llusiveness
that was part of her complicated charm.

Sec.5

For three days Mr. Brumley was so staggered by these things that it did
not occur to him that it was quite possible for him to see Lady Harman
for himself and find out just how things stood. He remained in London
with an imagination dazed. And as it was the Christmas season and as
George Edmund in a rather expectant holiday state had now come up from
Margate, Mr. Brumley went in succession to the Hippodrome, to Peter Pan
and to an exhibition at Olympia, assisted at an afternoon display of the
kinemacolor at La Scala Theatre, visited Hamley's and lunched George
Edmund once at the Criterion and twice at the Climax Club, while
thinking of nothing in all the world but the incalculable strangeness of
women. George Edmund thought him a very passive leadable parent indeed,
less querulous about money matters and altogether much improved. The
glitter and colour of these various entertainments reflected themselves
upon the surface of that deep flood of meditation, hook-armed
wooden-legged pirates, intelligent elephants, ingenious but extremely
expensive toys, flickering processions, comic turns, snatches of popular
music and George Edmund's way of eating an orange, pictured themselves
on his mind confusedly without in any way deflecting its course. Then on
the fourth day he roused himself, gave George Edmund ten shillings to
get himself a cutlet at the Cafe Royal and do the cinematographs round
and about the West End, and so released reached Aleham in time for a
temperate lunch. He chartered the Aleham car to take him to Black Strand
and arrived there about a quarter past three, in a great effort to feel
himself a matter-of-course visitor.

It ought to be possible to record that Mr. Brumley's mind was full of
the intensest sense of Lady Harman during that journey and of nothing
else, but as a matter of fact his mind was now curiously detached and
reflective, the tensions and expectation of the past month and the
astonishment of the last few days had worked themselves out and left him
as it were the passive instrument of the purpose of his more impassioned
moods. This distressed lover approached Black Strand in a condition of
philosophical lassitude.

The road from Aleham to Black Strand is a picturesque old English road,
needlessly winding and badly graded, wriggling across a healthy
wilderness with occasional pine-woods. Something in that familiar
landscape--for