. The
reasons for divorce he felt should be extended to include things not
generally reprehensible, and chivalrous people coming into court should
be protected from the indelicate publicity of free reporting....

Sec.3

Mr. Brumley was still contemplating rather inconclusively the
possibility of a long and intimate talk leading up to and preparing for
an elopement with Lady Harman, when he read of her Jago Street escapade
and of her impending appearance at the South Hampsmith police court. He
was astonished. The more he contemplated the thing the greater became
his astonishment.

Even at the first impact he realized that the line she had taken wasn't
quite in the picture with the line he had proposed for her. He
felt--left out. He felt as though a door had slammed between himself and
affairs to which he had supposed himself essential. He could not
understand why she had done this thing instead of coming straight to his
flat and making use of all that chivalrous service she surely knew was
at her disposal. This self-reliance, this direct dealing with the world,
seemed to him, even in the height of his concern, unwomanly, a deeper
injury to his own abandoned assumptions than any he had contemplated. He
felt it needed explanation, and he hurried to secure an elbowed
unsavoury corner in the back of the court in order to hear her defence.
He had to wait through long stuffy spaces of time before she appeared.
There were half a dozen other window smashers,--plain or at least
untidy-looking young women. The magistrate told them they were silly and
the soul of Mr. Brumley acquiesced. One tried