“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.”