At this moment in came Mr. Flanders. He had mistaken the time.

Now, though they had finished their meat, Mrs. Plumer took a second
helping of cabbage. Jacob determined, of course, that he would eat his
meat in the time it took her to finish her cabbage, looking once or
twice to measure his speed--only he was infernally hungry. Seeing this,
Mrs. Plumer said that she was sure Mr. Flanders would not mind--and the
tart was brought in. Nodding in a peculiar way, she directed the maid to
give Mr. Flanders a second helping of mutton. She glanced at the mutton.
Not much of the leg would be left for luncheon.

It was none of her fault--since how could she control her father
begetting her forty years ago in the suburbs of Manchester? and once
begotten, how could she do other than grow up cheese-paring, ambitious,
with an instinctively accurate notion of the rungs of the ladder and an
ant-like assiduity in pushing George Plumer ahead of her to the top of
the ladder? What was at the top of the ladder? A sense that all the
rungs were beneath one apparently; since by the time that George Plumer
became Professor of Physics, or whatever it might be, Mrs. Plumer could
only be in a condition to cling tight to her eminence, peer down at the
ground, and goad her two plain daughters to climb the rungs of the
ladder.

"I was down at the races yesterday," she said, "with my two little
girls."

It was none of THEIR fault either. In they came to the drawing-room, in
white frocks and blue sashes. They handed the cigarettes. Rhoda had
inherited her father's cold grey eyes. Cold grey eyes George Plumer had,