terest. It was the
strongest and the strangest intellectual influence I had ever felt.
You'll never quite know what it meant to me."

"And it means nothing now--you don't like it--my poor genius? And they
used to say you were in love with it."

"So I was, Jinny, before I saw you."

"You were in love enough to marry it."

"I didn't marry it. It wouldn't marry me."

"Is that why you hate it? Darling, you can't hate it as much as I do."

"I don't hate it. But you can't expect me to love it as I love my wife."

"But I'm not your wife. Your wife wouldn't behave like this. Would you
like me better if I didn't?"

He held her arms in his arms, fiercely and tight, crushing her.

"If," she said, "I was a virtuous woman, the sort of woman who sits on
her husband's head like an uncomfortable crown?"

"Jinny--if Gertrude were to hear you!"

She loosened his arms and sat up and listened.

"I hear Gertrude," she said. "Darling, your hair's all any way. Let me
straighten it. It might be used in evidence against us."

Gertrude indeed wore as she entered the ominously distant air of one who
suspects a vision of iniquity. She took her place on the other side of
the hearth and bent her head over her sewing. A thin stream of
conversation flowed from Brodrick and from Jane, and under it she
divined, she felt the tide that drew them.

She herself sat silent and smooth and cool. She sat like one removed
from mortality's commotion. But it was as if she were listening to the
blood that beat in Brodrick's veins, and felt in herself the passion
that ran there, in secret, exulting towards its end.

At ten o'clock Jane rose and held out her hand to Gertrude. She was
saying good-night. Brodrick sat abstracted for a moment. Presently he
rose also and followed her with shining eyes.

Gertrude's head bent lower and lower over her sewing.

LII

Before long Brodrick was aware that that month of spring had brought him
the thing he most desired. He was appeased again with the hope of
fatherhood. It tided him over the bad months of nineteen-seven, over the
intolerable hours that Levine was giving him in the office of the
"Monthly Review." It softened for him the hard fact that he could no
longer afford his expensive dream. The old, reckless, personal ambition,
the fantastic pride, had been overtaken by the ambition and the pride of
race. He wanted to found, not a great magazine, but a family, to have
more and more children like