overlooked. She realized the woman. She divined
her secret, her significance, all that she stood for and all that she
portended. In the light of that woman (for she spread round her an
unbearable illumination) Jane saw transparently what _she_ had been to
Tanqueray. She had had no power and no splendour for him of her own. But
she had been the reflection of the woman's splendour and her power. So
much so that, when he looked at her as he had looked the other evening,
he, George Tanqueray, had grown tender as if in the presence of the
other. He had suffered a sentimental, a sensuous hallucination, and had
made her suffer.

But never, never for a moment had he cared for her, or seen in her any
power or splendour of her own.

She wondered why he had not told her about that woman then. It had been
just two days before he married her. Perhaps it had been only his
shyness, or, more likely, his perversity.

But he had said nothing about her now. He had not said, as men say so
fatuously in this circumstance, that he believed they would like each
other and that he hoped they would be friends.

It was borne in on her that he had said nothing because he knew it was
the end. There were no fatuous beliefs and hopes in Tanqueray. And if
there was perversity, there was also an incorruptible, an almost violent
honesty. His honesty was, as it were, part of his perversity.

He was not going to keep up any absurd pretences, to let her imagine for
one moment that it was not the end. It was to mean, not only that
Tanqueray would no longer exist for her, but that she would no longer
exist for Tanqueray. In her attitude to him, there had always been,
though Tanqueray did not know it, an immense simplicity and humbleness.
She felt herself wiped out by this woman who wore for him (she saw her
wearing) all the powers and all the splendours. Tanqueray's wife must
make an end of her and of everything. There was nothing, not the
smallest, most pitiful, cast-up fragment that she could save from the
wreck. A simple, ordinary friendship might have survived it, but not
theirs. There had been in it a disastrous though vague element of
excess. She could not see it continuing in the face of Tanqueray's wife.
As for enlarging it so as to embrace Tanqueray's wife as well as
Tanqueray, Jane simply couldn't. There was something virile in her that
forbade it. She could no more have taken Tanqueray's wife into her heart
than Tanqueray, if their cases had b