hever way they turned Sir Isaac crippled them....

Sec.4

Mr. Brumley grew so angry that presently even the strangers in the
street annoyed him. He turned his face homeward. He hated dilemmas; he
wanted always to deny them, to thrust them aside, to take impossible
third courses.

"For three years," shouted Mr. Brumley, free at last in his study to
give way to his rage, "for three years I've been making her care for
these things. And then--and then--they turn against me!"

A violent, incredibly undignified wrath against the dead man seized him.
He threw books about the room. He cried out vile insults and mingled
words of an unfortunate commonness with others of extreme rarity. He
wanted to go off to Kensal Green and hammer at the grave there and tell
the departed knight exactly what he thought of him. Then presently he
became calmer, he lit a pipe, picked up the books from the floor, and
meditated revenges upon Sir Isaac's memory. I deplore my task of
recording these ungracious moments in Mr. Brumley's love history. I
deplore the ease with which men pass from loving and serving women to an
almost canine fight for them. It is the ugliest essential of romance.
There is indeed much in the human heart that I deplore. But Mr. Brumley
was exasperated by disappointment. He was sore, he was raw. Driven by an
intolerable desire to explore every possibility of the situation, full
indeed of an unholy vindictiveness, he went off next morning with
strange questions to Maxwell Hartington.

He put the case as a general case.

"Lady Harman?" said Maxwell Hartington.

"No, not particularly Lady Harman. A general principle. What are
people--what are women tied up in such a way to do?"

Precedents were quoted and possibilities weighed. Mr. Brumley was
flushed, vague but persistent.

"Suppose," he said, "that they love each other passionately--and their
work, whatever it may be, almost as passionately. Is there no way----?"

"He'll have a _dum casta_ clause right enough," said Maxwell Hartington.

"_Dum----? Dum casta!_ But, oh! anyhow that's out of the
question--absolutely," said Mr. Brumley.

"Of course," said Maxwell Hartington, leaning back in his chair and
rubbing the ball of his thumb into one eye. "Of course--nobody ever
enforces these _dum casta_ clauses. There isn't anyone to enforce them.
Ever."--He paused and then went on, speaking apparently to the array of
black tin boxes in the dingy fixtures before him. "Who's