sperating.
And this keeping out of the Union because it isn't genteel, it's the
very essence of the trouble with all these employees. We've discussed
that so often. Those drapers' girls seem full of such cold, selfish,
base, pretentious notions; much more full even than our refreshment
girls. And then as if it wasn't all difficult enough comes Mrs. Pembrose
and her wardresses doing all sorts of hard, clumsy things, and one can't
tell them just how little they are qualified to judge good behaviour.
Their one idea of discipline is to speak to people as if they were
servants and to be distant and crushing. And long before one can do
anything come trouble and tart replies and reports of "gross
impertinence" and expulsion. We keep on expelling girls. This is the
fourth time girls have had to go. What is to become of them? I know this
Burnet girl quite well as you know. She's just a human, kindly little
woman.... She'll feel disgraced.... How can I let a thing like that
occur?"

She spread her hands apart over the tea things.

Mr. Brumley held his chin in his hand and said "Um" and looked judicial,
and admired Lady Harman very much, and tried to grasp the whole trouble
and wring out a solution. He made some admirable generalizations about
the development of a new social feeling in response to changed
conditions, but apart from a remark that Mrs. Pembrose was all
organization and no psychology, and quite the wrong person for her
position, he said nothing in the slightest degree contributory to the
particular drama under consideration. From that utterance, however, Lady
Harman would no doubt have gone on to the slow, tentative but finally
conclusive statement of the new difficulty that had arisen out of her
husband's jealousy and to the discussion of the more fundamental
decisions it forced upon her, if a peculiar blight had not fallen upon
their conversation and robbed it at last of even an appearance of ease.

This blight crept upon their minds.... It began first with Mr. Brumley.

Mr. Brumley was rarely free from self-consciousness. Whenever he was in
a restaurant or any such place of assembly, then whatever he did or
whatever he said he had a kind of surplus attention, a quickening of the
ears, a wandering of the eyes, to the groups and individuals round about
him. And while he had seemed entirely occupied with Lady Harman, he had
nevertheless been aware from the outset that a dingy and
inappropriate-looking man in a bo