 easier.  Their inner life was so safe that they could bargain over externals in a way that would have been incredible to Aunt Juley, and impossible for Tibby or Charles.  There are moments when the inner life actually "pays," when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.  Such moments are still rare in the West; that they come at all promises a fairer future.  Margaret, though unable to understand her sister, was assured against estrangement, and returned to London with a more peaceful mind.
    The following morning, at eleven o'clock, she presented herself at the offices of the Imperial and West African Rubber Company.  She was glad to go there, for Henry had implied his business rather than described it, and the formlessness and vagueness that one associates with Africa had hitherto brooded over the main sources of his wealth.  Not that a visit to the office cleared things up.  There was just the ordinary surface scum of ledgers and polished counters and brass bars that began and stopped for no possible reason, of electric-light globes blossoming in triplets, of little rabbit hutches faced with glass or wire, of little rabbits.  And even when she penetrated to the inner depths, she found only the ordinary table and Turkey carpet, and though the map over the fireplace did depict a helping of West Africa, it was a very ordinary map.  Another map hung opposite, on which the whole continent appeared, looking like a whale marked out for blubber, and by its side was a door, shut, but Henry's voice came through it, dictating a "strong" letter.  She might have been at the Porphyrion, or Dempster's Bank, or her own wine-merchant's.  Everything seems just alike in these days.  But perhaps she was seeing the Imperial side of the company rather than its West African, and Imperialism always had been one of her difficulties.
    "One minute!" called Mr. Wilcox on receiving her name.  He touched a bell, the effect of which was to produce Charles.
    Charles had written his father an adequate letter--more adequate than Evie's, through which a girlish indignation throbbed.  And he greeted his future stepmother with propriety.
    "I hope that my wife--how do you do? --will give you a decent lunch," was his opening.  "I left instructions, but we live in a rough-and-ready way.  She expects you back to tea, too, after you have had a look at Howards End.
