When one came to think it over, the Hostels did complicate the problem. It was ingenious of Sir Isaac.... It was infernally ingenious of Sir Isaac.... He could not remain in the club for fear that somebody might presently come talking to him and interrupt his train of thought. He went out into the streets. These Hostels upset everything. What he had supposed to be a way of escape was really the mouth of a net. Whichever way they turned Sir Isaac crippled them.... §4 Mr. Brumley grew so angry that presently even the strangers in the street annoyed him. He turned his face homeward. He hated dilemmas; he wanted always to deny them, to thrust them aside, to take impossible third courses. “For three years,” shouted Mr. Brumley, free at last in his study to give way to his rage, “for three years I’ve been making her care for these things. And then—and then—they turn against me!” A violent, incredibly undignified wrath against the dead man seized him. He threw books about the room. He cried out vile insults and mingled words of an unfortunate commonness with others of extreme rarity. He wanted to go off to Kensal Green and hammer at the grave there and tell the departed knight exactly what he thought of him. Then presently he became calmer, he lit a pipe, picked up the books from the floor, and meditated revenges upon Sir Isaac’s memory. I deplore my task of recording these ungracious moments in Mr. Brumley’s love history. I deplore the ease with which men pass from loving and serving women to an almost canine fight for them. It is the ugliest essential of romance. There is indeed much in the human heart that I deplore. But Mr. Brumley was exasperated by disappointment. He was sore, he was raw. Driven by an intolerable desire to explore every possibility of the situation, full indeed of an unholy vindictiveness, he went off next morning with strange questions to Maxwell Hartington. He put the case as a general case. “Lady Harman?” said Maxwell Hartington. “No, not particularly Lady Harman. A general principle. What are people—what are women tied up in such a way to do?” Precedents were quoted and possibilities weighed. Mr. Brumley was flushed, vague but persistent. “Suppose,” he said, “that they love each other passionately—and their work, whatever it may be, almost as passionately. Is there no way——?” “He’ll have a _dum casta_ clause right enough,” said Maxwell Hartington. “_Dum——? Dum casta!_ But, oh! anyhow that’s out of the question—absolutely,” said Mr. Brumley.