at could one infer about a wife from a man like that? Except that
she'd have a lot to put up with."

"You know,--she's a beautiful person, tall, slender, dark...."

Lady Beach-Mandarin turned her full blue eye upon him.

"_Now!_" she said archly.

"I'm interested in the incongruity."

Lady Beach-Mandarin's reply was silent and singular. She compressed her
lips very tightly, fixed her eye firmly on Mr. Brumley's, lifted her
finger to the level of her left eyelash, and then shook it at him very
deliberately five times. Then with a little sigh and a sudden and
complete restoration of manner she remarked that never in any year
before had she seen peonies quite so splendid. "I've a peculiar sympathy
with peonies," she said. "They're so exactly my style."

CHAPTER THE THIRD

LADY HARMAN AT HOME

Sec.1

Exactly three weeks after that first encounter between Lady
Beach-Mandarin and Sir Isaac Harman, Mr. Brumley found himself one of a
luncheon party at that lady's house in Temperley Square and talking very
freely and indiscreetly about the Harmans.

Lady Beach-Mandarin always had her luncheons in a family way at a large
round table so that nobody could get out of her range, and she insisted
upon conversation being general, except for her mother who was
impenetrably deaf and the Swiss governess of her only daughter Phyllis
who was incomprehensible in any European tongue. The mother was
incalculably old and had been a friend of Victor Hugo and Alfred de
Musset; she maintained an intermittent monologue about the private lives
of those great figures; nobody paid the slightest attention to her but
one felt she enriched the table with an undertow of literary
associations. A small dark stealthy butler and a convulsive boy with
hair (apparently) taking the place of eyes waited. On this occasion Lady
Beach-Mandarin had gathered together two cousins, maiden ladies from
Perth, wearing valiant hats, Toomer the wit and censor, and Miss
Sharsper the novelist (whom Toomer detested), a gentleman named Roper
whom she had invited under a misapprehension that he was the Arctic
Roper, and Mr. Brumley. She had tried Mr. Roper with questions about
penguins, seals, cold and darkness, icebergs and glaciers, Captain
Scott, Doctor Cook and the shape of the earth, and all in vain, and
feeling at last that something was wrong, she demanded abruptly whether
Mr. Brumley had sold his house.

"I'm selling it," said Mr. Brumley, "by almost