't have plastering."

"There's canvas and paper, of course," said the young architect.

"There's canvas and paper," said Sir Isaac. "And those new patent
building units, so far as the corridor goes. I've seen the ads."

"We can whitewash 'em. They won't show much," said the young architect.

"Oh if you do things in _that_ way," said the builder from Aleham with
bitter resignation....

Sec.2

The morning dawned at last when the surprise was ripe. It was four days
after Susan's visit, and she was due again on the morrow with the money
that would enable her employer to go to Lady Viping's now imminent
dinner. Lady Harman had had to cut the Social Friends' meeting
altogether, but the day before the surprise Agatha Alimony had come to
tea in her jobbed car, and they had gone together to the committee
meeting of the Shakespear Dinner Society. Sir Isaac had ignored that
defiance, and it was an unusually confident and quite unsuspicious woman
who descended in a warm October sunshine to the surprise. In the
breakfast-room she discovered an awe-stricken Snagsby standing with his
plate-basket before her husband, and her husband wearing strange unusual
tweeds and gaiters,--buttoned gaiters, and standing a-straddle,--unusually
a-straddle, on the hearthrug.

"That's enough, Snagsby," said Sir Isaac, at her entrance. "Bring it
all."

She met Snagsby's eye, and it was portentous.

Latterly Snagsby's eye had lost the assurance of his former days. She
had noted it before, she noted it now more than ever; as though he was
losing confidence, as though he was beginning to doubt, as though the
world he had once seemed to rule grew insecure beneath his feet. For a
moment she met his eye; it might have been a warning he conveyed, it
might have been an appeal for sympathy, and then he had gone. She looked
at the table. Sir Isaac had breakfasted acutely.

In silence, among the wreckage and with a certain wonder growing, Lady
Harman attended to her needs.

Sir Isaac cleared his throat.

She became aware that he had spoken. "What did you say, Isaac?" she
asked, looking up. He seemed to have widened his straddle almost
dangerously, and he spoke with a certain conscious forcefulness.

"We're going to move out of this house, Elly," he said. "We're going
down into the country right away."

She sat back in her chair and regarded his pinched and determined
visage.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"I've bought that house of Brumley