r the proofs. He'd be
eternally disgraced, he said, if he didn't publish it. He wished she'd
look at the thing and tell him if he wouldn't be.

She looked and admired his judgment. The tale was everything that he had
said. Nina had more than found herself.

"Of course," she said, "you'll publish it."

"Of course I shall. I'm not going to knuckle under to Louis and his
beastly Jews--with a chance like that. I don't care if the price _is_
stiff. It's a little masterpiece, the sort of thing you don't get once
in a hundred years. It'll send up the standard. That's of course why he
funks it."

He pondered. "There's something queer about it. Whenever that woman gets
away and hides herself in some savage lair she invariably does a thing
like this."

Jane admitted half-audibly that it was queer.

They gave themselves up to the proofs, and it was late when she heard
that Nina had crept from her savage lair and was now in London. It was
very queer, she thought, that Nina had not told her she was coming.

She called the next day at Adelphi Terrace. She found Nina in her front
room, at work on the proofs that Brodrick had sent her.

Nina met her friend's reproaches with a perfect frankness. She had not
told her she was coming, because she didn't know how long she was going
to stay, and she had wanted, in any case, to be let alone. That was
yesterday. To-day what she wanted more than anything was to see Jane.
She hadn't read her book, and wasn't going to until she had fairly done
with her own. She had heard of it from Tanqueray, and was afraid of it.
Jane, she declared, was too tremendous, too overwhelming. She could only
save herself by keeping clear of her.

"I should have thought," Jane said, "you were safe enough--after that
last." She had told her what she had thought of it in the first moments
of her arrival. "Safe, at any rate, from me."

"You're the last person I shall ever be safe from. There you are, always
just ahead of me. I'm exhausted if I look at you. You make me feel as if
I never could keep up."

"But why? There's no comparison between your pace and mine."

"It's not your pace, Jinny, it's your handicap that frightens me."

"My handicap?"

"Well--a baby, a husband, and all those Brodricks and Levines. I've got
to see you carrying all that weight, and winning; and it takes the heart
out of me."

"If I did win, wouldn't it prove that the handicap wasn't what you
thought it?"

Nina said nothing. Sh