between Tanqueray and Owen
Prothero. For one year Nina had been immune from the divine folly. And
in that year she had produced her sinless masterpiece. No wonder that
the Master praised her.

And above the praise Jane heard Nina's voice proclaiming yet again that
the law and the condition was virginity, untamed and untamable
virginity. And for her, also, was it not the law? According to her code
and Tanqueray's she had sinned a mortal sin. She had conceived and
brought forth a book, not by divine compulsion, but because Brodrick
wanted a book and she wanted to please Brodrick. Such a desire was the
mother of monstrous and unshapen things. In Tanqueray's eyes it was
hardly less impure than the commercial taint. Its uncleanness lacked the
element of venality; that was all that could be said. She had done
violence to her genius. She had constrained the secret and incorruptible
will.

It had not suffered all at once. It was still tense with its own young
impulse towards creation. In the beginning of the work it moved
divinely; it was divinely unaware of her and of her urging.

She could trace the stages of its dissolution.

Nothing that Jane Holland had yet achieved could compare with that
beginning. In the middle there was a slight decline from her perfection;
further on, a perpetual struggle to recover it; and, towards the end, a
frightful collapse of energy. She could put her finger on the place;
there, at the close of a page that fairly flared; for the flame, of
course, had leaped like mad before it died. It was at that point that
she had got ill, and that Brodrick had found her and had taken her away.

After that the sentences came in jerks; they gasped for breath; they
reeled and fell; they dragged on, nerveless and bloodless, to an
unspeakable exhaustion. Then, as if her genius defied the ultimate
corruption, it soared and made itself its own funeral fire. She had
finished the thing somehow, and flung it from her as the divine folly
came upon her. The wonder was that she should have finished it at all.

And Tanqueray might almost say that she was venal. She had received
money for simply committing this crime. She would receive money again
for perpetuating it in a more flagrant form. So much down on the awful
day of publication; a half-yearly revenue as long as the abominable work
endured. There might be a great deal of money in it, as Louis Levine
would say. More money than Nina or George Tanqueray had ever ma