"Good God!" said Brocklebank. "That's Philippa."
By which he meant, not that Furnival's lady in the least resembled Philippa, but that she showed the heights to which Philippa had led him on.
X
Brocklebank agreed with Straker that they had got to get him out of that.
It was difficult, because the thing had come upon Furnival like a madness. He would have had more chance if he had been a man with a talent or an absorbing occupation, a politician, an editor, a journalist; if he had even been, Brocklebank lamented, on the London Borough Council it might have made him less dependent on the sympathy of ruinous ladies. But the Home Office provided no competitive distraction.
What was worse, it kept him on the scene of his temptation.
If it hadn't been for the Home Office he might have gone abroad with the Brocklebanks; they had wanted him to go. Straker did what he could for him. He gave him five days' yachting in August, and he tried to get him away for week-ends in September; but Furnival wouldn't go. Then Straker went away for his own holiday, and when he came back he had lost sight of Furnival. So had the Home Office.
For three months Furnival went under. Then one day he emerged. The Higginsons (Mary Probyn and her husband) ran up against him in Piccadilly, or rather, he ran up against them, and their forms interposed an effective barrier to flight. He was looking so wretchedly ill that their hearts warmed to him, and they asked him to dine with them that evening, or the next, or—well, the next after that. He refused steadily, but Mary managed to worm his address out of him and sent it on to Fanny Brocklebank that night.
Then the Brocklebanks, with prodigious forbearance and persistence, went to work on him. Once they succeeded in getting well hold of him they wouldn't let him go, and between them, very gradually, they got him straight. He hadn't, Fanny discovered, been so very awful; he had flung away all that he had on one expensive woman and he had lost his job. Brocklebank found him another in an insurance office where Fanny's brother was a director. Then Fanny settled down to the really serious business of settling Furnival. She was always asking him down to Amberley when the place was quiet, by which she meant when Philippa Tarrant wasn't there. She was always asking nice girls down to meet him. She worked at it hard for a whole year, and then she said that if it didn't come off that summer she would have to give it up.
The obstacle to her scheme for Furny's settlement was his imperishable repugnance to the legal tie. It had become, Fanny declared, a regular obsession. All this she confided to Straker as she lunched with him one day in his perfectly appointed club in Dover Street. Furny was coming down to Amberley, she said, in July; and she added, "It would do you good, Jimmy, to come, too."