own efforts, she went
to meetings--sometimes Sir Isaac took her, once or twice she was
escorted by Mr. Brumley, and presently her grave interest and her
personal charm had gathered about her a circle of companionable friends.
She tried to talk to people and made great efforts to hear people who
seemed authoritative and wise and leaderlike, talking.

There were many interruptions to this research, but she persevered.
Quite early she had an illness that ended in a miscarriage, an accident
for which she was by no means inconsolable, and before she had
completely recovered from that Sir Isaac fell ill again, the first of a
series of relapses that necessitated further foreign travel--always in
elaborately comfortable trains with maid, courier, valet, and secretary,
to some warm and indolent southward place. And few people knew how
uncertain her liberties were. Sir Isaac was the victim of an increasing
irritability, at times he had irrational outbursts of distrust that
would culminate in passionate outbreaks and scenes that were truncated
by an almost suffocating breathlessness. On several occasions he was on
the verge of quarrelling violently with her visitors, and he would
suddenly oblige her to break engagements, pour abuse upon her and bring
matters back to the very verge of her first revolt. And then he would
break her down by pitiful appeals. The cylinders of oxygen would be
resorted to, and he would emerge from the crisis, rather rueful, tamed
and quiet for the time.

He was her chief disturbance. Her children were healthy children and
fell in with the routines of governess and tutor that their wealth
provided. She saw them often, she noted their increasing resemblance to
their father, she did her best to soften the natural secretiveness and
aggressiveness of their manners, she watched their teachers and
intervened whenever the influences about them seemed to her to need
intervention, she dressed them and gave them presents and tried to
believe she loved them, and as Sir Isaac's illness increased she took a
larger and larger share in the direction of the household....

Through all these occupations and interruptions and immediacies she went
trying to comprehend and at times almost believing she comprehended
life, and then the whole spectacle of this modern world of which she was
a part would seem to break up again into a multitude of warring and
discordant fragments having no conceivable common aim or solution.
Tho