Sec.12

And now Lady Harman began to share the trouble of all those who let
their minds pass out of the circle of their immediate affections with
any other desire save interest and pleasure. Assisted in this unhappy
development by the sedulous suggestions of Mr. Brumley she had begun to
offend against the most sacred law in our sensible British code, she was
beginning to take herself and her hostels seriously, and think that it
mattered how she worked for them and what they became. She tried to give
all the attention her children's upbringing, her husband's ailments and
the general demands of her household left free, to this complex,
elusive, puzzling and worrying matter. Instead of thinking that these
hostels were just old hostels and that you start them and put in a Mrs.
Pembrose and feel very benevolent and happy and go away, she had come to
realize partly by dint of her own conscientious thinking and partly
through Mr. Brumley's strenuous resolve that she should not take Sir
Isaac's gift horse without the most exhaustive examination of its
quality, that this new work, like most new things in human life, was
capable not only of admirable but of altogether detestable consequences,
and that it rested with her far more than with any other human being to
realize the former and avoid the latter. And directly one has got to
this critical pose towards things, just as one ceases to be content with
things anyhow and to want them precisely somehow, one begins to realize
just how intractable, confused and disingenuous are human affairs. Mr.
Brumley had made himself see and had made her see how inevitable these
big wholesale ways of doing things, these organizations and close social
co-operations, have become unless there is to be a social disintegration
and set back, and he had also brought himself and her to realize how
easily they may develop into a new servitude, how high and difficult is
the way towards methods of association that will ensure freedom and
permit people to live fine individual lives. Every step towards
organization raises a crop of vices peculiar to itself, fresh
developments of the egotism and greed and vanity of those into whose
hands there falls control, fresh instances of that hostile pedantry
which seems so natural to officials and managers, insurgencies and
obstinacies and suspicions on the part of everyone. The poor lady had
supposed that when one's intentions were obviously benevolent everyone
h