nsuspiciousness of the
ancient selfish game of Him and Her that he had been so ardently
playing.... He idealized and worshipped this clean blindness. He abased
himself before it.

"No," cried Mr. Brumley suddenly in the silence of the night, "I will
rise again. I will rise again by love out of these morasses.... She
shall be my goddess and by virtue of her I will end this incessant
irrational craving for women.... I will be her friend and her faithful
friend."

He lay still for a time and then he said in a whisper very humbly: "_God
help me_."

He set himself in those still hours which are so endless and so
profitable to men in their middle years, to think how he might make
himself the perfect lover instead of a mere plotter for desire, and how
he might purge himself from covetousness and possessiveness and learn to
serve.

And if very speedily his initial sincerity was tinged again with egotism
and if he drowsed at last into a portrait of himself as beautifully and
admirably self-sacrificial, you must not sneer too readily at him, for
so God has made the soul of Mr. Brumley and otherwise it could not do.

CHAPTER THE TENTH

LADY HARMAN COMES OUT

Sec.1

The treaty between Lady Harman and her husband which was to be her Great
Charter, the constitutional basis of her freedoms throughout the rest of
her married life, had many practical defects. The chief of these was
that it was largely undocumented; it had been made piecemeal, in various
ways, at different times and for the most part indirectly through
diverse intermediaries. Charterson had introduced large vaguenesses by
simply displaying more of his teeth at crucial moments, Mrs. Harman had
conveyed things by hugging and weeping that were afterwards discovered
to be indistinct; Sir Isaac writing from a bed of sickness had
frequently been totally illegible. One cannot therefore detail the
clauses of this agreement or give its provisions with any great
precision; one can simply intimate the kind of understanding that had
had an air of being arrived at. The working interpretations were still
to come.

Before anything else it was manifestly conceded by Lady Harman that she
would not run away again, and still more manifest that she undertook to
break no more windows or do anything that might lead to a second police
court scandal. And she was to be a true and faithful wife and comfort,
as a wife should be, to Sir Isaac. In return for that consideration a