Beach-Mandarin.

Lady Harman perceived equivocation. "Now how long is that really?" she
said.

"Count not in years, nor yet in moments on a dial," said Lady
Beach-Mandarin with a fine air of quotation. "I'm thinking of her quiet
strength of character. Mrs. Plessington brought her round to see me the
other afternoon."

"Did she talk to you?"

"I saw, my dear, I saw."

A vague aversion from Mrs. Pembrose was in some mysterious way
strengthened in Lady Harman by this extraordinary convergence of
testimony. When Sir Isaac mentioned the lady with a kind of forced
casualness at breakfast as the only conceivable person for the work of
initiation and organization that lay before them, Lady Harman determined
to see more of her. With a quickened subtlety she asked her to tea. "I
have heard so much of your knowledge of social questions and I want you
to advise me about my work," she wrote, and then scribbled a note to Mr.
Brumley to call and help her judgments.

Mrs. Pembrose appeared dressed in dove colour with a near bonnetesque
straw hat to match. She had a pale slightly freckled complexion, little
hard blue-grey eyes with that sort of nose which redeems a squarish
shape by a certain delicacy of structure; her chin was long and
protruding and her voice had a wooden resonance and a ghost of a lisp.
Her talk had a false consecutiveness due to the frequent use of the word
"Yes." Her bearing was erect and her manner guardedly alert.

From the first she betrayed a conviction that Mr. Brumley was incidental
and unnecessary and that her real interest lay with Sir Isaac. She might
almost have been in possession of special information upon that point.

"Yes," she said, "I'm rather specially _up_ in this sort of question. I
worked side by side with my poor Frederick all his life, we were
collaborators, and this question of the urban distributive employee was
one of his special studies. Yes, he would have been tremendously
interested in Sir Isaac's project."

"You know what we are doing?"

"Every one is interested in Sir Isaac's enterprise. Naturally. Yes, I
think I have a fairly good idea of what you mean to do. It's a great
experiment."

"You think it is likely to answer?" said Mr. Brumley.

"In Sir Isaac's hands it is _very_ likely to answer," said Mrs. Pembrose
with her eye steadily on Lady Harman.

There was a little pause. "Yes, now you wrote of difficulties and
drawing upon my experience. Of course just now I'm qu