ng.

All the paths of enlightenment he thought of, led to Lady Harman.

Sec.9

That evening George Edmund, who had come home with his mind aglitter
with cinematograph impressions, found his father a patient but
inattentive listener. For indeed Mr. Brumley was not listening at all;
he was thinking and thinking. He made noises like "Ah!" and "Um," at
George Edmund and patted the boy's shoulder kindly and repeated words
unintelligently, such as, "Red Indians, eh!" or "Came out of the water
backwards! My eye!"

Sometimes he made what George Edmund regarded as quite footling
comments. Still George Edmund had to tell someone and there was no one
else to tell. So George Edmund went on talking and Mr. Brumley went on
thinking.

Sec.10

Mr Brumley could not sleep at all until it was nearly five. His
intelligence seemed to be making up at last for years of speculative
restraint. In a world for the most part given up to slumber Mr. Brumley
may be imagined as clambering hand over fist in the silences, feverishly
and wonderfully overtaking his age. In the morning he got up pallid and
he shaved badly, but he was a generation ahead of his own Euphemia
series, and the school of charm and quiet humour and of letting things
slide with a kind of elegant donnishness, had lost him for ever....

And among all sorts of things that had come to him in that vast gulf of
nocturnal thinking was some vivid self-examination. At last he got to
that. He had been dragged down to very elemental things indeed by the
manifest completeness of Lady Harman's return to her husband. He had had
at last to look at himself starkly for the male he was, to go beneath
the gentlemanly airs, the refined and elegant virilities of his habitual
poses. Either this thing was unendurable--there were certainly moments
when it came near to being unendurable--or it was not. On the whole and
excepting mere momentary paroxysms it was not, and so he had to
recognize and he did recognize with the greatest amazement that there
could be something else besides sexual attraction and manoeuvring and
possession between a beautiful woman and a man like himself. He loved
Lady Harman, he loved her, he now began to realize just how much, and
she could defeat him and reject him as a conceivable lover, turn that
aside as a thing impossible, shame him as the romantic school would
count shame and still command him with her confident eyes and her
friendly extended hands. He admitted