Then the Lord Chancellor was said to be interested in philosophy—a difficult subject. She had got Timbre to talk to him upon that. Timbre was a professor of philosophy at Oxford, so that was sure to be all right. But she wished she knew one or two good safe things to say in philosophy herself. She had long felt the need of a secretary, and now she felt it more than ever. If she had a secretary, she could just tell him what it was she wanted to talk about and he could get her one or two of the right books and mark the best passages and she could learn it all up. She feared—it was a worrying fear—that Laxton would say right out and very early in the week-end that he didn’t believe in philosophy. He had a way of saying he “didn’t believe in” large things like that,—art, philanthropy, novels, and so on. Sometimes he said, “I don’t believe in all this”—art or whatever it was. She had watched people’s faces when he had said it and she had come to the conclusion that saying you don’t believe in things isn’t the sort of thing people say nowadays. It was wrong, somehow. But she did not want to tell Laxton directly that it was wrong. He would remember if she did, but he had a way of taking such things rather badly at the time.... She hated him to take things badly. “If one could invent some little hint,” she whispered to herself. She had often wished she was better at hints. She was, you see, a gentlewoman, modest, kindly. Her people were quite good people. Poor, of course. But she was not clever, she was anything but clever. And the wives of these captains of industry need to be very clever indeed if they are to escape a magnificent social isolation. They get the titles and the big places and all that sort of thing; people don’t at all intend to isolate them, but there is nevertheless an inadvertent avoidance.... Even as she uttered these words, “If one could invent some little hint,” Bealby down there less than forty feet away through the solid floor below her feet and a little to the right was wetting his stump of pencil as wet as he could in order to ensure a sufficiently emphatic fourteenth cross on the score sheet of the doomed Thomas. Most of the other thirteen marks were done with such hard breathing emphasis that the print of them went more than halfway through that little blue-edged book. § 5