Miss Sharsper was roused from deep preoccupation. "What, dear?" she asked.
"See Sir Isaac?"
"Sir Isaac?"
"Dodging about the garden when we went through it."
The novelist reflected. "I didn't notice," she said. "I was busy observing things.")
§6
Lady Beach-Mandarin's car passed through the open gates and was swallowed up in the dusty stream of traffic down Putney Hill; the great butler withdrew, the little manservant vanished, Mrs. Sawbridge and her elder daughter had hovered and now receded from the back of the hall; Lady Harman remained standing thoughtfully in the large Bulwer-Lyttonesque doorway of her house. Her face expressed a vague expectation. She waited to be addressed from behind.
Then she became aware of the figure of her husband standing before her. He had come out of the laurels in front. His pale face was livid with anger, his hair dishevelled, there was garden mould and greenness upon his knees and upon his extended hands.
She was startled out of her quiet defensiveness. "Why, Isaac!" she cried. "Where have you been?"
It enraged him further to be asked so obviously unnecessary a question. He forgot his knightly chivalry.
"What the Devil do you mean," he cried, "by chasing me all round the garden?"
"Chasing you? All round the garden?"
"You heard me breaking my shins on that infernal flower-pot you put for me, and out you shot with all your pack of old women and chased me round the garden. What do you mean by it?"
"I didn't think you were in the garden."
"Any Fool could have told I was in the garden. Any Fool might have known I was in the garden. If I wasn't in the garden, then where the Devil was I? Eh? Where else could I be? Of course I was in the garden, and what you wanted was to hunt me down and make a fool of me. And look at me! Look, I say! Look at my hands!"
Lady Harman regarded the lord of her being and hesitated before she answered. She knew what she had to say would enrage him, but she had come to a point in their relationship when a husband's good temper is no longer a supreme consideration. "You've had plenty of time to wash them," she said.
"Yes," he shouted. "And instead I kept 'em to show you. I stayed out here to see the last of that crew for fear I might run against 'em in the house. Of all the infernal old women——"
His lips were providentially deprived of speech. He conveyed his inability to express his estimate of Lady Beach-Mandarin by a gesture of despair.
"If—if anyone calls and I am at home I have to receive them," said Lady Harman, after a moment's deliberation.
"Receiving them's one thing. Making a Fool of yourself——"
His voice was rising.
"Isaac," said Lady Harman, leaning forward and then in a low penetrating whisper, "Snagsby!"
(It was the name of the great butler.)
"Damn Snagsby!" hissed Sir Isaac, but dropping his voice and drawing near to her. What his voice lost in height it gained in intensity. "What I say is this, Ella, you oughtn't to have brought that old woman out into the garden at all——"
"She insisted on coming."
"You ought to have snubbed her. You ought to have done—anything. How the Devil was I to get away, once she was through the verandah? There I was! Bagged!"
"You could have come forward."
"What! And meet her!"
"I had to meet her."
Sir Isaac felt that his rage was being frittered away upon details. "If you hadn't gone fooling about looking at houses," he said, and now he stood very close to her and spoke with a confidential intensity, "you wouldn't have got that Holy Terror on our track, see? And now—here we are!"
He walked past her into the hall, and the little manservant suddenly materialised in the middle of the space and came forward to brush him obsequiously. Lady Harman regarded that proceeding for some moments in a preoccupied manner and then passed slowly into the classical conservatory. She felt that in view of her engagements the discussion of Lady Beach-Mandarin was only just beginning.
§7
She reopened it herself in the long drawing-room into which they both drifted after Sir Isaac had washed the mould from his hands. She went to a French window, gathered courage, it seemed, by a brief contemplation of the garden, and turned with a little effort.
"I don't agree," she said, "with you about Lady Beach-Mandarin."
Sir Isaac appeared surprised. He had assumed the incident was closed. "How?" he asked compactly.
"I don't agree," said Lady Harman. "She seems friendly and jolly."
"She's a Holy Terror," said Sir Isaac. "I've seen her twice, Lady Harman."
"A call of that kind," his wife went on, "—when there are cards left and so on—has to be returned."
"You won't," said Sir Isaac.
Lady Harman took a blind-tassel in her hand,—she felt she had to hold on to something. "In any case," she said, "I should have to do that."
"In any case?"
She nodded. "It would be ridiculous not to. We——It is why we know so few people—because we don't return calls...."
Sir Isaac paused before answering. "We don't want to know a lot of people," he said. "And, besides——Why! anybody could make us go running about all over London calling on them, by just coming and calling on us. No sense in it. She's come and she's gone, and there's an end of it."
"No," said Lady Harman, gripping her tassel more firmly. "I shall have to return that call."
"I tell you, you won't."
"It isn't only a call," said Lady Harman. "You see, I promised to go there to lunch."
"Lunch!"
"And to go to a meeting with her."
"Go to a meeting!"
"—of a society called the Social Friends. And something else. Oh! to go to the committee meetings of her Shakespear Dinners Movement."
"I've heard of that."
"She said you supported it—or else of course...."
Sir Isaac restrained himself with difficulty.
"Well," he said at last, "you'd better write and tell her you can't do any of these things; that's all."
He thrust his hands into his trousers pockets and walked to the French window next to the one in which she stood, with an air of having settled this business completely, and being now free for the tranquil contemplation of horticulture. But Lady Harman had still something to say.
"I am going to all these things," she said. "I said I would, and I will."
He didn't seem immediately to hear her. He made the little noise with his teeth that was habitual to him. Then he came towards her. "This is your infernal sister," he said.
Lady Harman reflected. "No," she decided. "It's myself."
"I might have known when we asked her here," said Sir Isaac with an habitual disregard of her judgments that was beginning to irritate her more and more. "You can't take on all these people. They're not the sort of people we want to know."
"I want to know them," said Lady Harman.
"I don't."
"I find them interesting," Lady Harman said. "And