an air of having settled
this business completely, and being now free for the tranquil
contemplation of horticulture. But Lady Harman had still something to
say.

"I am going to _all_ these things," she said. "I said I would, and I
will."

He didn't seem immediately to hear her. He made the little noise with
his teeth that was habitual to him. Then he came towards her. "This is
your infernal sister," he said.

Lady Harman reflected. "No," she decided. "It's myself."

"I might have known when we asked her here," said Sir Isaac with an
habitual disregard of her judgments that was beginning to irritate her
more and more. "You can't take on all these people. They're not the sort
of people we want to know."

"I want to know them," said Lady Harman.

"I don't."

"I find them interesting," Lady Harman said. "And I've promised."

"Well you oughtn't to have promised without consulting me."

Her reply was the material of much subsequent reflection on the part of
Sir Isaac. There was something in her manner....

"You see, Isaac," she said, "you kept so out of the way...."

In the pause that followed her words, Mrs. Sawbridge appeared from the
garden smiling with a determined amiability, and bearing a great bunch
of the best roses (which Sir Isaac hated to have picked) in her hands.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE BEGINNINGS OF LADY HARMAN

Sec.1

Lady Harman had been married when she was just eighteen.

Mrs. Sawbridge was the widow of a solicitor who had been killed in a
railway collision while his affairs, as she put it, were unsettled; and
she had brought up her two daughters in a villa at Penge upon very
little money, in a state of genteel protest. Ellen was the younger. She
had been a sturdy dark-eyed doll-dragging little thing and had then shot
up very rapidly. She had gone to a boarding-school at Wimbledon because
Mrs. Sawbridge thought the Penge day-school had made Georgina opiniated
and unladylike, besides developing her muscular system to an unrefined
degree. The Wimbledon school was on less progressive lines, and anyhow
Ellen grew taller and more feminine than her sister and by seventeen was
already womanly, dignified and intensely admired by a number of
schoolmates and a large circle of their cousins and brothers. She was
generally very good and only now and then broke out with a venturesome
enterprise that hurt nobody. She got out of a skylight, for example,
and perambulated the roof in the moonsh