Lady Harman toiled to pacify these disorders, gently, attentively, and with a faint dismay in her dark eyes. She bribed and entreated and marvelled at mental textures so unlike her own. Baby was squared with a brand new Teddy Bear, a rare sort, a white one, which Snagsby went and purchased in the Putney High Street and brought home in his arms, conferring such a lustre upon the deed that the lower orders, the very street-boys, watched him with reverence as he passed. Annette went to sleep amidst a discomfort of small treasures and woke stormily when Mrs. Harblow tried to remove some of the spikier ones. And Lady Harman went back to her large pink bedroom and meditated for a long time upon these things and tried to remember whether in her own less crowded childhood with Georgina, either of them had been quite so inhumanly hard and grasping as these feverish little mites in her nursery. She tried to think she had been, she tried to think that all children were such little distressed lumps of embittered individuality, and she did what she could to overcome the queer feeling that this particular clutch of offspring had been foisted upon her and weren’t at all the children she could now imagine and desire,—gentle children, sweet-spirited children.... §4 Susan Burnet arrived in a gusty mood and brought new matter for Lady Harman’s ever broadening consideration of the wifely position. Susan, led by a newspaper placard, had discovered Sir Isaac’s relations to the International Bread and Cake Stores. “At first I thought I wouldn’t come,” said Susan. “I really did. I couldn’t hardly believe it. And then I thought, ‘it isn’t _her_. It can’t be _her_!’ But I’d never have dreamt before that I could have been brought to set foot in the house of the man who drove poor father to ruin and despair.... You’ve been so kind to me....” Susan’s simple right-down mind stopped for a moment with something very like a sob, baffled by the contradictions of the situation. “So I came,” she said, with a forced bright smile. “I’m glad you came,” said Lady Harman. “I wanted to see you. And you know, Susan, I know very little—very little indeed—of Sir Isaac’s business.” “I quite believe it, my lady. I’ve never for one moment thought _you_——I don’t know how to say it, my lady.” “And indeed I’m not,” said Lady Harman, taking it as said. “I knew you weren’t,” said Susan, relieved to be so understood. And the two women looked perplexedly at one another over the neglected curtains Susan had come to “see to,” and shyness just snatched back Lady Harman from her impulse to give Susan a sisterly kiss. Nevertheless Susan who was full of wise intuitions felt that kiss that was never given, and in the remote world of unacted deeds returned it with effusion.