ck. For Gertrude the "Monthly Review" _was_ Brodrick.

She drew him for Prothero's benefit as the champion of the lost cause of
literature. She framed the portrait as it were in a golden laurel
wreath.

Eddy Heron cried, "Hear, hear!" and "Go it, Gertrude!" and Winny wanted
to know if her uncle's ears weren't tingling. She was told that an
editor's ears were past tingling. But he flushed slightly when Gertrude
crowned herself and him. They were all listening to her now.

"I assure you," she was saying, "_we_ are not afraid."

She was one with Brodrick, his interests and his dream.

She was congratulated (by Jane) on her championship of the champion, and
Brodrick was heard murmuring something to the effect that nobody need be
frightened; they were safe enough.

It struck Laura that Brodrick looked singularly unsatisfied for a man
who has realized his dream.

"All the same," said Prothero, "it was rash of you to take those poems I
sent you."

"Dear Owen," said Jane, "do you think they'll sink him?"

"As far as that goes," Brodrick said, "we're going to have a novel of
George Tanqueray's. That'll show you what we can afford."

"Or what George can afford," said Jane. It was the first spark she had
emitted. But it consumed the heavy subject.

"By the way," said Caro Bickersteth, "where _is_ George Tanqueray?"

Laura said that he was somewhere in the country. He was always in the
country now.

"Without his wife," said Caro, and nobody contradicted her. She went on.

"You great geniuses ought not to marry, any more than lunatics. The law
ought to provide for it. Genius, in either party, if you can establish
the fact, should annul the contract, like--like any other crucial
disability."

"Or," Jane amended, "why not make the marriage of geniuses a criminal
act, like suicide? You can always acquit them afterwards on the ground
of temporary insanity."

"How would you deal," said Brodrick suddenly, "with mixed marriages?"

"Mixed----?" Caro feigned bewilderment.

"When a norm--an ordinary--person marries a genius? It's a racial
difference."

("Distinctly," Caro murmured.)

"And wouldn't it be hard to say which side the lunacy was on?"

Laura would have suspected him of a bitter personal intention had it not
been so clear that Jinny's genius was no longer in question, that her
flame was quenched.

It was Caro who asked (in the drawing-room, afterwards) if they might
see the children.

Gertrude went up-s