It was a perfect day, Jane's birthday, like a young June day, a day of the sun, of white distances and vivid foregrounds.

Wendover Hill looked over Arnott Nicholson's white house and over his green garden, where, summer and winter through, there brooded a heavenly quiet, a perfect peace. It was strange and sad, said Tanqueray, that a quiet and peace like that should be given to Nicky—to write poems in. Jane said it was sadder and stranger that verse so vile should flow from anything so charming, so perfect in its way as Nicky.

"Do you think," said she, as they crowded on his doorstep, "do you think he'll be at home?"

"Rather. We shall find him in his library, among his books and his busts, seething in a froth of abominable manuscripts, and feeling himself immortal."

Arnott Nicholson was at home, and he was in his library, with his books and his busts, and with Gisborne's great portrait of Jane Holland (the original) above his chimney-piece. He was, as Tanqueray had predicted, seething in his froth. Their names came to him there—Miss Holland and Mr. Tanqueray. In a moment Nicky was out of his library and into his drawing-room.

He was a singularly attractive person, slender, distinguished, highly finished in black and white. He was dressed, not like a candidate for immortality, but in the pink of contemporary perfection.

He was shyly, charmingly glad to see them. And delighted, of course, he said, to see Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning. He insisted on their all staying to tea, to dinner, on their giving him, now that they had come, a day. He ordered whisky and soda and lemonade. He brought peaches and chocolates and cigarettes, and offered them diffidently, as things mortal and savouring of mortality.

He went to and fro, carrying himself humbly yet with triumph, like one aware that he entertained immortal guests. He couldn't get over it, he said, their dropping in on him like this, with a divine precipitance, out of their blue. Heavens! Supposing he had been out! He stood there glowing at them, the most perfect thing in his perfect drawing-room.

It was a room of old chintzes and old china, of fragile, distinguished furniture, of family portraits, of miniatures in medallions, and great bowls of roses everywhere. The whole house had a strange feminine atmosphere, a warm look as if a woman's hand had passed over it. Yet it was Nicky who was the soul of his house, a slender soul, three parts feminine.

Nicky was looking at Jane as she stooped over the roses. "Do you know," he said, "that you've come home? Come and see yourself."

He led the way into his library where her portrait looked down from its high place.

"You bought it?" said she.

"Rather. Gisborne painted it for me."

"Oh, Nicky!"

"It's your genius brooding over mine—I mean over me."

He looked at her again. When he looked at you Nicky's perfect clothes, his long chin, his nose that seemed all bridge, his fine little black moustache, Nicky himself retreated into insignificance beneath his enormous, prominent black eyes.

"I put you there," he said, "to inspire me."

Nicky's eyes gazed at you with a terrible solemnity whenever he talked about his inspiration.

"Do I?"

She did. They had caught him in the high act of creation. He'd been at it since ten o'clock; sitting there, with the blood, he said, beating so furiously in his brain that if he'd gone on like that he'd have destroyed himself. His head was burning now.

"We'll drag you, Nicky, to the top of Wendover Hill, and air you thoroughly. You reek," said Tanqueray.

His idea always was that they took Nicky out of doors to air him; he had so strongly the literary taint.

Nicky declared that he would have been willing to be dragged with them anywhere. Only, as it happened, he had to be at home. He was expecting Miss Bickersteth. They knew Miss Bickersteth?

They knew her. Nicky, for purposes of his own, was in the habit of cultivating, assiduously, the right people; and Miss Bickersteth was eminently right.

The lady, he said, might be upon them any minute.

"In that case," said Tanqueray, "we'll clear out."

"You clear out? But you're the very people he wants to see."

"He?"

Hugh Brodrick. Miss Bickersteth was bringing Hugh Brodrick.

They smiled. Miss Bickersteth was always bringing somebody or being brought.

Brodrick was the right man to bring. He implored them to stay and meet Brodrick.

"Who is Brodrick?"

Brodrick, said Nicky, was a man to be cultivated, to be cherished, to be clung to and never to be let go. Brodrick was on the "Morning Telegraph," and at the back of it, and everywhere about it. And the Jews were at the back of Brodrick. So much so that he was starting a monthly magazine—for the work of the great authors only. That was his, Brodrick's, dream. He didn't know whether he could carry it through. Nicky supposed it would depend on the authors. No, on the advertisements, Brodrick told him. That was where he had the pull. He could work the "Telegraph" agency for that. And he had the Jews at the back of him. He was going to pay his authors on a scale that would leave the popular magazines behind him.

"He sounds too good to be true," said Jane.

"Or is he," said Tanqueray, "too true to be altogether good?"

"He isn't true, in your sense, at all. That's the beauty of him. He's a gorgeous dream. But a dream that can afford to pay for itself."

"A dream with Jews at its back," said Tanqueray.

"And he wants—he told me—to secure you first, Miss Holland. And Mr. Tanqueray. And he's sure to want Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning. You'll all be in it. It's the luckiest thing that you came in to-day, of all days."

In fact, Nicky suggested that if the finger of Providence was ever to be seen clearly working anywhere, it was working here.

A bell in the distance tinkled gently, with a musical silver note. It was one of the perfections of Nicky's house that it had no jarring noises in it.

"That's he," said Nicky solemnly. "Excuse me."

And he went out.

He came back, all glowing and quivering, behind Miss Bickersteth and Mr. Hugh Brodrick.

Miss Bickersteth they all knew, said Nicky. His voice was unsteady with his overmastering sense of great presences, of Jane Holland, of Tanqueray, of Brodrick.

Brodrick was a man of about thirty-five, square-built, with a torso inclined to a somewhat heavy slenderness, and a face with blunt but regular features, heavily handsome. One of those fair Englishmen who grow darker after adolescence; hair, moustache and skin acquiring a dull sombreness in fairness. But Brodrick's face gained in its effect from the dusky opacity that intensified the peculiar blueness of his eyes. They were eyes which lacked, curiously, the superficial social gaze, which fixed themselves, undeviating and intent, on the one object of his interest. As he entered they were fixed on Jane, turning straight to her in her corner.

This directness of aim rendered mediation almost superfluous. But Nicky, as the fervent adorer of Miss Holland, had brought to the ceremony of introduction a solemnity and mystery which he was in no mood to abate. It was wonderful how in spite of Brodrick he got it all in.

Brodrick was charged with a more formidable and less apparent fire. Yet what struck Jane first in Brodrick was his shyness, his deference, his positive timidity. There was something about him that appealed to her, pathetically, to forget that he was that important person, a proprietor of the "Morning Telegraph." She would have said that he was new to any business of proprietorship. New with a newness that shone in his slumbering ardour; that at first sight seemed to betray itself in the very innocence, the openness of his approach. If it could be called an approach, that slow, indomitable gravitation of Brodrick toward Jane.

"Do you often come over to Wendover?" he said.

"Not very often."

There was a pause, then Brodrick said something again, but in so low a voice that Jane had to ask him what he said.

"Only that it's an easy run down from Marylebone."

"It is—very," said she, and she tried to draw him into conversation with Miss Lempriere and Miss Gunning.

It was not easy to draw him where he had not previously meant to go. He was a creature too unswerving, inadaptable for purely social purposes. For Nina and Laura he had only a blank courtesy. Yet he talked to them, he talked fluently, in an abstracted manner, while he looked, now at Jane, and now at her portrait by Gisborne. He seemed to be wondering quietly what she was doing there, in Nicky's house.

Nicky, as became him, devoted himself to Miss Bickersteth. She was on the reviewing staff of the "Morning Telegraph," and very valuable to Nicky. Besides, he liked her. She interested him, amused, amazed him. As a journalist she had strange perversities and profundities. She had sharpened her teeth on the "Critique of Pure Reason" in her prodigious teens. Yet she could toss off, for the "Telegraph," paragraphs of an incomparable levity. In the country Miss Bickersteth was a blustering, full-blooded Diana of the fields. In town she was intellect, energy and genial modernity made flesh. Even Tanqueray, who drew the line at the dreadful, clever little people, had not drawn it at Miss Bickersteth. There was something soothing in her large and florid presence. It had no ostensible air of journalism, of being restlessly and for ever on the spot. You found it wherever you wanted it, planted fairly and squarely, with a look of having grown there.

Nicky, concealed beside Miss Bickersteth in a corner, had begun by trying to make her talk about Shelley (she had edited him). He hoped that thus he might be led on to talk about himself. To Nicky the transition was a natural one.

But Miss Bickersteth did not want to talk about Shelley. Shelley, she declared irreverently, was shop. She wanted to talk about people whom they knew, having reached the absolving age of forty, when you may say anything you please about anybody to an audience sufficiently discreet. And she had just seen Jane and Tanqueray going out together through the long window on to the lawn.

"I suppose," said she, "if they liked, they could marry now."

"Now?" repeated poor Nicky vaguely.

"Now that one of them has got an income."

"I didn't think he was a marrying man."

"No. And you wouldn't think, would you, she was a marrying woman?"

"I—I don't know. I haven't thought about it. He said he wasn't going to marry."

"Oh." Two small eyes looked at him, two liquid, luminous spots in the pinkness of Miss Bickersteth's face.

"It's got as far as that, has it? That shows he's been thinking of it."

"I should have thought it showed he wasn't."

Miss Bickersteth's mouth was decided in its set, and vague in its outline and its colouring. Her smile now appeared as a mere quiver of her face.

"How have you managed to preserve your beautiful innocence? Do you always go about with your head among the stars?"

"My head——?" He felt it. It was going round and round.

"Yes. Is a poet not supposed ever to see anything under his exquisite nose?"

"I am not," said Nicky solemnly, "always a poet. And when a person tells me he isn't going to do a thing, I naturally think he isn't."

"And I naturally think he is. Whatever you think about George Tanqueray, he's sure to do the other thing."

"Come—if you can calculate on that."

"You can't calculate on anything. Least of all with George Tanqueray. Except that he'll never achieve anything that isn't a masterpiece. If it's a masterpiece of folly."

"Mind you," she added, "I don't say he will marry Jane Holland, and I don't say it would be a masterpiece of folly if he did."

"What do you say?"

"That if he ever cares for any woman enough to marry her, it will be Jane."

"I see," said Nicky, after some reflection. "You think he's that sort?"

"I think he's a genius. What more do you want?"

"Oh, I don't want anything more," said Nicky, plunging head-first into a desperate ambiguity. He emerged. "What I mean is, when we've got Him, and when we've got Her—creators——" He paused before the immensity of his vision of Them. "What business have we——"

"To go putting one and one together so as to make two?"

"Well—it doesn't seem quite reverent."

"You think them gods, then, your creators?"

"I think I—worship them."

"Ah, Mr. Nicholson, you're adorable. And I'm atrocious."

"I believe," said Nicky, "tea is in the garden."

"Let us go into the garden," said Miss Bickersteth.

And they went.

Tea was served in a green recess shut in from the lawn by high yew hedges. Nicky at his tea-table was more charming than ever, surrounded by old silver and fine linen, making tea delicately, and pouring it into fragile cups and offering it, doing everything with an almost feminine dexterity and grace.

After tea the group scattered and rearranged itself. In Nicky's perfect garden, a garden of smooth grass plots and clipped yew-trees, of lupins and larkspurs, of roses that would have been riotous but for the restraining spirit of the place; in a green alley between lawn and orchard, Mr. Hugh Brodrick found himself with Miss Holland, and alone. Very quietly, very persistently, with eyes intent, he had watched for and secured this moment.

"You don't know," he was saying, "how I've wanted to meet you, and how hard I've worked for it."

"Was it so hard?"

"Hard isn't the word for it. If you knew the things I've done——" He spoke in his low, even voice, saying eager and impulsive things without a sign of eagerness or impulse.

"What things?"

"Mean things, base things. Going on my knees to people I didn't know, grovelling for an introduction."

"I'm sorry. It sounds awful."

"It was. I've been on the point of meeting you a score of times, and there's always been some horrid fatality. Either you'd gone when I arrived, or I had to go before you arrived. I believe I've seen you—once."

"I don't remember."

"At Miss Bickersteth's. You were coming out as I was going in." He looked at his watch. "And now I ought to be catching a train."

"Don't catch it."

"I shan't. For I've got to tell you how much I admire your work. I'm not going to ask how you do it, for I don't suppose you know yourself."

"I don't."

"I'm not even going to ask myself. I simply accept the miracle."

"If it's miracles you want, look at George Tanqueray."

He said nothing. And now she thought of it, he had not looked at George Tanqueray. He had looked at nobody but her. It was the look of a man who had never known a moment's uncertainty as to the thing he wanted. It was a look that stuck.

"Why aren't you at his feet?" she said.

"Because I'm not drawn—to my knees—by brutal strength and cold, diabolical lucidity."

"Oh," she cried, "you haven't read him."

"I've read all of him. And I prefer you."

"Me? You've spoilt it all. If you can't admire him, what is the use of your admiring me?"

"I see. You don't want me to admire you."

He said it with no emphasis, no emotion, as if he were indifferent as to what she wanted.

"No. I don't think I do."

"You see," he said, "you have a heart."

"Oh, if people would only leave my heart alone!"

"And Tanqueray, I believe, has a devil."

She turned on him.

"Give me George Tanqueray's devil!" She paused, considering him. "Why do you talk about my heart?"

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"Why do you talk about my heart?"

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"Because, if I may say so, it's what I like most in you."

"Anybody can like that."

"Can they?"

"Yes. For ten people who care for me there isn't one capable of caring for George Tanqueray."

"How very unfortunate for him."

"Unfortunate for me, you mean."

He smiled. He was not in the least offended. It was as if her perverse shafts never penetrated his superb solidity.

And yet he was not obtuse, not insensitive. He might fall, she judged, through pride, but not through vanity.

"I admit," said he, "that he is our greatest living novelist."

"Then," said she, "you are forgiven."

"And I may continue to adore your tenderness?"

"You may adore anything—after that admission."

He smiled again, like one satisfied, appeased.

"What," he said presently, "is Miss Lempriere's work like? Has she anything of your breadth, your solidity, your fire?"

"There's more fire in Nina Lempriere's little finger than in my whole body."

Brodrick took out his pocket-book and made a note of Nina.

"And the little lady? What does she do?"

"Little things. Charming, delicious, funny, pathetic things. Everything she does is like herself."

"I must put her down too." And he made another note of Laura.

They had turned on to the lawn. Their host was visible, gathering great bunches of roses for his guests.

"What a lovable person he is," said Brodrick.

"Isn't he?" said Jane.

They faced the house, the little house roofed with moss, walled with roses, where, thought Jane, poor Nicky nested like the nightingale he wasn't and would never be.

"I wonder," said Brodrick, "how he gets the perfection, the peace, the finish of it, the little feminine touches, the flowers on the table——"

"Yes, Mr. Nicholson and his house always look as if they were expecting a lady."

"But," said Brodrick, "it's so pathetic, for the lady never comes."

"Perhaps if she did it wouldn't be so peaceful."

"Perhaps. But it must be sad for him—living alone like this."

"I don't know. I live alone and I'm not sad."

"You? You live alone?"

"Of course I do. So does Mr. Tanqueray."

"Tanqueray. He's a man, and it doesn't matter. But you, a woman——It's horrible."

He was almost animated.

"There's your friend, Miss Bickersteth. She lives alone."

"Miss Bickersteth—is Miss Bickersteth."

"There's Nina Lempriere."

"The fiery lady?" He paused, meditating. "Why do her people let her?"

"She hasn't got any. Her people are all dead."

"How awful. And your small friend, Miss Gunning? Don't say she lives alone, too."

"She doesn't. She lives with her father. He's worse than a family——"

"Worse than a——?" He stared aghast.

"Worse than a family of seven children."

"And that's a misfortune, is it?" He frowned.

"Yes, when you have to keep it—on nothing but what you earn by writing, and when it leaves you neither time nor space to write in."

"I see. She oughtn't to have to do it."

"But she has, and it's killing her. She'd be better if she lived alone."

"Well—I don't know anything about Miss Gunning. But for you——"

"You don't know anything about me."

"I do. I've seen you. And I stick to it. It's horrible."

"What's horrible?" said Miss Bickersteth, as they approached.

"Ask Mr. Brodrick."

But Brodrick, thus appealed to, drifted away towards Nicholson, murmuring something about that train he had to catch.

"What have you done to agitate him?" said Miss Bickersteth. "You didn't throw cold water on his magazine, did you?"

"I shouldn't have known he had a magazine."

"What? Didn't he mention it?"

"Not to me."

"Then something is the matter with him." She added, after a thoughtful pause, "What did you think of him?"

"There's no doubt he's a very amiable, benevolent man. The sort of man who wants everybody to marry because he's married himself."

"But he isn't married."

"Well, he looks it. He looks as if he'd never been anything but married all his life."

"Anyhow," said Miss Bickersteth, "that's safe. Safer than not looking married when you are."

"Oh, he's safe enough," said Jane. As she spoke she was aware of Tanqueray standing at her side.

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