He glanced at Lady Harman and she was standing over the ecstasies of her tremendous visitor, polite, attentive—with an entirely unemotional speculation in her eyes. Miss Sawbridge, stirred by the great waves of violent philoprogenitive enthusiasm that circled out from Lady Beach-Mandarin, had caught up the baby and was hugging it and addressing it in terms of humorous rapture, and the nurse and her assistant were keeping respectful but wary eyes upon the handling of their four charges. Miss Sharsper was taking in the children’s characteristics with a quick expertness. Mrs. Sawbridge stood a little in the background and caught Mr. Brumley’s eye and proffered a smile of sympathetic tolerance. Mr. Brumley was moved by a ridiculous impulse, which he just succeeded in suppressing, to say to Mrs. Sawbridge, “Yes, I admit it looks very well. But the essential point, you know, is that it isn’t so....” That it wasn’t so, indeed, entirely dominated his impression of that nursery. There was Lady Beach-Mandarin winning Lady Harman’s heart by every rule of the game, rejoicing effusively in those crowning triumphs of a woman’s being, there was Miss Sawbridge vociferous in support and Mrs. Sawbridge almost offering to join hands in rapturous benediction, and there was Lady Harman wearing her laurels, not indeed with indifference but with a curious detachment. One might imagine her genuinely anxious to understand why Lady Beach-Mandarin was in such a stupendous ebullition. One might have supposed her a mere cold-hearted intellectual if it wasn’t that something in her warm beauty absolutely forbade any such interpretation. There came to Mr. Brumley again a thought that had occurred to him first when Sir Isaac and Lady Harman had come together to Black Strand, which was that life had happened to this woman before she was ready for it, that her mind some years after her body was now coming to womanhood, was teeming with curiosity about all she had hitherto accepted, about Sir Isaac, about her children and all her circumstances.... There was a recapitulation of the invitations, a renewed offering of outlooks and vistas and Agatha Alimony. “You’ll not forget,” insisted Lady Beach-Mandarin. “You’ll not afterwards throw us over.” “No,” said Lady Harman, with that soft determination of hers. “I’ll certainly come.” “I’m so sorry, so very sorry, not to have seen Sir Isaac,” Lady Beach-Mandarin insisted. The raid had accomplished its every object and was drifting doorward. For a moment Lady Beach-Mandarin desisted from Lady Harman and threw her whole being into an eddying effort to submerge the already subjugated Mrs. Sawbridge. Miss Sawbridge was behind up the oak staircase explaining Sir Isaac’s interest in furniture-buying to Miss Sharsper. Mr. Brumley had his one moment with Lady Harman. “I gather,” he said, and abandoned that sentence. “I hope,” he said, “that you will have my little house down there. I like to think of _you_—walking in my garden.”