ral and
normal--for me?"

"It's pretty evident," he said, "that you can't have both. You weren't
built to stand the double strain----"

"And you mean--you mean----"

"I mean that it would be better for you if you could keep off it for a
while. At any rate while the child's young."

"But he'll be young, though, for ages. And if--if there are any more of
him, there'll be no end to the keeping off."

"You needn't think about that," he said.

"It would be all very well," she said, "if it were simpler; if either
you or I could deal with the thing, if we could just wring its neck and
destroy it. I would if it would make you any happier, but I can't. It's
stronger than I. I _can't_ keep off it."

He pondered. He was trying, painfully, to understand the nature of this
woman whom he thought he knew, whom, after all, it seemed, he did not
know.

"You used to understand," she said. "Why can't you now?"

Why couldn't he? He had reckoned with her genius when he married her. He
had honestly believed that he cared for it as he cared for her, that
Jinny was not to be thought of apart from her genius. He had found
Henry's opinion of it revolting, absurd, intolerable. And imperceptibly
his attitude had changed. In spite of himself he was coming round to
Henry's view, regarding genius as a malady, a thing abnormal,
disastrous, not of nature; or if normal and natural--for Jinny--a thing
altogether subordinate to Jinny's functions as a wife and mother. There
was no sane man who would not take that view, who would not feel that
nature was supreme. And Jinny had proved that left to nature, to her
womanhood, she was sound and perfect. Jinny's genius had had, as he put
it, pretty well its fling. It was nature's turn.

Under all his arguments there lurked, unrecognized and unsuspected, the
natural man's fear of the thing not of nature, of its dominion, coming
between him and her, slackening, perhaps sundering the tie of flesh.
Through the tie of flesh, insensibly, he had come to look on Jinny as
his possession.

"What would you do," he said, "if the little chap were to get ill?"

She turned as if he had struck her.

"Ill? Why couldn't you _tell_ me he was ill?"

"But he isn't. I was only----"

"Does Henry say he's ill?"

"Henry? Oh Lord, no."

"You're lying. I'll go to him and see----"

She made a rush for the window. He sprang after her and caught her. She
struggled in his arms.

"Jinny, you little fool. There's nothin