e was thinking that it must be pretty serious if
Jinny was not prepared to be sincere about it.

"That's what I want to prove," said Jane softly, "that there isn't any
handicap. That's why I want to win."

Her feeling was that she must keep her family out of these discussions.
She had gone too far the other night in the things that she had said to
Tanqueray, that Tanqueray had forced her to say. She had made herself
afraid of him. Her admissions had been so many base disloyalties to
Hugh. She was not going to admit anything to Nina, least of all that she
found her enviable, as she stood there, stripped for the race, carrying
nothing but her genius. It was so horribly true (as Nina had once said)
that the lash had been laid across her naked shoulders to turn her into
the course when she had swerved from it. It had happened every time,
every time; so invariably as to prove that for Nina virginity was the
sacred, the infrangible, predestined law, the one condition.

But the conditions, she said aloud, were nobody's business but your own.
She refused to be judged by anything but the result. It was absurd to
talk about winning and handicapping; as if creative art _was_ a
handicap, as if there were any joy or any end in it beyond the act of
creation. You defeated your end if you insisted on conditions, if you
allowed anything extraneous to count as much as that.

The flush on her face showed what currents moved her to her protest.

"Does it seem to you, then, that _I_'ve defeated my end?" Nina pressed
her point home implacably.

Jane strung herself to the pain of it.

"Not you." She paused for her stroke. "Nor yet I."

She rose with it. She wanted to get away from Nina who seemed terrible
to her at that moment. She shrank from meeting Nina's eyes.

Nina was left meditating on her friend's beautiful hypocrisy.

It might be beautiful, but it was fatuous, too, of Jinny to pretend that
she could live surrounded and hemmed in by Brodricks and do what she had
done without turning a hair, or that she could maintain so
uncompromising an affection for her husband and child without
encountering the vengeance of the jealous god. Nina could not suppose
that Jinny's god was less jealous than George Tanqueray's or her own.
And Jinny must be perpetually offending him. She recognized the
righteousness of the artist in Jinny's plea to be judged only by the
results. That, no doubt, was how posterity would judge her. But she,
Nina, w