imperceptible degrees."

"He haggles?"

"Haggles and higgles. He higgles passionately. He goes white and breaks
into a cold perspiration. He wants me now to include the gardener's
tools--in whatever price we agree upon."

"A rich man like that ought to be easy and generous," said Lady
Beach-Mandarin.

"Then he wouldn't be a rich man like that," said Mr. Toomer.

"But doesn't it distress you highly, Mr. Brumley," one of the Perth
ladies asked, "to be leaving Euphemia's Home to strangers? The man may
go altering it."

"That--that weighs with me very much," said Mr. Brumley, recalled to his
professions. "There--I put my trust in Lady Harman."

"You've seen her again?" asked Lady Beach-Mandarin.

"Yes. She came with him--a few days ago. That couple interests me more
and more. So little akin."

"There's eighteen years between them," said Toomer.

"It's one of those cases," began Mr. Brumley with a note of scientific
detachment, "where one is really tempted to be ultra-feminist. It's
clear, he uses every advantage. He's her owner, her keeper, her
obstinate insensitive little tyrant.... And yet there's a sort of
effect, as though nothing was decided.... As if she was only just
growing up."

"They've been married six or seven years," said Toomer. "She was just
eighteen."

"They went over the house together and whenever she spoke he
contradicted her with a sort of vicious playfulness. Tried to poke
clumsy fun at her. Called her 'Lady Harman.' Only it was quite evident
that what she said stuck in his mind.... Very queer--interesting
people."

"I wouldn't have anyone allowed to marry until they were
five-and-twenty," said Lady Beach-Mandarin.

"Sweet seventeen sometimes contrives to be very marriageable," said the
gentleman named Roper.

"Sweet seventeen must contrive to wait," said Lady Beach-Mandarin.
"Sweet fourteen has to--and when I was fourteen--I was Ardent! There's
no earthly objection to a little harmless flirtation of course. It's the
marrying."

"You'd conduce to romance," said Miss Sharsper, "anyhow. Eighteen won't
bear restriction and everyone would begin by eloping--illegally."

"I'd put them back," said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "Oh! remorselessly."

Mr. Roper, who was more and more manifestly not the Arctic one, remarked
that she would "give the girls no end of an adolescence...."

Mr. Brumley did not attend very closely to the subsequent conversation.
His mind had gone back to Black Strand an