t of woman only cares for her children."

"Won't you care for them, Jinny?"

"Not as I care for you," said Jinny.

And to his uttermost amazement she bowed her head over his hands and
cried.

XXXVI

Tanqueray's book was out. Times and seasons mattered little in a case so
hopeless. There was no rivalry between George Tanqueray and his
contemporaries; therefore, his publishers had not scrupled to produce
him in the same month as Jane Holland. They handled any work of his with
the apathy of despair.

He himself had put from him all financial anxiety when he banked the
modest sum, "on account," which was all that he could look for. The
perturbing question for him was, not whether his sales would be small or
great, but whether this time the greatness of his work would or would
not be recognized. He did not suppose for a moment that it would be.
_His_ tide would never turn.

His first intimation that it was turning came from Jane, in a pencil
note enclosed with a newspaper cutting, his first favourable review.
"Poor George," she wrote, "you thought you could escape it. But it's
coming--it's come. You needn't think you're going to be so very
posthumous, after all." He marvelled that Jinny should attach so much
importance to the printed word.

But Jinny had foreseen those mighty lunar motions that control the
tides. It looked really as if it had come, years before he had expected
it, as if (as dear Jinny put it) he would not have a chance of being
posthumous. Not only was he aware that this book of his was a
masterpiece, but other people were aware. There was one man, even
Tanqueray admitted, who cared and knew, whose contemporary opinion
carried the prestige of posterity; and he had placed him where he would
be placed. And lesser men followed, praising him; some with the
constrained and tortured utterances of critics compelled into eating
their own words; some with the cold weight of a verdict delivered
unwillingly under judicial pressure. And there were others, lesser
still, men who had hated Tanqueray. They postured now in attitudes of
prudery and terror; they protested; they proclaimed themselves victims
of diabolic power, worshippers of the purity, the sanctity of English
letters, constrained to an act of unholy propitiation. They would, if
they could, have passed him by.

It was Caro Bickersteth who said of Tanqueray that he played upon the
imaginations of his critics as he played upon women's hearts.