She began to tell him of the conflict between Mrs. Pembrose and Alice Burnet that threatened the latter with extinction. She found it more convenient to talk at first as though the strands of decision were still all in her hands; afterwards she could go on to the peculiar complication of the situation through the unexpected weakening of her position in relation to Mrs. Pembrose. She described the particular of the new trouble, the perplexing issue between the “lady-like,” for which as a feminine ideal there was so much to be said on the one hand and the “genial,” which was also an admirable quality, on the other. “You see,” she said, “it’s very rude to cough at people and make noises, but then it’s so difficult to explain to the others that it’s equally rude to go past people and pretend not to see or hear them. Girls of that sort always seem so much more underbred when they are trying to be superior than when they are not; they get so stiff and—exasperating. And this keeping out of the Union because it isn’t genteel, it’s the very essence of the trouble with all these employees. We’ve discussed that so often. Those drapers’ girls seem full of such cold, selfish, base, pretentious notions; much more full even than our refreshment girls. And then as if it wasn’t all difficult enough comes Mrs. Pembrose and her wardresses doing all sorts of hard, clumsy things, and one can’t tell them just how little they are qualified to judge good behaviour. Their one idea of discipline is to speak to people as if they were servants and to be distant and crushing. And long before one can do anything come trouble and tart replies and reports of “gross impertinence” and expulsion. We keep on expelling girls. This is the fourth time girls have had to go. What is to become of them? I know this Burnet girl quite well as you know. She’s just a human, kindly little woman.... She’ll feel disgraced.... How can I let a thing like that occur?” She spread her hands apart over the tea things. Mr. Brumley held his chin in his hand and said “Um” and looked judicial, and admired Lady Harman very much, and tried to grasp the whole trouble and wring out a solution. He made some admirable generalizations about the development of a new social feeling in response to changed conditions, but apart from a remark that Mrs. Pembrose was all organization and no psychology, and quite the wrong person for her position, he said nothing in the slightest degree contributory to the particular drama under consideration. From that utterance, however, Lady Harman would no doubt have gone on to the slow, tentative but finally conclusive statement of the new difficulty that had arisen out of her husband’s jealousy and to the discussion of the more fundamental decisions it forced upon her, if a peculiar blight had not fallen upon their conversation and robbed it at last of even an appearance of ease. This blight crept upon their minds.... It began first with Mr. Brumley.