entless enough in its youth; it would be terrible in its
maturity. The struggle, if she struggled, would tear her as she had
never yet been torn. She would have to surrender, or at any rate to make
terms with it. It was useless to fall back upon the old compromises and
adjustments. Tanqueray's solution was the only possible, the only
tolerable one. But it depended perilously upon Hugh's consent.

She went to him in his study where he sat peaceably smoking in the
half-hour before bed-time.

Brodrick merely raised his eyebrows as she laid it before him--her
monstrous proposal to go away--for three months. He asked her if three
months was not rather a long time for a woman to leave her home and her
children?

"I know," she said, "but if I don't----"

"Well?"

"I shall go to pieces."

He looked at her critically, incredulously.

"Why can't you say at once what's wrong?" he said. "Is there anything
you want that you don't have here? Is there any mortal thing that can be
done that isn't done?"

"Not any mortal thing."

"What is it then?"

"Hugh dear, did it never strike you that you are a very large family?
And that when it comes down on me it's in the proportion of about seven
to one?"

"Whoever _does_ come down on you?"

"John," said she, "was with me for two hours yesterday."

Brodrick lent his ear as to a very genuine grievance. John, since his
bereavement, was hardly ever out of the house.

"And I suppose," he said, "he bored you?"

"No, but he will call when I'm writing."

"Why on earth don't you send him away?"

"I would, if Mabel hadn't died. But how can you when he's unhappy? It
would hurt him so. And yet, supposing you were to die, what would John
say if I were to call on him at the works every day, and play with his
dynamos to distract my mind, or sit with him in his office rumpling his
hair, and dislocating his ideas till he didn't know the difference
between a steam-roller and an internal combustion engine? That's more or
less what John does to me. The only thing is to get away."

However, it was for Brodrick to decide, she said. And Brodrick said he
couldn't decide until he had thought it over.

She was very soon aware that she had caused a scandal in her husband's
family by her proposal to go away for three months. The scandal was not
altogether unconnected with George Tanqueray, since it was at his
suggestion that she proposed to take this unprecedented step. If she had
proposed to ta