He was a little distraught because he had just seen Sir Isaac step forward in a crouching attitude from beyond the edge of the lilacs, peer at the tea-table with a serpent-like intentness and then dart back convulsively into cover.... If Lady Beach-Mandarin saw him Mr. Brumley felt that anything might happen. §4 Lady Beach-Mandarin always let herself go about children. It would be unjust to the general richness of Lady Beach-Mandarin to say that she excelled herself on this occasion. On all occasions Lady Beach-Mandarin excelled herself. But never had Mr. Brumley noted quite so vividly Lady Beach-Mandarin’s habitual self-surpassingness. She helped him, he felt, to understand better those stories of great waves that sweep in from the ocean and swamp islands and devastate whole littorals. She poured into the Harman nursery and filled every corner of it. She rose to unprecedented heights therein. It seemed to him at moments that they ought to make marks on the walls, like the marks one sees on the houses in the lower valley of the Main to record the more memorable floods. “The dears!” she cried: “the _little_ things!” before the nursery door was fairly opened. (There should have been a line for that at once on the jamb just below the lintel.) The nursery revealed itself as a large airy white and green apartment entirely free from old furniture and done rather in the style of an æsthetically designed hospital, with a tremendously humorous decorative frieze of cocks and puppies and very bright-coloured prints on the walls. The dwarfish furniture was specially designed in green-stained wood and the floor was of cork carpet diversified by white furry rugs. The hospital quality was enhanced by the uniformed and disciplined appearance of the middle-aged and reliable head nurse and her subdued but intelligent subordinate. Three sturdy little girls, with a year step between each of them, stood up to receive Lady Beach-Mandarin’s invasion; an indeterminate baby sprawled regardless of its dignity on a rug. “Aah!” cried Lady Beach-Mandarin, advancing in open order. “Come and be hugged, you dears! Come and be hugged!” Before she knelt down and enveloped their shrinking little persons Mr. Brumley was able to observe that they were pretty little things, but not the beautiful children he could have imagined from Lady Harman. Peeping through their infantile delicacy, hints all too manifest of Sir Isaac’s characteristically pointed nose gave Mr. Brumley a peculiar—a eugenic, qualm.