perhaps hampered her speech; she presided flushed and
bright-eyed in a state of infectious nervous tension. Her politeness was
awful. Never in all her life had Lady Harman felt her own lack of real
conversational power so acutely. She couldn't think of a thing that
mightn't be construed as an impertinence and that didn't remind her of
district visiting. Yet perhaps she succeeded better than she supposed.

"What a family you have had!" she said to Mrs. Burnet. "I have four
little girls, and I find them as much as we can manage."

"You're young yet, my ladyship," said Mrs. Burnet, "and they aren't
always the blessings they seem to be. It's the rearing's the
difficulty."

"They're all such healthy-looking--people."

"I wish we could get hold of Luke, my ladyship, and show you _'im_. He's
that sturdy. And yet when 'e was a little feller----"

She was launched for a time on those details that were always so dear to
the mothers of the past order of things. Her little spate of
reminiscences was the only interlude of naturalness in an afternoon of
painfully constrained behaviour....

Lady Harman returned a trifle shamefacedly from this abortive dip into
realities to Mr. Brumley's speculative assurance.

Sec.9

While Lady Harman was slowly accustoming her mind to this idea that the
development of those Hostels was her appointed career in life, so far as
a wife may have a career outside her connubial duties, and while she was
getting insensibly to believe in Mr. Brumley's theory of their exemplary
social importance, the Hostels themselves with a haste that she felt
constantly was premature, were achieving a concrete existence. They were
developing upon lines that here and there disregarded Mr. Brumley's
ideas very widely; they gained in practicality what perhaps they lost in
social value, through the entirely indirect relations between Mr.
Brumley on the one hand and Sir Isaac on the other. For Sir Isaac
manifestly did not consider and would have been altogether indisposed to
consider Mr. Brumley as entitled to plan or suggest anything of the
slightest importance in this affair, and whatever of Mr. Brumley reached
that gentleman reached him in a very carefully transmitted form as Lady
Harman's own unaided idea. Sir Isaac had sound Victorian ideas about the
place of literature in life. If anyone had suggested to him that
literature could supply ideas to practical men he would have had a
choking fit, and he regarded Mr.