orch
nor burn but gilds and warms deliciously, that summer sunshine which
only northward islands know.

Recovering from his first astonishment and his first misadventure, Mr.
Brumley was soon himself again, talkative, interesting, subtly and
gently aggressive. For once one may use a hackneyed phrase without the
slightest exaggeration; he was charmed...

He was one of those very natural-minded men with active imaginations who
find women the most interesting things in a full and interesting
universe. He was an entirely good man and almost professionally on the
side of goodness, his pen was a pillar of the home and he was hostile
and even actively hostile to all those influences that would undermine
and change--anything; but he did find women attractive. He watched them
and thought about them, he loved to be with them, he would take great
pains to please and interest them, and his mind was frequently dreaming
quite actively of them, of championing them, saying wonderful and
impressive things to them, having great friendships with them, adoring
them and being adored by them. At times he had to ride this interest on
the curb. At times the vigour of its urgencies made him inconsistent and
secretive.... Comparatively his own sex was a matter of indifference to
him. Indeed he was a very normal man. Even such abstractions as Goodness
and Justice had rich feminine figures in his mind, and when he sat down
to write criticism at his desk, that pretty little slut of a Delphic
Sibyl presided over his activities.

So that it was a cultivated as well as an attentive eye that studied the
movements of Lady Harman and an experienced ear that weighed the words
and cadences of her entirely inadequate and extremely expressive share
in their conversation. He had enjoyed the social advantages of a popular
and presentable man of letters, and he had met a variety of ladies; but
he had never yet met anyone at all like Lady Harman. She was pretty and
quite young and fresh; he doubted if she was as much as four-and-twenty;
she was as simple-mannered as though she was ever so much younger than
that, and dignified as though she was ever so much older; and she had a
sort of lustre of wealth about her----. One met it sometimes in young
richly married Jewesses, but though she was very dark she wasn't at all
of that type; he was inclined to think she must be Welsh. This manifest
spending of great lots of money on the richest, finest and fluffiest
thin