hings!" 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
aesthetically 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.

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 g