That did not matter, considering how little _they_ mattered. The
nuisance of it was that he thus became aware of her himself. Rose at the
head of his table, so conspicuously and yet so fortuitously his wife,
emphasizing her position by her struggles to sustain it, Rose with her
embarrassments and solecisms, with her lost innocence in the matter of
her aspirates, agonized now by their terrified flight and by her own
fluttering efforts at recapture, Rose was not a person that anybody
could ignore, least of all her husband.

As long as she had remained a servant in his house he had been unaware
of her, or aware of her only as a presence beneficent, invisible,
inaudible. Here again his celebrity, such as it was, had cursed him. The
increase in Tanqueray's income, by enabling them to keep a servant, had
the effect of throwing Rose adrift about the house. As the mistress of
it, with a maid under her, she was not quite so invisible, nor yet so
inaudible as she had been.

It seemed to Tanqueray that his acuter consciousness dated from the
arrival of that maid. Rose, too, had developed nerves. The maid
irritated Rose. She put her back up and rubbed her the wrong way in all
the places where she was sorest. For Rose's weakness was that she
couldn't tolerate any competition in her own line. She couldn't, as she
said, abide sitting still and seeing the work taken out of her hands,
seeing another woman clean _her_ house, and cook _her_ husband's dinner,
and she knowing that she could do both ten times as well herself. She
appealed to Tanqueray to know how he'd like it if she was to get a man
in to write his books for him. She was always appealing to Tanqueray.
When George wanted to know what, after all, was wrong with Susan, and
declared that Susan seemed to him a most superior young woman, Rose said
that was the worst of it. Susan was much too superior for her. She could
see well enough, she said, that Susan knew that she was not a lady, and
she could see that George knew that she knew. Else why did he say that
Susan was superior? And sometimes George would be beside himself with
fury and would roar, "Damn Susan!" And sometimes, but not often, he
would be a torment and a tease. He would tell Rose that he loved Susan,
that he adored Susan, that he couldn't live without her. He might part
with Rose, but he couldn't possibly part with Susan. Susan was the
symbol of his prosperity. Without Susan he would not feel celebrated any
more.

And sometimes Rose would laugh; and sometimes, in moments of extreme
depression, she would deplore the irony of the success that had saddled
her with Susan. And Tanqueray cursed Susan in his heart, as the cause of
Rose's increasing tendency to conversation.

It was there that she encroached. She invaded more and more the guarded
territory of silence. She annexed outlying pieces of Tanqueray's sacred
time, pursuing him with talk that it was intolerable to listen to.

He blamed Prothero and Laura and Jane for that, as well as Susan. They
were the first who had encouraged her to talk, and now she had got the
habit.

And it was there again that the really fine and poignant irony came in.
Through her intercourse with Jane and Laura, Rose offered herself for
comparison, and showed flagrantly imperfect. But for that, owing to
Tanqueray's superhuman powers of abstraction, she might almost have
passed unnoticed. As it was, he owned that her incorruptible simplicity
preserved her, even at her worst, from being really dreadful.

Once, after some speech of hers, there had followed an outburst of fury
on Tanqueray's part and on Rose's a long period of dumbness.

He was, he always had been, most aware of her after seeing Jane
Brodrick. From every meeting with Jane he came to her gloomy and
depressed and irritable. And the meetings were growing more frequent. He
saw Jane now at less and less intervals. He couldn't go on without
seeing her. A fortnight was about as long as he could stand it. He had a
sense of just struggling through, somehow, in the days that passed
between the night (it was a Thursday) when he had dined at Putney and
Monday afternoon when Jane had promised that she would come to
Hampstead.

On Monday a telegram arrived for Tanqueray. The brisk director of a
great publishing firm in New York desired (at the last moment before his
departure) an appointment with the novelist for that afternoon. The
affair was of extreme importance. The American meant business. It would
be madness not to see him, even though he should miss Jinny.

All morning Tanqueray sulked because of that American.

Rose was cowed by his mood. At luncheon she prepared herself to sit dumb
lest she should irritate him. She had soft movements that would have
conciliated a worse ruffian than Tanqueray in his mood. She rebuked the
importunities of Joey in asides so tender that they couldn't have
irritated anybody. But Tanqueray remained irritated. He couldn't eat his
luncheon, and said so.

And then Rose said something, out loud. That wasn't her fault, she said.
And Tanqueray told her that he hadn't said it was. Then, maddened by her
thought, she (as she put it to herself afterwards) fair burst with it.

"I wish I'd never set eyes on that Susan!" said she.

Tanqueray at the moment was trying to make notes in his memorandum-book.
He might be able to cut short that interview if he started with all his
points clear.

"Oh--_hold_ your tongue," said Tanqueray.

"I _am_ 'oldin' it," said Rose.

He smiled at that in spite of himself. He was softened by its reminder
of her submissive dumbness, by its implication that there were, after
all, so many things she might have said and hadn't.

Having impressed upon her that she was on no account to let Mrs.
Brodrick go till he came back, he rushed for his appointment.

By rushing away from it, cutting it very short indeed, he contrived to
be back again at half-past four. Susan informed him that Mrs. Brodrick
had come. She had arrived at four with the baby and the nurse. She was
in there with the baby.

"The baby?"

Sounds of laughter came from the dining-room, rendering it unnecessary
for Susan to repeat her statement. She smiled sidelong at the door, as
much as to say she had put her master on to a good thing. He would
appreciate what he found in there.

In there he found Jinny crouching on a footstool; facing her, Rose knelt
upon the floor. In the space between them, running incessantly to and
fro on his unsteady feet, was Brodrick's little son. When he got to
Jinny he flung his arms around her neck and kissed her twice, and then
Rose said, "Oh, kiss poor Rose"; and when he got to Rose he flung his
arms around her neck, too, and kissed her, once only. That was the
distinction that he made. And as he ran he laughed, he laughed as if
love were the biggest joke in all the world.

Tanqueray stood still in the doorway and watched, as he had stood once
in the doorway of the house in Bloomsbury, watching Rose. Now he was
watching Jinny. He thought he had never seen her look so divinely happy.
He watched Brodrick's son and thought distastefully that when Brodrick
was a baby he must have looked just like that.

And the little Brodrick ran to and fro, from Jinny to Rose and from Rose
to Jinny, passionately, monotonously busy, with always the same
rapturous embrace from Brodrick's wife and always the same cry from
Tanqueray's, "Kiss poor Rose!"

When Jane turned to greet Tanqueray, the baby clung to her gown. His
mouth drooped as he realized that it was no longer possible to reach her
face. Identifying Tanqueray as the cause of her remoteness, he stamped a
baby foot at him; he distorted his features and set up a riotous howl.
Rose reiterated her sad cry as a charm to distract him. She pretended to
cry too, because the baby wouldn't look at her. He wouldn't look at
anybody till his mother took him in her arms and kissed him. Then, with
his round face still flushing under his tears, he smiled at Tanqueray, a
smile of superhuman forgiveness and reconciliation.

Rose gazed at them in a rapture.

"Well," said she, "how you can keep orf kissin' 'im----"

"I can keep off kissing anything," said he.

Jane asked if he would ring for the nurse to take the baby.

Tanqueray was glad when he went. It had just dawned on him that he
didn't like to see Jinny with a baby; he didn't like to see her
preoccupied with Brodrick's son, adoring, positively adoring, and
caressing Brodrick's son.

At the same time it struck him that it was a pity that Rose had never
had a baby; but he didn't carry the thought far enough to reflect that
Rose's baby would be his son. He wondered if he could persuade Jinny to
send the baby home and stay for dinner.

He apologized for not having been there to receive her. Jane replied
that Rose had entertained her.

"You mean that you were entertaining Rose?"

"We were entertaining each other."

"And now you've got to entertain me."

She was going to when Rose interrupted (her mind was still running on
the baby).

"If I was you," said she, "I shouldn't leave 'im much to that Gertrude."

"What?" (It was Tanqueray who exclaimed.) "Not to the angel in the
house?"

"I don't know about angels, but if it was me I wouldn't leave 'im, or
she'll get a hold on 'im."

"Isn't he," said Tanqueray, "a little young?"

But Rose was very serious.

"It's when 'e's young she'll do the mischief."

"My dear Rose," said Jane, "whatever do you think she'll do?"

"She'll estrange 'im, if you don't take care."

"She couldn't."

"Couldn't? She'll get a 'old before you know where you are."

"But," said Jane quietly, "I do know where I am."

"Not," Rose insisted, "when you're away, writin'."

Tanqueray saw Jane's face flush and whiten. He looked at Rose.

"You don't know what you're talking about," he said, with anger under
his breath.

Jane seemed not to know that he was there. She addressed herself
exclusively to Rose.

"What do you suppose happens when I'm--away?"

"You forget."

"Never!" said Jane. The passion of her inflection was lost on Rose who
brooded.

"You forget," she repeated. "And she doesn't."

Involuntarily Tanqueray looked at Jane and Jane at Tanqueray. There were
moments when his wife's penetration was terrible.

Rose was brooding so profoundly that she failed to see the passing of
that look.

"If it was me," she murmured in a thick voice, a voice soft as her
dream, "if it was my child----"

Tanqueray's nerves gave way. "But it isn't." He positively roared at
her. "And it never will be."

Rose shrank back as if he had struck her. Jane's heart leaped to her
help.

"If it was," she said, "it would have the dearest, sweetest little
mother."

At that, at the sudden tenderness of it coming after Tanqueray's blow,
Rose gave a half-audible moan and got up quickly and left the room. They
heard her faltering steps up-stairs in the room above them.

It was then that Tanqueray asked Jane if she would stay and dine with
them. She could send a note to Brodrick by the nurse.

She stayed. She felt that if she did not Tanqueray would bully Rose.

Rose was glad she stayed. She was afraid to be left alone that evening
with George. She was dumb before him, and her dumbness cut Jane to the
heart. Jane tried to make her talk a little during dinner. They talked
about the Protheros when Susan was in the room, and when she was out of
it they talked about Susan.

This was not wise of Jane, for it exasperated Tanqueray. He wanted to
talk to Jane, and he wanted to be alone with her to talk.

After dinner they went up to his study to look at some books he had
bought. The best of selling your own books, he said, was that you could
buy as many as you wanted of other people's. He had now got as many as
he wanted. They were more than the room would hold. All that he could
not get on to the shelves were stacked about the floor. He stood among
them smiling.

Rose did not smile. The care of Tanqueray's study was her religion.

"How am I to get round them 'eaps to dust?" said she.

"You don't get round them, and you don't dust," said Tanqueray
imperturbably.

"Then--them books'll breed a fever."

"They will. But _you_ won't catch it."

Rose lingered, and he suggested that it would be as well if she went
down-stairs and made the coffee. She needn't send it up till nine, he
said. It was now five minutes past eight.

She went obediently.

"She knows she isn't allowed into this room," said Tanqueray to Jane.

"You speak of her as if she was a dog," said she. She added that she
would have to go at half-past eight. There was a train at nine that she
positively must catch.

He had to go down and ask Rose to come back with the coffee soon. Jane
was glad that she had forced on him that act of humility.

For the moments that she remained alone with him she wandered among his
books. There were some that she would like to borrow. She talked about
them deliberately while Tanqueray maddened.

He walked with her to the station.

She turned on him as they dipped down the lane out of sight and hearing.

"George," she said, "I'll never come and see you again if you bully that
dear little wife of yours."

"I?--Bully her?"

"Yes. You bully her, you torture her, you terrify her till she doesn't
know what she's doing."

"I'm sorry, Jinny."

"Sorry? Of course you're sorry. She slaves for you from morning till
night."

"That's not my fault. I stopped her slaving and she got ill. Why, it was
you--_you_--who made me turn her on to it again."

"Of course I did. She loves slaving for you. She'd cut herself in little
pieces. She'd cook herself--deliciously--and serve herself up for your
dinner if she thought you'd fancy her."

"You're right, Jinny. I never ought to have married her."

"I didn't say you never ought to have married her. I say you ought to be
on your knees now you have married her. She's ten thousand times too
good for you."

"You're right, Jinny. You always were right, you always will be damnably
right."

"And you always will be--oh dear me--so rude."

He looked in her face like a whipped dog trying to reinstate himself in
favour, as far as Tanqueray could look like a whipped dog.

"Let me carry those books for you," he said.

"You may carry the books, but I don't like you, Tanks."

His devil, the old devil that used to be in him, looked at her then.

"You used to like me," he said.

But Jinny was beyond its torment. "Of course I liked you. I liked you
awfully. You were another person then."

He said nothing to that.

"Forgive me, George," she said presently. "You see, I love your little
wife."

"I love you for loving her," he said.

"You may go on loving me for that. But you needn't come any further with
me. I know my way."

"But I want to come with you."

"And I, unfortunately, want to be alone."

"You shall. I'll walk behind you--as many yards as you like behind you.
I've got to carry the books."

"Bother the books. I'll carry them."

"You'll do nothing of the sort."

They walked together in silence till the station doors were in sight. He
meant to go with her all the way to Putney, carrying the books.

"I wish," he said, "I knew what would really please you."

"You do know," she said.

A moment passed. Tanqueray stopped his stride.

"I'll go back and beg her pardon--_now_."

She gave him her hand. He went back; and between them they forgot the
books.

Though it was not yet ten the light was low in Rose's bedroom. Rose had
gone to bed. He went up to her room. He raised the light a little,
quietly, and stood by her bedside. She lay there, all huddled, her body
rounded, her knees drawn up as if she had curled into herself in her
misery. One arm was flung out on the bed-clothes, the hand hung cramped
over a fold of blanket; sleep only had slackened its convulsive grip.
Her lips were parted, her soft face was relaxed, blurred, stained in
scarlet patches. She had cried herself to sleep.

And as he looked at her he remembered how happy she had been playing
with Jinny's baby; and how his brutal words had struck her in the hurt
place where she was always tender.

His heart smote him. He undressed quietly and lay down beside her.

She stirred; and, finding him there, gave a little cry and put her arms
about him.

And then he asked her to forgive him, and she said there was nothing to
forgive.

She added with her seeming irrelevance, "You didn't go all the way to
Putney then?"

She knew he had meant to go. She knew, too, that he had been sent back.




XLIX


On her return Jane went at once to Brodrick in his study. The editor was
gloomy and perturbed. He made no response to her regrets, nor yet to her
excuse that Tanqueray had kept her. Presently, after some moments of
heavy silence, she learned that her absence was not the cause of his
gloom. He was worried about the magazine. Levine was pestering him. When
she reminded him that Louis had nothing to do with it, that she thought
he was going to be kept out, he replied that that was all very well in
theory; you couldn't keep him out when he'd got those infernal Jews
behind him, and they were running the concern. You could buy him out,
you could buy out the whole lot of them if you had the money; but, if
you hadn't, where were you? It had been stipulated that the editor was
to have a free hand; and up till now, as long as the thing had paid its
way, his hand had been pretty free. But it wasn't paying; and Levine was
insisting that the free hand was the cause of the deficit.

He did not tell her that Levine's point was that they had not bargained
for his wife's hand, which was considerably freer than his own. If they
were prepared to run the magazine at a financial loss they were not
prepared to run it for the exclusive benefit of his wife's friends;
which, Levine said, was about what it amounted to.

That was what was bothering Brodrick; for it was Jane's hand, in its
freedom, that had kept the standard of the magazine so high. It had
helped him to realize his expensive dream. The trouble, this time, he
told her, was a tale of Nina Lempriere's.

Jane gave an excited cry at this unexpected flashing forth of her
friend's name.

"What, Nina? Has she----?"

Brodrick answered, almost with anger, that she had. And Levine had put
his silly foot down. He had complained that the tale was gruesome (they
had set it up; it was quite a short thing); Nina's tales usually were
gruesome; and Nina's price was stiff. He didn't know about the price;
perhaps it was a trifle stiff; you might even say it crackled; but the
tale----! Brodrick went on in the soft, even voice that was a sign with
him of profound excitement--the tale was a corker. He didn't care if it
_was_ gruesome. It was magnificent.

"More so than her last?" Jane murmured.

"Oh, miles more." He rummaged among his papers for the proofs. He'd be
eternally disgraced, he said, if he didn't publish it. He wished she'd
look at the thing and tell him if he wouldn't be.

She looked and admired his judgment. The tale was everything that he had
said. Nina had more than found herself.

"Of course," she said, "you'll publish it."

"Of course I shall. I'm not going to knuckle under to Louis and his
beastly Jews--with a chance like that. I don't care if the price _is_
stiff. It's a little masterpiece, the sort of thing you don't get once
in a hundred years. It'll send up the standard. That's of course why he
funks it."

He pondered. "There's something queer about it. Whenever that woman gets
away and hides herself in some savage lair she invariably does a thing
like this."

Jane admitted half-audibly that it was queer.

They gave themselves up to the proofs, and it was late when she heard
that Nina had crept from her savage lair and was now in London. It was
very queer, she thought, that Nina had not told her she was coming.

She called the next day at Adelphi Terrace. She found Nina in her front
room, at work on the proofs that Brodrick had sent her.

Nina met her friend's reproaches with a perfect frankness. She had not
told her she was coming, because she didn't know how long she was going
to stay, and she had wanted, in any case, to be let alone. That was
yesterday. To-day what she wanted more than anything was to see Jane.
She hadn't read her book, and wasn't going to until she had fairly done
with her own. She had heard of it from Tanqueray, and was afraid of it.
Jane, she declared, was too tremendous, too overwhelming. She could only
save herself by keeping clear of her.

"I should have thought," Jane said, "you were safe enough--after that
last." She had told her what she had thought of it in the first moments
of her arrival. "Safe, at any rate, from me."

"You're the last person I shall ever be safe from. There you are, always
just ahead of me. I'm exhausted if I look at you. You make me feel as if
I never could keep up."

"But why? There's no comparison between your pace and mine."

"It's not your pace, Jinny, it's your handicap that frightens me."

"My handicap?"

"Well--a baby, a husband, and all those Brodricks and Levines. I've got
to see you carrying all that weight, and winning; and it takes the heart
out of me."

"If I did win, wouldn't it prove that the handicap wasn't what you
thought it?"

Nina said nothing. She was thinking that it must be pretty serious if
Jinny was not prepared to be sincere about it.

"That's what I want to prove," said Jane softly, "that there isn't any
handicap. That's why I want to win."

Her feeling was that she must keep her family out of these discussions.
She had gone too far the other night in the things that she had said to
Tanqueray, that Tanqueray had forced her to say. She had made herself
afraid of him. Her admissions had been so many base disloyalties to
Hugh. She was not going to admit anything to Nina, least of all that she
found her enviable, as she stood there, stripped for the race, carrying
nothing but her genius. It was so horribly true (as Nina had once said)
that the lash had been laid across her naked shoulders to turn her into
the course when she had swerved from it. It had happened every time,
every time; so invariably as to prove that for Nina virginity was the
sacred, the infrangible, predestined law, the one condition.

But the conditions, she said aloud, were nobody's business but your own.
She refused to be judged by anything but the result. It was absurd to
talk about winning and handicapping; as if creative art _was_ a
handicap, as if there were any joy or any end in it beyond the act of
creation. You defeated your end if you insisted on conditions, if you
allowed anything extraneous to count as much as that.

The flush on her face showed what currents moved her to her protest.

"Does it seem to you, then, that _I_'ve defeated my end?" Nina pressed
her point home implacably.

Jane strung herself to the pain of it.

"Not you." She paused for her stroke. "Nor yet I."

She rose with it. She wanted to get away from Nina who seemed terrible
to her at that moment. She shrank from meeting Nina's eyes.

Nina was left meditating on her friend's beautiful hypocrisy.

It might be beautiful, but it was fatuous, too, of Jinny to pretend that
she could live surrounded and hemmed in by Brodricks and do what she had
done without turning a hair, or that she could maintain so
uncompromising an affection for her husband and child without
encountering the vengeance of the jealous god. Nina could not suppose
that Jinny's god was less jealous than George Tanqueray's or her own.
And Jinny must be perpetually offending him. She recognized the
righteousness of the artist in Jinny's plea to be judged only by the
results. That, no doubt, was how posterity would judge her. But she,
Nina, was judging, like posterity, by the results. The largeness and the
perfection of them pointed to a struggle in which poor Jinny must have
been torn in pieces. Her very anxiety to conceal the signs of laceration
betrayed the extent to which she had been torn. She had not gone so far
in her hypocrisy as to argue that the struggle was the cause of the
perfection, and you could only conclude that, if the conditions had
been perfect, there would have been no end to the vast performances of
Jinny. That was how she measured her.

It looked as if whatever you did to her you couldn't stop Jinny, any
more than you could stop George Tanqueray. Jinny, if you came to think
of it, had the superior impetus. George, after all, had carefully
removed obstruction from his path. Jinny had taken the risk, and had
swept on, reckless, regardless.

It was beautiful, her pretending not to see it; beautiful, too, her not
letting you allow for it in appraising her achievement, lest it should
seem somehow, to diminish yours. As if she had not said herself that the
idea of rivalry was absurd.

Nina knew it. Her fear lay deeper than the idea of rivalry. She had no
vision of failure in her career as long as she kept to it. The great
thing was to be certain of the designs of destiny; so certain that you
acquiesced. And she was certain now; she was even thankful for the hand
and its scourge on her shoulders, turning her back again on to the
splendid course. It marked her honourably; it was the sign and
certificate of her fitness. She was aware also that, beyond the splendid
course, there was no path for her. She would have been sure of herself
there but that her nerves remembered how she had once swerved. She had
instincts born of that experience; they kept her on the look-out for
danger, for the sudden starting up of the thing that had made her
swerve. What she dreaded now was some irreparable damage to her genius.

She was narrowed down to that, her bare genius. Since there was nothing
else; since, as she had said long ago, she had been made to pay for it
with all she had and all she might have had, she cherished it fiercely
now. Her state was one of jealousy and fear, a perpetual premonition of
disaster. She had tried to forget the existence of Jane's book, because
Tanqueray had said it was tremendous, and she felt that, if it were as
tremendous as all that, it was bound to obscure for a moment her vision
of her own.

If the designs of destiny were clear, it was equally evident that her
friends were bent on frustrating them. Within five minutes after Jane
Brodrick had removed her disturbing presence, Nina received a telegram
from Owen Prothero. He was coming to see her at five o'clock. It was now
half-past four.

This was what she had dreaded more than anything. Her fear of it had
kept her out of London for two years.

Owen had been considerate in notifying her of his coming. It suggested
that it was open to her to escape if she did not want to see him, while
it warned her not to miss him if she did. She debated the point for the
half hour he had left her, and decided that she would see him.

Prothero arrived punctually to his hour. She found no change in his
aspect or his manner. If he looked happy, he looked it in his own
supersensual way. Marriage had not abridged his immeasurable remoteness,
nor touched his incorruptible refinement.

He considered her with a medical eye, glad to see her bearing the signs
of life lived freely and robustly in the open air. Her mountains, he
said, evidently agreed with her.

She inquired after Laura, and was told that she would not know her. The
Kiddy, he said, smiling, had grown up. She was almost plump; she had
almost a colour.

"She wants to see you," he said. "She told me I was to bring you back
with me."

Ages passed before she answered. "I don't think, really, Owen, that I
can come."

"Why not?" he said.

She would have told him that she was too busy, but for her knowledge
that with Owen lying was no good. She resented his asking her why not,
when he knew perfectly well why.

"Why ever not," he repeated, "when we want you?"

She smiled. "You seem determined to get everything you want."

She had a good mind to tell him straight out, there and then, that he
couldn't have everything he wanted, not with her, at any rate. He
couldn't have it both ways. But you do not say these things; and if she
could judge by the expression of his face what she had said had hit him
hard enough.

He sheltered himself behind a semblance of irrelevance. "Laura is very
fond of you."

The significance of the statement lay in its implication that he was
very fond of Laura. Taken that way it was fuel heaped on to Nina's
malignant fire. Under it she smouldered darkly.

"She's getting unhappy about you," he went on. "You don't want to make
her unhappy, do you?"

"Did I ever want to make her unhappy?" she answered, with a flash. "And
if it comes to that, why should it?"

"The Kiddy has a very tender conscience."

She saw what he meant now. He was imploring her not to put it into
Laura's head that she had come between them. That would hurt Laura. His
wife was never to suspect that her friend had suffered. Nina, he seemed
secretly to intimate, was behaving in a manner likely to give rise to
that suspicion. He must have been aware that she did it to save herself
more suffering; but his point was that it didn't matter how much she
suffered, provided they saved Laura. There must be no flaw in that
perfect happiness.

"You mean," she said, "she won't understand it if I don't come?"

"I'm afraid I mean she will understand it if you keep on not coming. But
of course you'll come. You're coming with me now."

It was the same voice that had told her three years ago that she was not
coming with him, that she was going to stay and take care of Laura,
because that was all that she could do for him. And as she had stayed
then she went with him now, and for the same reason.

She felt, miserably, that her reluctance damned her; it proved her
coarse, or at any rate not fine enough for the communion he had offered
her, the fineness of which she had once accepted as the sanction of
their fellowship. She must seem to him preposterous in her anxiety to
break with him, to make an end of what had never been. All the same,
what he was forcing on her now was the fact of separation. As they
approached the house where he and Laura lived she had an increasing
sense of estrangement from him and of distance.

He drew her attention to the iron gate that guarded their sanctuary, and
the untrodden grass behind it. His dreams came in by that gate, and all
other things by the postern door, which, he said, was the way he and she
must go.

Nina paused by the gate. "It won't open, Owen."

"No. The best dreams come through the gates that never open."

"It looks as if a good south wind would bring it down."

"It will last my time," he said.




L


Laura received her as if Prothero were not there; as if he never had
been, never would be there. She looked up from their embrace with a
blue-eyed innocence that ignored him in its perfect assurance that they
had kept their pledge, that nothing had ever come or would come between
them.

It struck Nina that he had no grounds for his anxiety. Laura was not
suffering; she was not going to suffer. She had no consciousness or
conscience in the matter.

It was made clear to Nina that she was too happy for that, too much in
love with Owen, too much aware that Owen was in love with her, though
their fineness saved them both from any flagrant evidences of their
state. They evaded as by a common understanding the smallest allusion to
themselves and their affairs. They suggested charmingly that what
excited them was the amazing performance of their friends, of Tanqueray,
of Jane, of Nina. In her smiling protest that she no longer counted
Laura gave the effect of serene detachment from the contest. She
surveyed it from an inaccessible height, turning very sweetly and
benignly from her bliss. She was not so remote, she seemed to say, but
that she remembered. She knew how absorbing those ardent rivalries could
be. Nina she evidently regarded as absorbed fatally, beyond recall; and
no wonder, when for her the game was so magnificent. If Nina cared for
the applause of a blessed spirit, it was hers.

It seemed to Nina's morbid sense that Laura overdid it; that the two of
them closed round her by a common impulse and a common fear, that they
rushed to her wild head to turn her to her course and keep her there. In
every word there was a sting for her, the flick of the lash that drove
her on.

Nina was then aware that she hated Laura. The hatred was not active in
her presence; it made no movement towards its object; it lay somewhere
in the dark; it tossed on a hot bed, sleepless in an incurable distress.

And Laura remained unconscious. She took her presently up-stairs to her
room, Owen's room. It was all they had, she said. Nina held her head
very straight, trying hard not to see Owen's coat that hung behind the
door, or his big boots all in a row beside Laura's little ones. Her face
in the glass met her with a challenge to her ironic humour. It demanded
why she could not face that innocent juxtaposition, after all she _had_
stood, after all that they were evidently prepared to make her stand.
But she was not to be moved by any suggestions of her face. She owed it
a grudge; it showed so visibly her murkiness. Sun-burnt, coarsened a
little by the wind, with the short, virile, jutting bridge of the nose,
the hot eyes, the mouth's ironic twist, it was the face not of a woman
but a man, or rather of a temperament, a face foredoomed to disaster.
She accentuated its effect by the masculine fashion of her clothes and
the way she swept back her hair sidelong from her forehead. Laura saw
her doing it now.

"I like your face," was her comment.

"It's more than I do," said Nina. "But I like my hands."

She began washing them with energy, as if thus dismissing an unpleasant
subject. She could admire their fine flexible play under the water; do
what she would with them her hands at least were feminine. But they
brought her up sharp with the sight of the little scar, white on her
wrist, reminding her of Owen. She was aware of the beast in her blood
that crouched, ready to fall upon the innocent Laura.

At the other end of the room, by the wardrobe, Laura, in her innocence,
was babbling about Owen.

"He's growing frightfully extravagant," she said. "He got fifteen pounds
for an article the other day, and what do you think he did with it? Look
there!"

She had taken a gown, a little mouse-coloured velvet gown, from the
wardrobe and laid it on the bed for Nina to admire.

"He went and spent it, every bit of it, on that. He said he thought I
should look nice in it. Wasn't it clever of him to know? And who ever
would have thought that he'd have cared?"

Nina looked at the gown and remembered the years when Laura had gone
shabby.

"He cares so much," said Laura, "that I have to put it on every
evening."

"Put it on now," said Nina.

"Shall I?" She was longing to. "No, I don't think I will."

"You must," said Nina.

Laura put it on, baring her white neck and shoulders, and turned for
Nina to "fasten her up the back."

Nina had a vision of Prothero standing over the little thing, his long
deft hands trembling as he performed this office.

The Kiddy, divinely unconscious, babbled on of Owen and the wonderful
gown.

"Conceive," she said, "the darling going out all by himself to get it!
How he knew one gown from another--how he knew the shops--what hand
guided him--I can't think. It must have been his guardian angel."

"Or yours."

"Yes--when you think of the horrors he might have got."

Laura had stroked the velvet to smoothness about her waist, and now she
was pulling up a fold of lace above her breasts. As she did this she
looked at her own image in the glass and smiled softly, unaware. Nina
saw then that her breasts were slightly and delicately rounded; she
recognized the work of life, shaping Laura's womanhood; it was the last
touch of the passion that had made her body the sign and symbol of its
perfection. Her own breasts heaved as the wild fang pierced them.

Then, as her fingers brushed the small white back, there surged up in
her a sudden virile tenderness and comprehension. She looked at Laura
with Prothero's eyes, she touched her almost with Prothero's touch.
There was, after all, some advantage in being made so very like a man,
since it compelled her to take Prothero's view of a little woman in a
mouse-coloured velvet gown.

The gown was fastened, and the Kiddy in an innocent vanity was looking
over her left shoulder and admiring her mouse-coloured tail. Of a sudden
she caught sight of Nina's eyes in the glass regarding her sombrely. She
turned and put up her face to Nina's, and paused, wavering. She closed
her eyes and felt Nina's arms about her neck, and Nina's hands touching
her hair with a subtle, quick caress, charged with confession. Laura's
nerves divined it. She opened her eyes and looked at Nina.

"Ah," she cried, "try not to hate me."

[Illustration: "Ah," she cried, "try not to hate me!"]

Nina bowed her head. "Poor Kiddy, dear Kiddy," she whispered. "How could
I?"

How could she?

She couldn't, even if she tried; not even afterwards, when she sat alone
in that room of hers that reminded her so intolerably of Prothero.
To-night it reminded her still more intolerably of her dreadful self.
She had been afraid to enter it lest it should put her to the torture.
It was the place where her beast had gone out and in with her. It still
crouched in the corner where she had kicked it. It was an unhappy beast,
but it was not cruel any more. It could have crawled to Laura's feet and
licked them.

For the Kiddy was such a little thing. It was impossible to feel hatred
for anything so soft and so unintentionally sweet and small. Life had
been cruel enough to Laura, before Owen married her. If it came to
suffering, it was not conceivable that she should have been allowed to
suffer more.

Nina put it to herself, beast or no beast, if she had had the power to
take Owen from the Kiddy, to make the Kiddy suffer as she had suffered,
could she have done it? Could she have borne to be, really, such a beast
as that? Even if the choice had lain, innocently, between her own
torture and the Kiddy's, could she have endured to see the little tender
thing stretched out, in her place, on the rack? Of course she couldn't.

And since she felt like that about it, beast or no beast, wouldn't even
Owen say that she was not so dreadful after all?

She remembered then that, though he had seen through her, he had never
at any time admitted that she was dreadful. He had spoken rather as if,
seeing _through_ her, he had seen things she could not see, fine things
which he declared to be the innermost truth of her.

He must have known all the time that she would feel like that when she
could bring herself to see Laura.

She saw through _him_ now. That was why he had insisted on her coming.
It was as if he had said to her, "I'm not thinking so tremendously of
her. What I mean is that it'll be all right for you if you'll trust
yourself to me; if you'll only come." He seemed to say frankly, "That
beast of yours is really dreadful. It must be a great affliction to have
to carry it about with you. I'll show you how to get rid of it
altogether. You've only got to see her, Nina, in her heartrending
innocence, wearing, if you would believe it, a mouse-coloured velvet
gown."

That night Laura stood silent and thoughtful while Prothero's hands
fumbled gently over the many little hooks and fastenings of the gown.
She let it slide with the soft fall of its velvet from her shoulders to
her feet.

"I wish," she said, "I hadn't put it on."

He stooped and kissed her where the silk down of her hair sprang from
her white neck.

"Does it think," he said, "that it crushed poor Nina with its beauty?"

She shook her head. She would not tell him what she thought. But the
tears in her eyes betrayed her.




LI


It was April in a week of warm weather, of blue sky, of white clouds,
and a stormy south-west wind. Brodrick's garden was sweet with dense
odours of earth and sunken rain, of young grass and wallflowers thick in
the borders, and with the pure smells of virgin green, of buds and
branches and of lime-leaves fallen open to the sun. Outside, among the
birch-trees, there was a flashing of silver stems, a shaking of green
veils, and a triumphing of bright grass over the blown dust of the
suburb, as the spring gave back its wildness to the Heath.

Brodrick was coming back. He had been away a fortnight, on his holiday.
He was to have taken Jane with him but at the last moment she had been
kept at home by some ailment of the child's. They had been married more
than three years now, and they had not been separated for as many nights
and days. In all his letters Brodrick had stated that he was enjoying
himself immensely and could do with three months of it; and at the end
of a fortnight he had sent Jane a telegram to say that he was coming
back.

She was waiting for him, walking in the garden, as she used to wait for
him more than three years ago, in excitement and ecstasy. The spring
made her wild with the wildness of her girlhood when the white April
evenings met her on her Dorset moors.

She knew again the virgin desire of desire, the poignant, incommunicable
passion, when the soul knows the body's mystery and the body half
divines the secret of the soul. She felt again that keen stirring of the
immortal spirit in mortal sense, her veins were light, they ran fire and
air, and the fine nerves aspired and adored. At moments it was as if the
veils of being shook, and in their commotion all her heights and depths
were ringing, reverberant to the indivisible joy.

It was so until she heard Brodrick calling to her at the gate. And at
his voice her wedded blood remembered, and she came to him with the
swift feet, and the flushed face uplifted, and the eyes and mouth of a
bride.

Up-stairs Gertrude Collett was dressing for dinner. She looked out at
her window and saw them walking up and down the long alley of the
kitchen garden, like children, hand in hand.

They were late for dinner, which was the reason, Brodrick thought, why
the Angel of the Dinner (as Jane called her) looked annoyed.

They were very polite and kind to her, sustaining a conversation devised
and elaborated for her diversion.

Gertrude was manifestly not diverted. She congratulated Brodrick on his
brilliant appearance, and said in her soft voice that his holiday had
evidently done him good, and that it was a pity he hadn't stayed away a
little longer. Brodrick replied that he didn't want to stay away longer.
He thought Gertrude looked fatigued, and suggested that a holiday would
do her good. She had better take one.

"I wish you would," said Jane.

"We both," said Brodrick, "wish you would."

Gertrude said she never wanted to take holidays. She got on better
without them. Jane looked at Brodrick.

"I might have gone with you," she said. "After all, Baby never did have
convulsions."

"I knew he wouldn't," said Brodrick, and remembered that it was Gertrude
who had said he would.

A pause in the dialogue robbed Gertrude's next remark of any relevance
it might have had.

"We've seen," said she, "a good deal of Mr. Tanqueray." (Another pause.)
"I wonder how Mrs. Tanqueray gets on."

"I imagine," said Brodrick, "that she never did get on with him."

"I meant--without him."

"Oh." He caused the conversation to flourish round another subject.

In the drawing-room, where Gertrude did not follow them all at once,
Jane turned to him.

"Hugh," she said, "was I unkind to her?"

"Unkind?"

"Well, was I kind enough?"

"You are always kind," he said.

"Do you think so? Do you really think so?"

"Don't talk about her, Jinny, I've got other things to attend to."

"What things?"

He put his arm round her and drew her to their seat beside the hearth.
So drawn, so held, she looked in his face and smiled that singular smile
of hers that he found so adorable and incomprehensible.

"I'm tired of being made love to. I'm going," she said, "to fling off
all maidenly reserve and make love to you."

She put away his arm from her and rose and seated herself with audacity
on his knees.

"The devil gets into me when I have to talk to Gertrude."

She put her arm lightly and shyly about him.

"Do you mind?" she said.

"No, Jinny, I rather like it."

Her arms tightened ever so little.

"It gives you, doesn't it, an agreeable sense of impropriety at your own
fireside?"

She did something to his hair which made him look unlike himself or any
Brodrick.

"Supposing," she said, "you repulse me? Could you repulse me?"

"No, Jinny; I don't think I ever could."

"What, not this outrageous hussy, flinging herself at your head, and
rumpling your nice collar?"

She let him go that she might look at him and see how he really took it.
He drew her and held her close to him in arms that trembled violently,
while her lips brushed his with skimming, fugitive kisses, and kisses
that lingered a moment in their flight.

"Do you like the way I make love?" she said. "And do you like my gown
and the way I do my hair?"

His voice shook. "Jinny, why aren't you always like this? Why aren't you
always adorable?"

"I can't be anything--always. Don't you adore me in my other moods?"

"Can you," said he, "adore a little devil when it teases?"

"I never tease you when you're tired."

"No, but I'm sometimes tired when you tease me. You are, darling, just a
little bit exhausting for one man."

"Yes," said Jinny complacently; "I can exhaust you. But you can never,
never exhaust me. There's always more where I came from."

"The trouble is, Jinny, that I can't always make you out. I never know
where I am with you."

"But, my dear, think of having to live with a woman whom you _had_ made
out. Think of knowing exactly what she's going to do before she does it,
and anticipating all her conversation!"

"Think," said he, "of living with a woman and never knowing precisely
whether she's your wife or not your wife."

"But it solves all the matrimonial problems--how to be the exemplary
father of a family and yet to slip the noose and be a bachelor
again--how to break the seventh commandment----"

"Jinny!"

"The seventh commandment and yet be faithful to your marriage vows--how
to obtain all the excitement of polygamy, all the relief of the divorce
court without the bother and the scandal and the expense. Why can't you
look at it in that light?"

"Perhaps, Jinny, because I'm not polygamous."

"You never know what you are until you're tried. Supposing you'd married
Gertrude--you'd have had Gertrude, all there is of Gertrude, always
Gertrude, and nothing but Gertrude. Could you have stood it?"

"Probably."

"You couldn't. Before you'd been married to Gertrude six months you'd
have gone, howling, to the devil. Whereas with me you've got your devil
at home."

His smile admitted that there was truth in what she said. She had
appealed to the adventurous and lawless spirit in him, the spirit that
marked his difference from his family.

She went on with her air of reasonableness and wisdom. "I am really,
though you mayn't know it, the thing you need."

He saw his advantage in her mood.

"And _you_, Jinny? Don't you know that you're happiest like this?"

"Yes. I know it."

"And that when you're working like ten horses you're in misery half the
time?"

"In torture." She agreed.

"And don't you know that it makes little lines come, little lines of
agony on your forehead, Jinny, and purple patches under your dear eyes;
and your mouth hardens."

"I know," she moaned. "I know it does. And you don't love me when I look
like that?"

"I love you whatever you look like, and you know it. I love you even
when you wander."

"Even? Do you mind so very much--my wandering?"

"Sometimes, perhaps, a little."

"You didn't mind at all before you married me."

"I didn't realize it then."

"Didn't realize what?"

"Your genius, Jinny, and the things it does to you."

"But you did--you did--you knew all about it."

"I knew what it meant to me."

"What _did_ it mean--to you?"

He appeared to plunge into deep memories before he answered her.

"To me it was simply _the_ supreme intellectual interest. It was the
strongest and the strangest intellectual influence I had ever felt.
You'll never quite know what it meant to me."

"And it means nothing now--you don't like it--my poor genius? And they
used to say you were in love with it."

"So I was, Jinny, before I saw you."

"You were in love enough to marry it."

"I didn't marry it. It wouldn't marry me."

"Is that why you hate it? Darling, you can't hate it as much as I do."

"I don't hate it. But you can't expect me to love it as I love my wife."

"But I'm not your wife. Your wife wouldn't behave like this. Would you
like me better if I didn't?"

He held her arms in his arms, fiercely and tight, crushing her.

"If," she said, "I was a virtuous woman, the sort of woman who sits on
her husband's head like an uncomfortable crown?"

"Jinny--if Gertrude were to hear you!"

She loosened his arms and sat up and listened.

"I hear Gertrude," she said. "Darling, your hair's all any way. Let me
straighten it. It might be used in evidence against us."

Gertrude indeed wore as she entered the ominously distant air of one who
suspects a vision of iniquity. She took her place on the other side of
the hearth and bent her head over her sewing. A thin stream of
conversation flowed from Brodrick and from Jane, and under it she
divined, she felt the tide that drew them.

She herself sat silent and smooth and cool. She sat like one removed
from mortality's commotion. But it was as if she were listening to the
blood that beat in Brodrick's veins, and felt in herself the passion
that ran there, in secret, exulting towards its end.

At ten o'clock Jane rose and held out her hand to Gertrude. She was
saying good-night. Brodrick sat abstracted for a moment. Presently he
rose also and followed her with shining eyes.

Gertrude's head bent lower and lower over her sewing.




LII


Before long Brodrick was aware that that month of spring had brought him
the thing he most desired. He was appeased again with the hope of
fatherhood. It tided him over the bad months of nineteen-seven, over the
intolerable hours that Levine was giving him in the office of the
"Monthly Review." It softened for him the hard fact that he could no
longer afford his expensive dream. The old, reckless, personal ambition,
the fantastic pride, had been overtaken by the ambition and the pride of
race. He wanted to found, not a great magazine, but a family, to have
more and more children like the solid little son they had called John
Henry Brodrick.