“Here,” said Sir Isaac, flinging open a white door, “is your dressing-room.” She was chiefly aware of a huge white bath standing on a marble slab under a window of crinkled pink-stained glass, and of a wide space of tiled floor with white fur rugs. “And here,” he said, opening a panel that was covered by wall paper, “is _my_ door.” “Yes,” he said to the question in her eyes, “that’s my room. You got this one—for your own. It’s how people do now. People of our position.... There’s no lock.” He shut the door slowly again and surveyed the splendours he had made with infinite satisfaction. “All right?” he said, “isn’t it?”... He turned to the pearl for which the casket was made, and slipped an arm about her waist. His arm tightened. “Got a kiss for me, Elly?” he whispered. At this moment, a gong almost worthy of Snagsby summoned them to tea. It came booming in to them with a vast officious arrogance that brooked no denial. It made one understand the imperatives of the Last Trump, albeit with a greater dignity.... There was a little awkward pause. “I’m so dirty and trainy,” she said, disengaging herself from his arm. “And we ought to go to tea.” §3 The same exceptional aptitude of Sir Isaac for detailed administration that had relieved his wife from the need of furnishing and arranging a home, made the birth of her children and the organization of her nursery an almost detached affair for her. Sir Isaac went about in a preoccupied way, whistling between his teeth and planning with expert advice the equipment of an ideal nursery, and her mother and his mother became as it were voluminous clouds of uncommunicative wisdom and precaution. In addition the conversation of Miss Crump, the extremely skilled and costly nurse, who arrived a full Advent before the child, fresh from the birth of a viscount, did much to generalize whatever had remained individual of this thing that was happening. With so much intelligence focussed, there seemed to Lady Harman no particular reason why she should not do her best to think as little as possible about the impending affair, which meant for her, she now understood quite clearly, more and more discomfort culminating in an agony. The summer promised to be warm, and Sir Isaac took a furnished house for the great event in the hills behind Torquay. The maternal instinct is not a magic thing, it has to be evoked and developed, and I decline to believe it is indicative of any peculiar unwomanliness in Lady Harman that when at last she beheld her newly-born daughter in the hands of the experts, she moaned druggishly, “Oh! please take it away. Oh! Take it—away. Anywhere—anywhere.”