And then the thought of Georgina came like a blow upon his heart....

In his flurry he went on denying....

The subsequent conversation in the smoking-room was as red-eared and disagreeable for Sir Isaac as any conversation could be. "But how _could_ such a thing have happened?" he asked in a voice that sounded bleached to him. "How could such a thing have come about?" Their eyes were dreadful. Did they guess? Could they guess? Conscience within him was going up and down shouting out, "Georgina, your sister-in-law, Georgina," so loudly that he felt the whole smoking-room must be hearing it....

--8

As Lady Harman came up through the darkness of the drive to her home, she was already regretting very deeply that she had not been content to talk to Mr. Brumley in Kensington Gardens instead of accepting his picturesque suggestion of Hampton Court. There was an unpleasant waif-like feeling about this return. She was reminded of pictures published in the interests of Doctor Barnardo's philanthropies,--Dr.

Barnardo her favourite hero in real life,--in which wistful little outcasts creep longingly towards brightly lit but otherwise respectable homes. It wasn't at all the sort of feeling she would have chosen if she had had a choice of feelings. She was tired and dusty and as she came into the hall the bright light was blinding. Snagsby took her wrap. "Sir Isaac, me lady, 'as been enquiring for your ladyship," he communicated.

Sir Isaac appeared on the staircase.

"Good gracious, Elly!" he shouted. "Where you been?"

Lady Harman decided against an immediate reply. "I shall be ready for dinner in half an hour," she told Snagsby and went past him to the stairs.

Sir Isaac awaited her. "Where you been?" he repeated as she came up to him.

A housemaid on the staircase and the second nursemaid on the nursery landing above shared Sir Isaac's eagerness to hear her answer. But they did not hear her answer, for Lady Harman with a movement that was all too reminiscent of her mother's in the garden, swept past him towards the door of her own room. He followed her and shut the door on the thwarted listeners.

"Here!" he said, with a connubial absence of restraint. "Where the devil you been? What the deuce do you think you've been getting up to?"

She had been calculating her answers since the moment she had realized that she was to return home at a disadvantage. (It is not my business to blame her for a certain disingenuousness; it is my business simply to record it.) "I went out to lunch at Lady Beach-Mandarin's," she said. "I told you I meant to."

"Lunch!" he cried. "Why, it's eight!"

"I met--some people. I met Agatha Alimony. I have a perfect right to go out to lunch----"

"You met a nice crew I'll bet. But that don't account for your being out to eight, does it? With all the confounded household doing as it pleases!"

"I went on--to see the borders at Hampton Court."

"With _her_?"

"_Yes_," said Lady Harman....

It wasn't what she had meant to happen. It was an inglorious declension from her contemplated pose of dignified a.s.sertion. She was impelled to do her utmost to get away from this lie she had uttered at once, to eliminate Agatha from the argument by an emphatic generalization. "I've a perfect right," she said, suddenly nearly breathless, "to go to Hampton Court with anyone I please, talk about anything I like and stay there as long as I think fit."

He squeezed his thin lips together for a silent moment and then retorted. "You've got nothing of the sort, nothing of the sort. You've got to do your duty like everybody else in the world, and your duty is to be in this house controlling it--and not gossiping about London just where any silly fancy takes you."

"I don't think that _is_ my duty," said Lady Harman after a slight pause to collect her forces.

"Of _course_ it's your duty. You know it's your duty. You know perfectly well. It's only these rotten, silly, degenerate, decadent fools who've got ideas into you----" The sentence staggered under its load of adjectives like a camel under the last straw and collapsed. "_See?_" he said.

Lady Harman knitted her brows.

"I do my duty," she began.

But Sir Isaac was now resolved upon eloquence. His mind was full with the acc.u.mulations of an extremely long and bitter afternoon and urgent to discharge. He began to answer her and then a pa.s.sion of rage flooded him. Suddenly he wanted to shout and use abusive expressions and it seemed to him there was nothing to prevent his shouting and using abusive expressions. So he did. "Call this your duty," he said, "gadding about with some infernal old suffragette----"

He paused to gather force. He had never quite let himself go to his wife before; he had never before quite let himself go to anyone. He had always been in every crisis just a little too timid to let himself go.

But a wife is privileged. He sought strength and found it in words from which he had hitherto abstained. It was not a discourse to which print could do justice; it flickered from issue to issue. He touched upon Georgina, upon the stiffness of Mrs. Sawbridge's manner, upon the neurotic weakness of Georgina's unmarried state, upon the general decay of feminine virtue in the community, upon the laxity of modern literature, upon the dependent state of Lady Harman, upon the unfairness of their relations which gave her every luxury while he spent his days in arduous toil, upon the shame and annoyance in the eyes of his servants that her unexplained absence had caused him.

He emphasized his speech by gestures. He thrust out one rather large ill-shaped hand at her with two vibrating fingers extended. His ears became red, his nose red, his eyes seemed red and all about these points his face was wrathful white. His hair rose up into stiff scared listening ends. He had his rights, he had some _little_ claim to consideration surely, he might be just n.o.body but he wasn't going to stand this much anyhow. He gave her fair warning. What was she, what did she know of the world into which she wanted to rush? He lapsed into views of Lady Beach-Mandarin--unfavourable views. I wish Lady Beach-Mandarin could have heard him....

Ever and again Lady Harman sought to speak. This incessant voice confused and baffled her; she had a just attentive mind at bottom and down there was a most weakening feeling that there must indeed be some misdeed in her to evoke so impa.s.sioned a storm. She had a curious and disconcerting sense of responsibility for his dancing exasperation, she felt she was to blame for it, just as years ago she had felt she was to blame for his tears when he had urged her so desperately to marry him.

Some irrational instinct made her want to allay him. It is the supreme feminine weakness, that wish to allay. But she was also clinging desperately to her resolution to proclaim her other forthcoming engagements. Her will hung on to that as a man hangs on to a mountain path in a thunderburst. She stood gripping her dressing-table and ever and again trying to speak. But whenever she did so Sir Isaac lifted a hand and cried almost threateningly: "You hear me out, Elly! You hear me out!" and went on a little faster....

(Limburger in his curious "_s.e.xuelle Unterschiede der Seele_," points out as a probably universal distinction between the s.e.xes that when a man scolds a woman, if only he scolds loudly enough and long enough, conviction of sin is aroused, while in the reverse case the result is merely a murderous impulse. This he further says is not understood by women, who hope by scolding to produce the similar effect upon men that they themselves would experience. The pa.s.sage is ill.u.s.trated by figures of ducking stools and followed by some carefully a.n.a.lyzed statistics of connubial crime in Berlin in the years 1901-2. But in this matter let the student compare the achievement of Paulina in _The Winter's Tale_ and reflect upon his own life. And moreover it is difficult to estimate how far the twinges of conscience that Lady Harman was feeling were not due to an entirely different cause, the falsification of her position by the lie she had just told Sir Isaac.)

And presently upon this noisy scene in the great pink bedroom, with Sir Isaac walking about and standing and turning and gesticulating and Lady Harman clinging on to her dressing-table, and painfully divided between her new connections, her sense of guilty deception and the deep instinctive responsibilities of a woman's nature, came, like one of those rows of dots that are now so frequent and so helpful in the art of fiction, the surging, deep, a.s.suaging note of Snagsby's gong: Booooooom.

Boom. Boooooom....

"d.a.m.n it!" cried Sir Isaac, smiting at the air with both fists clenched and speaking as though this was Ellen's crowning misdeed, "and we aren't even dressed for dinner!"

--9

Dinner had something of the stiffness of court ceremonial.

Mrs. Sawbridge, perhaps erring on the side of discretion, had consumed a little soup and a wing of chicken in her own room. Sir Isaac was down first and his wife found him grimly astride before the great dining-room fire awaiting her. She had had her dark hair dressed with extreme simplicity and had slipped on a blue velvet tea-gown, but she had been delayed by a visit to the nursery, where the children were now flushed and uneasily asleep.

Husband and wife took their places at the genuine Sheraton dining-table--one of the very best pieces Sir Isaac had ever picked up--and were waited on with a hushed, scared dexterity by Snagsby and the footman.

Lady Harman and her husband exchanged no remarks during the meal; Sir Isaac was a little noisy with his soup as became a man who controls honest indignation, and once he complained briefly in a slightly hoa.r.s.e voice to Snagsby about the state of one of the rolls. Between the courses he leant back in his chair and made faint sounds with his teeth.

These were the only breach of the velvety quiet. Lady Harman was surprised to discover herself hungry, but she ate with thoughtful dignity and gave her mind to the attempted digestion of the confusing interview she had just been through.

It was a very indigestible interview.

On the whole her heart hardened again. With nourishment and silence her spirit recovered a little from its abas.e.m.e.nt, and her resolution to a.s.sert her freedom to go hither and thither and think as she chose renewed itself. She tried to plan some way of making her declaration so that she would not again be overwhelmed by a torrent of response. Should she speak to him at the end of dinner? Should she speak to him while Snagsby was in the room? But he might behave badly even with Snagsby in the room and she could not bear to think of him behaving badly to her in the presence of Snagsby. She glanced at him over the genuine old silver bowl of roses in the middle of the table--all the roses were good _new_ sorts--and tried to estimate how he might behave under various methods of declaration.

The dinner followed its appointed ritual to the dessert. Came the wine and Snagsby placed the cigars and a little silver lamp beside his master.

She rose slowly with a speech upon her lips. Sir Isaac remained seated looking up at her with a mitigated fury in his little red-brown eyes.

The speech receded from her lips again.

"I think," she said after a strained pause, "I will go and see how mother is now."

"She's only shamming," said Sir Isaac belatedly to her back as she went out of the room.

She found her mother in a wrap before her fire and made her dutiful enquiries.

"It's only quite a _slight_ headache," Mrs. Sawbridge confessed.

"But Isaac was so upset about Georgina and about"--she flinched--"about--everything, that I thought it better to be out of the way."

"What exactly has Georgina done?"