Harman. It is just that. This is a great time, so
great that there is no chance for great men. Every chance for great
work. And we're doing it. There is a wind--blowing out of heaven. And
when beautiful people like yourself come into things----"

"I try to understand," she said. "I want to understand. I want--I want
not to miss life."

He was on the verge of saying something further and then his eyes
wandered down the table and he stopped short.

He ended his talk as he had begun it with "Bother! Lady Tarvrille, Lady
Harman, is trying to catch your eye."

Lady Harman turned her face to her hostess and answered her smile.
Wilkins caught at his chair and stood up.

"It would have been jolly to have talked some more," he said.

"I hope we shall."

"Well!" said Wilkins, with a sudden hardness in his eyes and she was
swept away from him.

She found no chance of talking to him upstairs, Sir Isaac came for her
early; but she went in hope of another meeting.

It did not come. For a time that expectation gave dinners and luncheon
parties a quite appreciable attraction. Then she told Agatha Alimony.
"I've never met him but that once," she said.

"One doesn't meet him now," said Agatha, deeply.

"But why?"

Deep significance came into Miss Alimony's eyes. "My dear," she
whispered, and glanced about them. "Don't you _know_?"

Lady Harman was a radiant innocence.

And then Miss Alimony began in impressive undertones, with awful
omissions like pits of darkness and with such richly embroidered details
as serious spinsters enjoy, adding, indeed, two quite new things that
came to her mind as the tale unfolded, and, naming no names and giving
no chances of verification or reply, handed on the fearful and at that
time extremely popular story of the awful wickedness of Wilkins the
author.

Upon reflection Lady Harman perceived that this explained all sorts of
things in their conversation and particularly the flash of hardness at
the end.

Even then, things must have been hanging over him....

Sec.5

And while Lady Harman was making these meritorious and industrious
attempts to grasp the significance of life and to get some clear idea of
her social duty, the developments of those Hostels she had started--she
now felt so prematurely--was going on. There were times when she tried
not to think of them, turned her back on them, fled from them, and times
when they and what she ought to do about them and what they ought