Exactly three weeks after that first encounter between Lady Beach-Mandarin and Sir Isaac Harman, Mr. Brumley found himself one of a luncheon party at that lady’s house in Temperley Square and talking very freely and indiscreetly about the Harmans. Lady Beach-Mandarin always had her luncheons in a family way at a large round table so that nobody could get out of her range, and she insisted upon conversation being general, except for her mother who was impenetrably deaf and the Swiss governess of her only daughter Phyllis who was incomprehensible in any European tongue. The mother was incalculably old and had been a friend of Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset; she maintained an intermittent monologue about the private lives of those great figures; nobody paid the slightest attention to her but one felt she enriched the table with an undertow of literary associations. A small dark stealthy butler and a convulsive boy with hair (apparently) taking the place of eyes waited. On this occasion Lady Beach-Mandarin had gathered together two cousins, maiden ladies from Perth, wearing valiant hats, Toomer the wit and censor, and Miss Sharsper the novelist (whom Toomer detested), a gentleman named Roper whom she had invited under a misapprehension that he was the Arctic Roper, and Mr. Brumley. She had tried Mr. Roper with questions about penguins, seals, cold and darkness, icebergs and glaciers, Captain Scott, Doctor Cook and the shape of the earth, and all in vain, and feeling at last that something was wrong, she demanded abruptly whether Mr. Brumley had sold his house. “I’m selling it,” said Mr. Brumley, “by almost imperceptible degrees.” “He haggles?” “Haggles and higgles. He higgles passionately. He goes white and breaks into a cold perspiration. He wants me now to include the gardener’s tools—in whatever price we agree upon.” “A rich man like that ought to be easy and generous,” said Lady Beach-Mandarin. “Then he wouldn’t be a rich man like that,” said Mr. Toomer. “But doesn’t it distress you highly, Mr. Brumley,” one of the Perth ladies asked, “to be leaving Euphemia’s Home to strangers? The man may go altering it.” “That—that weighs with me very much,” said Mr. Brumley, recalled to his professions. “There—I put my trust in Lady Harman.” “You’ve seen her again?” asked Lady Beach-Mandarin. “Yes. She came with him—a few days ago. That couple interests me more and more. So little akin.” “There’s eighteen years between them,” said Toomer. “It’s one of those cases,” began Mr. Brumley with a note of scientific detachment, “where one is really tempted to be ultra-feminist. It’s clear, he uses every advantage. He’s her owner, her keeper, her obstinate insensitive little tyrant.... And yet there’s a sort of effect, as though nothing was decided.... As if she was only just growing up.” “They’ve been married six or seven years,” said Toomer. “She was just eighteen.”