atement of the case.

Sir Isaac, reverting to his tone of almost elaborate reasonableness,
expanded his view that it was impossible for husband and wife to have
two different sets of friends;--let alone every other consideration, he
explained, it wasn't convenient for them not to be about together, and
as for reading or thinking what she chose he had never made any
objection to anything unless it was "decadent rot" that any decent man
would object to his womanfolk seeing, rot she couldn't understand the
drift of--fortunately. Blear-eyed humbug.... He checked himself on the
verge of an almost archiepiscopal outbreak in order to be patiently
reasonable again. He was prepared to concede that it would be very nice
if Lady Harman could be a good wife and also an entirely independent
person, very nice, but the point was--his tone verged on the
ironical--that she couldn't be two entirely different people at the same
time.

"But you have your friends," she said, "you go away alone----"

"That's different," said Sir Isaac with a momentary note of annoyance.
"It's business. It isn't that I want to."

Lady Harman had a feeling that they were neither of them gaining any
ground. She blamed herself for her lack of lucidity. She began again,
taking up the matter at a fresh point. She said that her life at present
wasn't full, that it was only half a life, that it was just home and
marriage and nothing else; he had his business, he went out into the
world, he had politics and--"all sorts of things"; she hadn't these
interests; she had nothing in the place of them----

Sir Isaac closed this opening rather abruptly by telling her that she
should count herself lucky she hadn't, and again the conversation was
suspended for a time.

"But I want to know about these things," she said.

Sir Isaac took that musingly.

"There's things go on," she said; "outside home. There's social work,
there's interests----Am I never to take any part--in that?"

Sir Isaac still reflected.

"There's one thing," he said at last, "I want to know. We'd better have
it out--_now_."

But he hesitated for a time.

"Elly!" he blundered, "you aren't--you aren't getting somehow--not fond
of me?"

She made no immediate reply.

"Look here!" he said in an altered voice. "Elly! there isn't something
below all this? There isn't something been going on that I don't know?"

Her eyes with a certain terror in their depths questioned him.

"Something," he said