Lady Beach-Mandarin always let herself go about children.  
It would be unjust to the general richness of Lady Beach-Mandarin to say that she excelled herself on this occasion. On all occasions Lady Beach-Mandarin excelled herself. But never had Mr. Brumley noted¹ quite so vividly² Lady Beach-Mandarin's habitual³ self-surpassingness. She helped him, he felt, to understand better those stories of great waves that sweep in from the ocean and swamp islands and devastate⁴ whole littorals⁵. She poured into the Harman nursery and filled every corner of it. She rose to unprecedented⁶ heights therein. It seemed to him at moments that they ought to make marks on the walls, like the marks one sees on the houses in the lower valley of the Main to record the more memorable⁷ floods. "The dears!" she cried: "the little things!" before the nursery door was fairly opened.
 
(There should have been a line for that at once on the jamb just below the lintel.)
 
The nursery revealed itself as a large airy white and green apartment entirely⁸ free from old furniture and done rather in the style of an æsthetically designed hospital, with a tremendously humorous decorative⁹ frieze¹⁰ of cocks and puppies and very bright-coloured prints on the walls. The dwarfish¹¹ furniture was specially¹² designed in green-stained wood and the floor was of cork¹³ carpet diversified¹⁴ by white furry¹⁵ rugs. The hospital quality was enhanced by the uniformed and disciplined appearance of the middle-aged¹⁶ and reliable head nurse and her subdued¹⁷ but intelligent subordinate.
 
Three sturdy little girls, with a year step between each of them, stood up to receive Lady Beach-Mandarin's invasion; an indeterminate baby sprawled¹⁸ regardless of its dignity on a rug. "Aah!" cried Lady Beach-Mandarin, advancing in open order. "Come and be hugged, you dears! Come and be hugged!" Before she knelt down and enveloped¹⁹ their shrinking little persons Mr. Brumley was able to observe that they were pretty little things, but not the beautiful children he could have imagined from Lady Harman. Peeping through their infantile delicacy²⁰, hints all too manifest of Sir Isaac's characteristically pointed²¹ nose gave Mr. Brumley a peculiar—a eugenic²², qualm.
 
He glanced at Lady Harman and she was standing²³ over the ecstasies²⁴ of her tremendous visitor, polite, attentive²⁵—with an entirely unemotional speculation²⁶ in her eyes. Miss Sawbridge, stirred by the great waves of violent philoprogenitive enthusiasm that circled out from Lady Beach-Mandarin, had caught up the baby and was hugging it and addressing it in terms of humorous rapture²⁷, and the nurse and her assistant were keeping respectful but wary^{28............}