him from having to keep a secretary.

For Gertrude lived and moved and had her sentimental being in Brodrick.
Thus she had laboured at her own destruction. So preoccupied was she
with the thought of Brodrick that her trouble, travelling along secret
paths of the nerves and brain, had subtly, insensibly communicated
itself to him. He grew restless in that atmosphere of unrest. If
Gertrude could have kept, inwardly, her visible beautiful serenity,
Brodrick, beguiled by the peace she wrapped him in, might have remained
indefinitely quiescent. But he had become the centre of a hundred
influences, wandering spirits of Gertrude's brain. Irresistibly urging,
intangibly irritating, perpetually suggesting, they had prepared him for
the dominion of Jane Holland. But Gertrude was not aware of this. Her
state, which had begun within a few months of her arrival, remained for
three years a secret to herself. She was before all things a
sentimentalist, and she had the sentimentalist's monstrous innocence and
boundless capacity for illusion. She shuddered in the grip of mortal
renunciation, and called her state holy, when adoration and desire were
fused in a burning beatitude at the approach of Brodrick. In her three
years' innocence she continued unaware that her emotions had any root in
flesh and blood; and Brodrick was not the man to enlighten her. His
attitude was such as to nourish and perpetuate her beautiful serenity.

It was with the coming of Jane Holland that disturbance had begun; a
trouble so mysterious and profound that, if her conscience probed it,
the seat of it remained hidden from the probe. She thought, in her
innocence, that she was going to have an illness; but it had not struck
her that her symptoms were aggravated by Miss Holland's presence and
became intense to excruciation in those hours when she knew that
Brodrick and Miss Holland were off together somewhere, and alone. She
sickened at the thought, and was unaware that she was sick. This
unconsciousness of hers was fostered by all the conventions of her
world, a world that veils itself decorously in the presence of the
unveiled; and she was further helped by her own anxiety to preserve the
perfect attitude, to do the perfect thing.

She was not even aware that she disliked Miss Holland. What she felt was
rather a nameless, inexplicable fascination, a charm that fed morbidly
on Jane's presence, and, in its strange workings, afflicted her with a
perversion of