ur," said one, "isn't what I call a
proper time to pack a box in."

In the nursery the children were disputing furiously what toys were to
be taken into the country.

Lady Harman was a very greatly astonished woman. The surprise had been
entirely successful.

Sec.3

It has been said, I think, by Limburger, in his already cited work, that
nothing so excites and prevails with woman as rapid and extensive
violence, sparing and yet centring upon herself, and certainly it has to
be recorded that, so far from being merely indignant, and otherwise a
helplessly pathetic spectacle, Lady Harman found, though perhaps she did
not go quite so far as to admit to herself that she found, this vehement
flight from the social, moral, and intellectual contaminations of London
an experience not merely stimulating but entertaining. It lifted her
delicate eyebrows. Something, it may have been a sense of her own
comparative immobility amid this sudden extraordinary bustle of her
home, put it into her head that so it was long ago that Lot must have
bundled together his removable domesticities.

She made one attempt at protest. "Isaac," she said, "isn't all this
rather ridiculous----"

"Don't speak to me!" he answered, waving her off. "Don't speak to me!
You should have spoken before, Elly. _Now_,--things are happening."

The image of Black Strand as, after all, a very pleasant place indeed
returned to her. She adjudicated upon the nursery difficulties, and then
went in a dreamlike state of mind to preside over her own more personal
packing. She found Peters exercising all that indecisive helplessness
which is characteristic of ladies' maids the whole world over.

It was from Peters she learnt that the entire household, men and maids
together, was to be hurled into Surrey. "Aren't they all rather
surprised?" asked Lady Harman.

"Yes, m'm," said Peters on her knees, "but of course if the drains is
wrong the sooner we all go the better."

(So that was what he had told them.)

A vibration and a noise of purring machinery outside drew the lady to
the window, and she discovered that at least four of the large
motor-vans from the International Stores were to co-operate in the trek.
There they were waiting, massive and uniform. And then she saw Snagsby
in his alpaca jacket _running_ towards the house from the gates. Of
course he was running only very slightly indeed, but still he was
running, and the expression of distress upon his fac