It emerged from the confusion of Lady Harman’s mind that perhaps she had better go to the nursery, and see how things were getting on there. Sir Isaac watched her departure with a slightly dubious eye, made little noises with his teeth for a time, and then went towards the telephone. In the hall she found two strange young men in green aprons assisting the under-butler to remove the hats and overcoats and such-like personal material into a motor-van outside. She heard two of the housemaids scurrying upstairs. “’Arf an hour,” said one, “isn’t what I call a proper time to pack a box in.” In the nursery the children were disputing furiously what toys were to be taken into the country. Lady Harman was a very greatly astonished woman. The surprise had been entirely successful. §3 It has been said, I think, by Limburger, in his already cited work, that nothing so excites and prevails with woman as rapid and extensive violence, sparing and yet centring upon herself, and certainly it has to be recorded that, so far from being merely indignant, and otherwise a helplessly pathetic spectacle, Lady Harman found, though perhaps she did not go quite so far as to admit to herself that she found, this vehement flight from the social, moral, and intellectual contaminations of London an experience not merely stimulating but entertaining. It lifted her delicate eyebrows. Something, it may have been a sense of her own comparative immobility amid this sudden extraordinary bustle of her home, put it into her head that so it was long ago that Lot must have bundled together his removable domesticities. She made one attempt at protest. “Isaac,” she said, “isn’t all this rather ridiculous——” “Don’t speak to me!” he answered, waving her off. “Don’t speak to me! You should have spoken before, Elly. _Now_,—things are happening.” The image of Black Strand as, after all, a very pleasant place indeed returned to her. She adjudicated upon the nursery difficulties, and then went in a dreamlike state of mind to preside over her own more personal packing. She found Peters exercising all that indecisive helplessness which is characteristic of ladies’ maids the whole world over. It was from Peters she learnt that the entire household, men and maids together, was to be hurled into Surrey. “Aren’t they all rather surprised?” asked Lady Harman. “Yes, m’m,” said Peters on her knees, “but of course if the drains is wrong the sooner we all go the better.” (So that was what he had told them.)