s 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...?

I am setting down here as clearly as possible what wasn't by any means
clear in Lady Harman's mind. I am giving you side by side phases that
never came side by side in her thoughts but which followed and ousted
and obliterated one another. She had moods of triviality. She had moods
of magnificence. She had moods of intense secret hostility to her urgent
little husband, and moods of genial tolerance for everything there was
in her life. She had moods, and don't we all have moods?--of scepticism
and cynicism, much profounder than the conventions and limitations of
novel-writing permit us to tell here. And for hardly any of these moods
had she terms and recognitions....

It isn't a natural thing to keep on worrying about the morality of
one's material prosperity. These are proclivities superinduced by modern
conditions of the conscience. There is a natural resistance in every
healthy human being to such distressful heart-searchings. Strong
instincts battled in Lady Harman against this intermittent sense of
responsibility that was beginning to worry her. An immense lot of her
was for simply running away from these troublesome considerations, for
covering herself up from them, for distraction.

And about this time she happened upon "Elizabeth and her German Garden,"
and was very greatly delighted and stimulated by that little sister of
Montaigne. She was charmed by the book's fresh gaiety, by its gallant
resolve to set off all the good things there are in this world, the
sunshine and flowers and laughter, against the limitations and
thwartings and disappointments of life. For a time it seemed to her that
these brave consolations were solutions, and she was stirred by an
imitative passion. How stupid had she not been to let life and Sir Isaac
overcome her! She felt that she must make herself like Elizabeth,
exactly like Elizabeth; she tried forthwith, and a certain difficulty
she found, a certain deadness, she ascribed to the square modernity of
her house and something in the Putney air. The house was too large, it
dominated the garden and controlled her. She felt she must get away to
some place that was chiefly exterior, in the sunshine, far from towns