It seemed to Mr. Brumley's now entirely¹ disordered mind that Sir Isaac, propped² up with cushions upon a sofa in the upstairs sitting-room³, white-faced, wary⁴ and very short of breath, was like Proprietorship⁵ enthroned. Everything about him referred deferentially⁶ to him. Even his wife dropped at once into the position of a beautiful satellite. His illness, he assured his visitor with a thin-lipped emphasis, was "quite temporary, quite the sort of thing that might happen to anyone." He had had a queer little benumbing of one leg, "just a trifle of nerve fag did it," and the slight asthma⁷ that came and went in his life had taken advantage of his condition to come again with a little beyond its usual aggressiveness. "Elly is going to take me off to Marienbad next week or the week after," he said. "I shall have a cure and she'll have a treat, and we shall come back as fit as fiddles⁸." The incidents of the past month were to be put on a facetious⁹ footing it appeared. "It's a mercy they didn't crop her hair," he said, apropos¹⁰ of nothing and with an air of dry humour. No further allusion¹¹ was made to Lady Harman's incarceration¹².