She was in a mood of discovery. She sat in the room that was all furnished in pink (her favourite colour) and read a bitter, malicious, coarsely written and yet insidiously credible account of her husband’s business methods. Something within herself seemed to answer, “But didn’t you know this all along?” That large conviction that her wealth and position were but the culmination of a great and honourable social service, a conviction that had been her tacit comfort during much distasteful loyalty seemed to shrivel and fade. No doubt the writer was a thwarted blackmailer; even her accustomed mind could distinguish a twang of some such vicious quality in his sentences; but that did not alter the realities he exhibited and exaggerated. There was a description of how Sir Isaac pounced on his managers that was manifestly derived from a manager he had dismissed. It was dreadfully like him. Convincingly like him. There was a statement of the wages he paid his girl assistants and long extracts from his codes of rules and schedules of fines.... When she put down the paper she was suddenly afflicted by a vivid vision of Susan Burnet’s father, losing heart and not knowing what to do. She had an unreasonable feeling that Susan Burnet’s father must have been a small, kindly, furry, bunnyish, little man. Of course there had to be progress and the survival of the fittest. She found herself weighing what she imagined Susan Burnet’s father to be like, against the ferrety face, stooping shoulders and scheming whistle of Sir Isaac. There were times now when she saw her husband with an extreme distinctness. §9 As this cold and bracing realization that all was not right with her position, with Sir Isaac’s business procedure and the world generally, took possession of Lady Harman’s thoughts there came also with it and arising out of it quite a series of new moods and dispositions. At times she was very full of the desire “to do something,” something that would, as it were, satisfy and assuage this growing uneasiness of responsibility in her mind. At times her consuming wish was not to assuage but escape from this urgency. It worried her and made her feel helpless, and she wanted beyond anything else to get back to that child’s world where all experiences are adventurous and everything is finally right. She felt, I think, that it was a little unfair to her that this something within her should be calling upon her to take all sorts of things gravely—hadn’t she been a good wife and brought four children into the world...?