“Well, I'm sure I'm very sorry if I have,” broke in Mrs. Comber hurriedly, beginning already to be sorry that she had spoken so quickly. “You see,” went on Miss Madder, “that I don't think we can any of us have two feelings about the question of discipline. I'm sure you agree with us there, Mrs. Comber.” “Oh, of course,” said Mrs. Comber. But she saw at once that war had been declared. They hated Isabel, and they hated her; they would make it so unpleasant that Isabel would not be able to come and stay again—they were of one mind. Above all, after they had gone, there remained the impression of that silent, black lady who had said not a word. What would she tell Moy-Thompson? What harm would come to Freddie? Last, and worst of all, as Mrs. Comber most wretchedly reflected, Freddie had still to be faced. His feelings, she knew, would be strongly expressed, and were certainly not in a line with her own. Oh! the umbrella had a great deal to answer for! III. And Freddie was, as a matter of fact, faced that very evening, and a crisis arrived in the affairs of the Combers which must be chronicled, because it had ultimately a good deal to do with Isabel and Archie Traill, and indeed with everyone in the present story. But whilst waiting for him downstairs, “dressed and shining,” as she used to like to say—with the dinner getting cold (for which disaster she was certain to be scolded)—she wondered in her muddled kind of way why it was that they should all have wanted to be so disagreeable, why, as a development of that, everyone always preferred to be disagreeable rather than pleasant. And she suddenly, facing the ormolu clock and the peacock screen with her eyes upon them as though they might, with their color and decoration help her, had a revelation—dim, misty, vague, and lost almost as soon as it was seen—that it wasn't really anyone's fault at all—that it was the system, the place, the tightness and closeness and helplessness that did for everybody; that nobody could escape from it, and that the finest saint, the most noble character, would be crushed and broken in that remorseless mill—“the mills of the gods”?—no, the mills of a rotten, impoverished, antiquated system.... She saw, staring at the clock and the screen and clinging to them, these men and these women, crushed, beaten, defeated: Mrs. Thompson, Mrs. Dormer, Miss Madder, her own Freddie, Mr. Perrin, Mr. Birkland, Mr. White—even already young Traill—all of them decent, hopeful, brave... once. The coals clicked in the glowing fire, and the soft autumn wind passed down the darkening paths. She felt suddenly as though she must give it all up—she must leave Freddie and the children and go away... anywhere... she could not endure it any longer. And then Freddie came in, irritable, peevish, scarcely noticing her. Moy-Thompson had changed one of his hours, and that annoyed him; the soup of course was stone cold, the fish very little better.