emed on the verge of assault,
and then with a gesture between fury and despair, he wheeled about and
the purple-striped pyjamas danced in passionate retreat from her room.

"Autonomy!..."

A slam, a noise of assaulted furniture, and then silence.

Lady Harman stood for some moments regarding the paper-covered door that
had closed behind him. Then she bared her white forearm and pinched
it--hard.

It wasn't a dream! This thing had happened.

Sec.12

At a quarter to three in the morning, Lady Harman was surprised to find
herself wide awake. It was exactly a quarter to three when she touched
the stud of the ingenious little silver apparatus upon the table beside
her bed which reflected a luminous clock-face upon the ceiling. And her
mind was no longer resting in the attitude of thought but
extraordinarily active. It was active, but as she presently began to
realize it was not progressing. It was spinning violently round and
round the frenzied figure of a little man in purple-striped pyjamas
retreating from her presence, whirling away from her like something
blown before a gale. That seemed to her to symbolize the completeness of
the breach the day had made between her husband and herself.

She felt as a statesman might feel who had inadvertently--while
conducting some trivial negotiations--declared war.

She was profoundly alarmed. She perceived ahead of her abundant
possibilities of disagreeable things. And she wasn't by any means as
convinced of the righteousness of her cause as a happy warrior should
be. She had a natural disposition towards truthfulness and it worried
her mind that while she was struggling to assert her right to these
common social freedoms she should be tacitly admitting a kind of justice
in her husband's objections by concealing the fact that her afternoon's
companion was a man. She tried not to recognize the existence of a
doubt, but deep down in her mind there did indeed lurk a weakening
uncertainty about the right of a woman to free conversation with any man
but her own. Her reason disowned that uncertainty with scorn. But it
wouldn't go away for all her reason. She went about in her mind doing
her utmost to cut that doubt dead....

She tried to go back to the beginning and think it all out. And as she
was not used to thinking things out, the effort took the form of an
imaginary explanation to Mr. Brumley of the difficulties of her
position. She framed phrases. "You see, Mr. Brumley,"