d the second visit that Lady
Harman, this time under her natural and proper protection, had paid him.
A little thread from the old lady's discourse drifted by him. She had
scented marriage in the air and she was saying, "of course they ought to
have let Victor Hugo marry over and over again. He would have made it
all so beautiful. He could throw a Splendour over--over almost
anything." Mr. Brumley sank out of attention altogether. It was so
difficult to express his sense of Lady Harman as a captive, enclosed but
unsubdued. She had been as open and shining as a celandine flower in the
sunshine on that first invasion, but on the second it had been like
overcast weather and her starry petals had been shut and still. She
hadn't been in the least subdued or effaced, but closed, inaccessible to
conversational bees, that astonishing honey of trust and easy friendship
had been hidden in a dignified impenetrable reserve. She had had the
effect of being not so much specially shut against Mr. Brumley as
habitually shut against her husband, as a protection against his
continual clumsy mental interferences. And once when Sir Isaac had made
a sudden allusion to price Mr. Brumley had glanced at her and met her
eyes....

"Of course," he said, coming up to the conversational surface again, "a
woman like that is bound to fight her way out."

"Queen Mary!" cried Miss Sharsper. "Fight her way out!"

"Queen Mary!" said Mr. Brumley, "No!--Lady Harman."

"_I_ was talking of Queen Mary," said Miss Sharsper.

"And Mr. Brumley was thinking of Lady Harman!" cried Lady
Beach-Mandarin.

"Well," said Mr. Brumley, "I confess I do think about her. She seems to
me to be so typical in many ways of--of everything that is weak in the
feminine position. As a type--yes, she's perfect."

"I've never seen this lady," said Miss Sharsper. "Is she beautiful?"

"I've not seen her myself yet," said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "She's Mr.
Brumley's particular discovery."

"You haven't called?" he asked with a faint reproach.

"But I've been going to--oh! tremendously. And you revive all my
curiosity. Why shouldn't some of us this very afternoon----?"

She caught at her own passing idea and held it. "Let's Go," she cried.
"Let's visit the wife of this Ogre, the last of the women in captivity.
We'll take the big car and make a party and call _en masse_."

Mr. Toomer protested he had no morbid curiosities.

"But you, Susan?"

Miss Sharsper declared she would