She did not feel that it was anything more than a partial
remedy for a special evil. She wanted something more general than that,
something comprehensive enough to answer completely so wide a question
as "What ought I to be doing with all my life?" In the honest simplicity
of her nature she wanted to find an answer to that. Out of the
confusion of voices about us she hoped to be able to disentangle
directions for her life. Already she had been reading voraciously: while
she was still at Marienbad she had written to Mr. Brumley and he had
sent her books and papers, advanced and radical in many cases, that she
might know, "What are people thinking?"

Many phrases from her earlier discussions with Sir Isaac stuck in her
mind in a curiously stimulating way and came back to her as she read.
She recalled him, for instance, with his face white and his eyes red and
his flat hand sawing at her, saying: "I dessay I'm all wrong, I dessay I
don't know anything about anything and all those chaps you read, Bernud
Shaw, and Gosworthy, and all the rest of them are wonderfully clever;
but you tell me, Elly, what they say we've got to do! You tell me that.
You go and ask some of those chaps just what they want a man like me to
do.... They'll ask me to endow a theatre or run a club for novelists or
advertise the lot of them in the windows of my International Stores or
something. And that's about all it comes to. You go and see if I'm not
right. They grumble and they grumble; I don't say there's not a lot to
grumble at, but give me something they'll back themselves for all
they're worth as good to get done.... That's where I don't agree with
all these idees. They're Wind, Elly, Weak wind at that."

It is distressing to record how difficult it was for Lady Harman to form
even the beginnings of a disproof of that. Her life through all this
second phase of mitigated autonomy was an intermittent pilgrimage in
search of that disproof. She could not believe that things as they were,
this mass of hardships, cruelties, insufficiencies and heartburnings
were the ultimate wisdom and possibility of human life, yet when she
went from them to the projects that would replace or change them she
seemed to pass from things of overwhelming solidity to matters more thin
and flimsy than the twittering of sparrows on the gutter. So soon as she
returned to London she started upon her search for a solution; she
supplemented Mr. Brumley's hunt for books with her