spite of Brodrick he got it all in.

Brodrick was charged with a more formidable and less apparent fire. Yet
what struck Jane first in Brodrick was his shyness, his deference, his
positive timidity. There was something about him that appealed to her,
pathetically, to forget that he was that important person, a proprietor
of the "Morning Telegraph." She would have said that he was new to any
business of proprietorship. New with a newness that shone in his
slumbering ardour; that at first sight seemed to betray itself in the
very innocence, the openness of his approach. If it could be called an
approach, that slow, indomitable gravitation of Brodrick toward Jane.

"Do you often come over to Wendover?" he said.

"Not very often."

There was a pause, then Brodrick said something again, but in so low a
voice that Jane had to ask him what he said.

"Only that it's an easy run down from Marylebone."

"It is--very," said she, and she tried to draw him into conversation
with Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning.

It was not easy to draw him where he had not previously meant to go. He
was a creature too unswerving, inadaptable for purely social purposes.
For Nina and Laura he had only a blank courtesy. Yet he talked to them,
he talked fluently, in an abstracted manner, while he looked, now at
Jane, and now at her portrait by Gisborne. He seemed to be wondering
quietly what she was doing there, in Nicky's house.

Nicky, as became him, devoted himself to Miss Bickersteth. She was on
the reviewing staff of the "Morning Telegraph," and very valuable to
Nicky. Besides, he liked her. She interested him, amused, amazed him. As
a journalist she had strange perversities and profundities. She had
sharpened her teeth on the "Critique of Pure Reason" in her prodigious
teens. Yet she could toss off, for the "Telegraph," paragraphs of an
incomparable levity. In the country Miss Bickersteth was a blustering,
full-blooded Diana of the fields. In town she was intellect, energy and
genial modernity made flesh. Even Tanqueray, who drew the line at the
dreadful, clever little people, had not drawn it at Miss Bickersteth.
There was something soothing in her large and florid presence. It had no
ostensible air of journalism, of being restlessly and for ever on the
spot. You found it wherever you wanted it, planted fairly and squarely,
with a look of having grown there.

Nicky, concealed beside Miss Bickersteth in a corner, had begun by
trying to m