ful with her "Man of Wrath."
Evidently there was some temperamental difference, or something in her
situation, that altered the values of the affair. It was clearly a
different sort of man for one thing. She didn't feel a bit gay, and her
profound and deepening indignation with the alternative to this
stagnation was tainted by a sense of weakness and incapacity.

She came very near surrender several times. There were afternoons of
belated ripened warmth, a kind of summer that had been long in the
bottle, with a certain lassitude in the air and a blue haze among the
trees, that made her feel the folly of all resistances to fate. Why,
after all, shouldn't she take life as she found it, that is to say, as
Sir Isaac was prepared to give it to her? He wasn't really so bad, she
told herself. The children--their noses were certainly a little sharp,
but there might be worse children. The next might take after herself
more. Who was she to turn upon her appointed life and declare it wasn't
good enough? Whatever happened the world was still full of generous and
beautiful things, trees, flowers, sunset and sunrise, music and mist and
morning dew.... And as for this matter of the sweated workers, the
harshness of the business, the ungracious competition, suppose if
instead of fighting her husband with her weak powers, she persuaded him.
She tried to imagine just exactly how he might be persuaded....

She looked up and discovered with an extraordinary amazement Mr. Brumley
with eager gestures and a flushed and excited visage hurrying towards
her across the croquet lawn.

Sec.6

Lady Viping's dinner-party had been kept waiting exactly thirty-five
minutes for Lady Harman. Sir Isaac, with a certain excess of zeal, had
intercepted the hasty note his wife had written to account for her
probable absence. The party was to have centred entirely upon Lady
Harman, it consisted either of people who knew her already, or of people
who were to have been specially privileged to know her, and Lady Viping
telephoned twice to Putney before she abandoned hope. "It's
disconnected," she said, returning in despair from her second struggle
with the great public service. "They can't get a reply."

"It's that little wretch," said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "He hasn't let her
come. _I_ know him."

"It's like losing a front tooth," said Lady Viping, surveying her table
as she entered the dining-room.

"But surely--she would have written," said Mr. Brumley,