is choice of the whole world that afternoon and all its
inhabitants and everything, there was no other place in which he would
be, no other companion, no other occupation than this he had. He talked
of spring and flowers, quoted poets and added the treasures of a
well-stored mind to the amenities of the day. "It's good to take a
holiday at times," he said, and after that it was more difficult than
ever to talk about the trouble of the hostels.

She was able to do this at last while they were having tea in the little
pavilion near the pagoda. It was the old pavilion, the one that Miss
Alimony's suffragettes were afterwards to burn down in order to
demonstrate the relentless logic of women. They did it in the same
eventful week when Miss Alimony was, she declared, so nearly carried off
by White Slave Traders (disguised as nurses but, fortunately for her,
smelling of brandy) from the Brixton Temperance Bazaar. But in those
simpler days the pavilion still existed; it was tended by agreeable
waiters whose evening dress was mitigated by cheerful little straw hats,
and an enormous multitude of valiant and smutty Cockney sparrows chirped
and squeaked and begged and fluttered and fought, venturing to the very
tables and feet of the visitors. And here, a little sobered from their
first elation by much walking about and the presence of jam and
watercress, Mr. Brumley and Lady Harman could think again of the work
they were doing for the reconstitution of society upon collective lines.

She began to tell him of the conflict between Mrs. Pembrose and Alice
Burnet that threatened the latter with extinction. She found it more
convenient to talk at first as though the strands of decision were still
all in her hands; afterwards she could go on to the peculiar
complication of the situation through the unexpected weakening of her
position in relation to Mrs. Pembrose. She described the particular of
the new trouble, the perplexing issue between the "lady-like," for which
as a feminine ideal there was so much to be said on the one hand and
the "genial," which was also an admirable quality, on the other. "You
see," she said, "it's very rude to cough at people and make noises, but
then it's so difficult to explain to the others that it's equally rude
to go past people and pretend not to see or hear them. Girls of that
sort always seem so much more underbred when they are trying to be
superior than when they are not; they get so stiff and--exa