all
inanimate person pursuing one clear benevolent purpose in life from her
very beginning, and Sir Isaac and her relations with Sir Isaac will be
rescued from reality. The book will be illustrated by a number of
carefully posed photographer's photographs of her, studies of the Putney
house and perhaps an unappetizing woodcut of her early home at Penge.
The aim of all British biography is to conceal. A great deal of what we
have already told will certainly not figure in any such biography, and
still more certainly will the things we have yet to tell be missing.

Lady Harman was indeed only by the force of circumstances and
intermittently a pure philanthropist, and it is with the intercalary
passages of less exalted humanity that we are here chiefly concerned. At
times no doubt she did really come near to filling and fitting and
becoming identical with that figure of the pure philanthropist which was
her world-ward face, but for the most part that earnest and dignified
figure concealed more or less extensive spaces of nothingness, while the
errant soul of the woman within strayed into less exalted ways of
thinking.

There were times when she was almost sure of herself--Mrs. Hubert
Plessington could scarcely have been surer of herself, and times when
the whole magnificent project of constructing a new urban social life
out of those difficult hostels, a collective urban life that should be
liberal and free, broke into grimacing pieces and was the most foolish
of experiments. Her struggles with Mrs. Pembrose thereupon assumed a
quality of mere bickering and she could even doubt whether Mrs. Pembrose
wasn't justified in her attitude and wiser by her very want of
generosity. She felt then something childish in the whole undertaking
that otherwise escaped her, she was convicted of an absurd
self-importance, she discovered herself an ignorant woman availing
herself of her husband's power and wealth to attempt presumptuous
experiments. In these moods of disillusionment, her mind went adrift and
was driven to and fro from discontent to discontent; she would find
herself taking soundings and seeking an anchorage upon the strangest,
most unfamiliar shoals. And in her relations and conflicts with her
husband there was a smouldering shame for her submissions to him that
needed only a phase of fatigue to become acute. So long as she believed
in her hostels and her mission that might be endured, but forced back
upon her more personal