ck, "if I can help it." And he wiped his forehead.

Jane caught herself smiling at Brodrick's hat. She felt a sudden
melting, enervating tenderness for Brodrick's hat. The passion which, in
the circumstances, she could not permit herself to feel for Brodrick,
she felt, ridiculously, for Brodrick's hat.

It was, of course, ridiculous, that she, Jane Holland, should feel a
passion for a man's hat, a passion that brought her heart into her
mouth, so that she could not say any of the things that she had thought
of.

Brodrick's hat on an arm-chair beside him was shining in the firelight.
On his uncomfortable seat Brodrick lowered and darkened, an incarnate
gloom.

"How happy your hat looks," said Jane, smiling at it again.

"I'm glad it amuses you," said Brodrick.

Jane made tea.

He rose, wrapped in his dream, and took his cup from her. He sat down
again, in his dream, and put his cup on the arm-chair and left it there
as an offering to the hat. Then, with an immense, sustained politeness,
he began to talk.

Now that Hambleby had become a classic; he supposed that her ambition
was almost satisfied.

It was so much so, Jane said, that she was tired of hearing about
Hambleby. Whereupon Brodrick inquired with positively formidable
politeness, how the new serial was getting on.

"Very well," said Jane. "How's the 'Monthly Review'?"

Brodrick intimated that the state of the "Monthly Review" was prosperity
itself, and he asked her if she had heard lately from Mr. Prothero?

Jane said that she had had a long letter from Mr. Prothero the other
day, and she wished that a suitable appointment could be found for Mr.
Prothero at home. Brodrick replied, that, at the moment, he could not
think of any appointment more suitable for Mr. Prothero than the one he
had already got for him.

Then there was a silence, and when Jane with competitive urbanity
inquired after Brodrick's sisters, Brodrick's manner gave her to
understand that she had touched on a subject by far too intimate and
personal. And while she was wondering what she could say next Brodrick
took up his hat and said good-bye and went out hurriedly, he who never
hurried.

Jane stood for a moment looking at the seat he had left and the place
where his hat had been. And her heart drew its doors together and shut
them against Brodrick.

She had heard the sound of him going down her stairs, and the click of
the latch at the bottom, and the slamming of the front doo