she had meant to happen. It was an inglorious declension
from her contemplated pose of dignified assertion. 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 accumulations of an extremely long and bitter afternoon and urgent
to discharge. He began to answer her and then a passion 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 th