Lady Harman ceased to listen to Mr. Pope’s strained but not unhappy tenor. She had heard him before, and she had heard his like endlessly. He was the larger moiety of every public meeting she had ever attended. She had ceased even to marvel at the dull self-satisfaction that possessed him. To-day her capacity for marvelling was entirely taken up by the details of this extraordinary reality which had sprung from her dream of simple, kindly, beautiful homes for distressed and overworked young women; nothing in the whole of life had been so amazing since that lurid occasion when she had been the agonized vehicle for the entry of Miss Millicent Harman upon this terrestrial scene. It was all so entirely what she could never have thought possible. A few words from other speakers followed, Mrs. Blapton, with the young secretary at hand to prompt, said something, and Sir Isaac was poked forwards to say, “Thank you very much. It’s all my wife’s doing, really.... Oh dash it! Thank you very much.” It had the effect of being the last vestige of some more elaborate piece of eloquence that had suddenly disintegrated in his mind. “And now, Elly,” he said, as their landaulette took them home, “you’re beginning to have your hostels.” “Then they _are_ my hostels?” she asked abruptly. “Didn’t I say they were?” The satisfaction of his face was qualified by that fatigued irritability that nowadays always followed any exertion or excitement. “If I want things done? If I want things altered?” “Of course you may, of course you may. What’s the matter with you, Elly? What’s been putting ideers into your head? You got to have a directress to the thing; you must have a woman of education who knows a bit about things to look after the matrons and so on. Very likely she isn’t everything you want. She’s the only one we could get, and I don’t see——. Here I go and work hard for a year and more getting these things together to please you, and then suddenly you don’t like ’em. There’s a lot of the spoilt child in you, Elly—first and last. There they are....” They were silent for the rest of the journey to Putney, both being filled with incommunicable things. §12