Isabel and George Augustus depress me so much that I am anxious to get rid of them. On the other hand, it is impossible to understand George unless you know his parents. And then the older Winterbourne _ménage_ rather fascinates me, with a fascination of loathing and contempt. I cannot help wondering how they could have been such ignorant fools, how they came to make so little effort to break free from the humbug, how less than nothing they cared about being themselves. Of course, I tell myself that our own magnanimous nephews will ask themselves precisely the same questions about _us_; but then I also tell myself that they must see we _did_ struggle, we did fight against the humbug and the squelching of life and the worn-out formulæ, as young George fought. Perhaps Isabel did fight a little, but the forces of inertia and active spite were too much for her. Perhaps the twenty-two lovers and the talk about Agnosticism and Socialism (of which Isabel at all periods of her life knew rather less than nothing) were a sort of protest. But she was beaten by the economic factor—by the economic factor _and_ the child. You can say what you please, but poverty and a child will quench any woman’s instinct for self-development and self-assertion—or turn it sour. It turned Isabel’s sour and sharp. As for George Augustus, I doubt if he had any instincts left, except the instinct to be pretty comfortable. Whatever he achieved in and with his life was entirely the product of Isabel’s will and Isabel’s goading. He was a born mucker. And, since Isabel was ignorant, self-willed and overambitious, and turned sour and sharp under the tender mercies of dear Mamma, she became a mucker too—through George Augustus. Yet I have far more sympathy for Isabel than for George Augustus. She was at least the wreck of a human being. He was a thumb-twiddler, a harmless praying-Mantis, a zero of no value except in combination with her integer. * * * * *