y
brought her a moment of pain when she saw them going out of the room
with Gertrude, led by her hand.

For six weeks Brodrick had been left very much to Gertrude. And
Gertrude's face in that time had flowered softly, as if she had entered
herself into the peace she made.

But in March Jane was on her feet again. In April Brodrick took her to
the Riviera, and her return (in May) was the return of that brilliant
and distracting alien who had invaded Brodrick's house seven years ago.
Jane having nothing to do but to recover had done it so completely that
Henry admitted that he would not have known her. To which she had rather
ominously replied that she knew herself, only too well.

Even before she went away, even lying quiet, she had been aware that
life was having its triumphant will of her. She had known all along, of
course, that (as Owen Prothero had told her) she was sound through and
through. Her vitality was unconquerable. Nothing could wreck her. Even
Henry would own that her body, when they gave it a chance, was as fine a
physical envelope as any woman could wish to have. Lying quiet, she had
been inclined to agree with Henry that genius--her genius at any
rate--was a neurosis; and she was not going to be neurotic any more.
Whatever it was, it had made things terribly complicated. And to Jane
lying quiet they had become absurdly simple. She herself was simplified.
She had been torn in pieces; and in putting herself together again she
had left out the dangerous, disintegrating, virile element. Whatever
happened now, she would no longer suffer from the presence in her of two
sexes contending for the mastery. Through it all, through all her
dreadful virility, she had always been persistently and preposterously
feminine. And lying quiet she was more than ever what George Tanqueray
had said she was not to be--a mere woman.

Therefore to Jane, lying quiet, there had been no question of how she
was to go on.

But to Jane on her feet again, in all her ungovernable, disastrous
energy, the question was as insistent as Tanqueray himself. Her genius
had recognized its own vehicle in her body restored to perfect health,
and three years' repression had given it ten times its power to dominate
and torture. It had thriven on the very tragedies that had brought her
low.

It knew its hour and claimed her. She was close upon thirty-nine. It
would probably claim her without remission for the next seven years. It
had been rel