-plain, half-beautiful, wholly fascinating face; and it was as if
she looked for the first time on the face of her own passion, dully,
stupidly, not knowing it for the thing it was. She had a sudden vision
of their passion, Jane's and Brodrick's, as it would be; she saw the
transitory, incarnate thing, flushed in the splendour of its moment,
triumphant, exultant and alive.

She laid the portrait in its drawer again, face downwards, and turned
from it. And for a moment she stood there, clutching her breasts with
her hands, so that she hurt them, giving pain for intolerable pain.

XXXI

Now that the thing she was afraid of had become a fact, she told herself
that she might have known, that she had known it all the time. As she
faced it she realized how terribly afraid she had been. She had had
foreknowledge of it from the moment when Jane Holland came first into
Brodrick's house.

She maintained her policy of silence. It helped her, as if she felt
that, by ignoring this thing, by refusing to talk about it, by not
admitting that anything so preposterous could be, it did somehow cease
to be.

She would have been glad if Brodrick's family could have remained
unaware of the situation. But Brodrick's family, by the sheer instinct
of self-preservation, was awake to everything that concerned it.

Every Brodrick, once he had passed the privileged years of his minority,
knew that grave things were expected of him. It was expected of him,
first of all, that he should marry; and that, not with the levity of
infatuation, but soberly and seriously, for the good and for the
preservation of the race of Brodricks in its perfection. As it happened,
in the present generation of Brodricks, not one of them had done what
was expected of them, except Sophy. John had fallen in love with a
fragile, distinguished lady, and had incontinently married her; and she
had borne him no children. Henry, who should have known better, had
fallen in love with a lady so excessively fragile that she had died
before he could marry her at all. And because of his love for her he had
remained unmarried. Frances had set her heart on a rascal who had left
her for the governess. And now Hugh, with his Jane Holland, bid fair to
be similarly perverse.

For every Brodrick took, not delight, so much as a serious and sober
satisfaction, in the thought that he disappointed expectation. Each one
believed himself the creature of a solitary and majestic law. H