trifle
fragmentary and faintly uncomfortable to the end.

Mr. Brumley avoided as much as he could looking at Lady Harman, because
he knew Sir Isaac was alert for that, but he was acutely aware of her
presence dispensing the tea and moving about the room, being a good
wife. It was his first impression of Lady Harman as a good wife and he
disliked the spectacle extremely. The conversation hovered chiefly about
Marienbad, drifted away and came back again. Mrs. Harman made several
confidences that provoked the betrayal of a strain of irritability in
Sir Isaac's condition. "We're all looking forward to this Marienbad
expedition," she said. "I do hope it will turn out well. Neither of them
have ever been abroad before--and there's the difficulty of the
languages."

"Ow," snarled Sir Isaac, with a glance at his mother that was almost
vicious and a lapse into Cockney intonations and phrases that witnessed
how her presence recalled his youth, "It'll _go_ all right, mother.
_You_ needn't fret."

"Of course they'll have a courier to see to their things, and go train
de luxe and all that," Mrs. Harman explained with a certain gusto. "But
still it's an adventure, with him not well, and both as I say more like
children than grown-up people."

Sir Isaac intervened with a crushing clumsiness to divert this strain of
explanation, with questions about the quality of the soil in the wood
where the ground was to be cleared and levelled for his tennis lawns.

Mr. Brumley did his best to behave as a man of the world should. He made
intelligent replies about the sand, he threw out obvious but serviceable
advice upon travel upon the continent of Europe, and he tried not to
think that this was the way of living into which the sweetest,
tenderest, most beautiful woman in the world had been trapped. He
avoided looking at her until he felt it was becoming conspicuous, a
negative stare. Why had she come back again? Fragmentary phrases she had
used downstairs came drifting through his mind. "I never think of it. I
never read of it." And she so made for beautiful love and a beautiful
life! He recalled Lady Beach-Mandarin's absurdly apt, absurdly inept,
"like Godiva," and was suddenly impelled to raise the question of those
strikers.

"Your trouble with your waitresses is over, Sir Isaac?"

Sir Isaac finished a cup of tea audibly and glanced at his wife. "I
never meant to be hard on them," he said, putting down his cup. "Never.
The trouble bl