you."

He smiled. "No, Jinny. I told you long ago you couldn't."

He was moved, very strangely moved, by her admission. He had not had to
help himself to that. She had given it to him, a gift from the unseen.

"Well," he said presently, "what are you going to do?"

"Oh--struggle along somehow."

"I wouldn't struggle too hard." He meditated. "Look here, our natural
tendency, yours and mine, is to believe that it's people that do all the
mischief, and not that the thing itself goes. We'll believe anything
rather than that. But we've got to recognize that it's capricious. It
comes and goes."

"Still, people do count. My brother-in-law, John Brodrick, makes it go.
Whereas you, Tanks, I own you make it come."

"Oh, I make it come, do I?"

He wondered, "What does Brodrick do?"

His smile persisted, so that she divined his wonder.

She turned from him ever so little, and he saw a sadness in her face,
thus estranged and averted. He thought he knew the source of it and its
secret. It also was a gift from the unseen.

When he had left her she went up-stairs and cast herself upon the bed
where her little son lay naked, and abandoned herself to her maternal
passion.

And Gertrude stood there in the nursery, and watched her; and like
Tanqueray, she thought she knew.

XLV

There were moments when she longed to be as Gertrude, a woman with one
innocent, uncomplicated aim. She was no longer sorry for her. Gertrude's
passion was so sweetly and serenely mortal, and it was so manifestly
appeased. She bore within her no tyrannous divinity. She knew nothing of
the consuming and avenging will.

Jane was at its mercy; now that she had given it its head. It went, it
went, as they said; and the terror was now lest she should go with it,
past all bounds.

For the world of vivid and tangible things was receding. The garden, the
house, Brodrick and his suits of clothes and the unchanged garment of
his flesh and blood, the child's adorable, diminutive body, they had no
place beside the perpetual, the ungovernable resurgence of her vision.
They became insubstantial, insignificant. The people of the vision were
solid, they clothed themselves in flesh; they walked the earth; the
light and the darkness and the weather knew them, and the grass was
green under their feet. The things they touched were saturated with
their presence. There was no sign of ardent life they had not.

And not only was she surrounded by their visibl