cherished that wild surmise. Was that
perhaps it? But surely she could have looked in the Telephone Directory
or Who's Who....

But if that was the truth of the matter she would have looked and
behaved differently in court--quite differently. She would have been
looking for him. She would have seen him....

It was queer too to recall what she had said in court about her
daughters....

Could it be, he had a frightful qualm, that after all--he wasn't the
man? How little he knew of her really....

"This wretched agitation," said Mr. Brumley, trying to flounder away
anyhow from these disconcerting riddles; "it seems to unbalance them
all."

But he found it impossible to believe that Lady Harman was seriously
unbalanced.

Sec.4

And if Mr. Brumley's system of romantically distorted moral assumptions
was shattered by Lady Harman's impersonal blow at a post office window
when all the rules seemed to require her to fly from the oppression of
one man to the chivalry of another, what words can convey the
devastating effect upon him of her conduct after her release? To that
crisis he had been looking forward continually; to record the variety of
his expectations would fill a large volume, but throughout them all
prevailed one general idea, that when she came out of prison her
struggle with her husband would be resumed, and that this would give Mr.
Brumley such extraordinary opportunities of displaying his devotion that
her response, which he was now beginning to suspect might be more
reluctant than his earlier dreams had assumed, was ultimately
inevitable. In all these dreams and meditations that response figured as
the crown. He had to win and possess Lady Harman. The idea had taken
hold of his busy yet rather pointless life, had become his directing
object. He was full of schemes for presently arresting and captivating
her imagination. He was already convinced that she cared for him; he had
to inflame interest and fan liking into the fire of passion. And with a
mind so occupied, Mr. Brumley wrote this and that and went about his
affairs. He spent two days and a night at Margate visiting his son at
his preparatory school, and he found much material for musing in the
question of just how the high romantic affairs ahead of him would affect
this delicately intelligent boy. For a time perhaps he might misjudge
his father.... He spent a week-end with Lady Viping and stayed on until
Wednesday and then he came back to London