as this cold and bracing realization that all was not right with her position, with sir isaac's business procedure and the world generally, took possession of lady harman's thoughts there came also with it and arising out of it quite a series of new moods and dispositions. at times she was very full of the desire "to do something," something that would, as it were, satisfy and assuage this growing uneasiness of responsibility in her mind. at times her consuming wish was not to assuage but escape from this urgency. it worried her and made her feel helpless, and she wanted beyond anything else to get back to that child's world where all experiences are adventurous and everything is finally right. she felt, i think, that it was a little unfair to her that this something within her should be calling upon her to take all sorts of things gravely—hadn't she been a good wife and brought four children into the world...?
i am setting down here as clearly as possible what wasn't by any means clear in lady harman's mind. i am giving you side by side phases that never came side by side in her thoughts but which followed and ousted and obliterated one another. she had moods of triviality. she had moods of magnificence. she had moods of intense secret hostility to her urgent little husband, and moods of genial tolerance for everything there was in her life. she had moods, and don't we all have moods?—of scepticism and cynicism, much profounder than the conventions and limitations of novel-writing permit us to tell here. and for hardly any of these moods had she terms and recognitions....
it isn't a natural thing to keep on worrying about the morality of one's material prosperity. these are proclivities superinduced by modern conditions of the conscience. there is a natural resistance in every healthy human being to such distressful heart-searchings. strong instincts battled in lady harman against this intermittent sense of responsibility that was beginning to worry her. an immense lot of her was for simply running away from these troublesome considerations, for covering herself up from them, for distraction.
and about this time she happened upon "elizabeth and her german garden," and was very greatly delighted and stimulated by that little sister of montaigne. she was charmed by the book's fresh gaiety, by its gallant resolve to set off all the good things there are in this world, the sunshine and flowers and laughter, against the limitations and thwartings and disappointments of life. for a time it seemed to her that these brave consolations were solutions, and she was stirred by an imitative passion. how stupid had she not been to let life and sir isaac overcome her! she felt that she must make herself like elizabeth, exactly like elizabeth; she tried forthwith, and a certain difficulty she found, a certain deadness, she ascribed to the square modernity of her house and something in the putney air. the house was too large, it dominated the garden and controlled her. she felt she must get away to some place that was chiefly exterior, in the sunshine, far from towns and struggling, straining, angry and despairing humanity, from syndicated shops and all the embarrassing challenges of life. somehow there it would be possible to keep sir isaac at arm's length; and the ghost of susan burnet's father could be left behind to haunt the square rooms of the london house. and there she would live, horticultural, bookish, whimsical, witty, defiant, happily careless.
and it was this particular conception of evasion that had set her careering about the countryside in her car, looking for conceivable houses of refuge from this dark novelty of social and personal care, and that had driven her into the low long room of black strand and the presence of mr. brumley.
of what ensued and the appearance and influence of lady beach-mandarin and how it led among other things to a lunch invitation from that lady the reader has already been informed.
