She had known all the time that if she was not to go on thinking about George Tanqueray she must see his wife. When she had once thoroughly realized his wife it would be easier to give him up to her.

It was George who had tried to prevent her realizing Rose. He, for his part, refused to be given up to Rose or in any way identified with her. Nina was right. His marriage had made no difference to George.

But now that she realized Rose, it made all the difference to Jane. Rose was realized so completely that she turned George out of the place he persisted in occupying in Jane's mind. Jane had not allowed herself to feel that there was anything to be sorry about in George's marriage. She was afraid of having to be sorry for George, because, in that case, there would be no end to her thinking about him. But if there was any sorrow in George's marriage it was not going to affect George. She would not have to be sorry about him.

Like Nina, Jane was sorry for the woman.

That little figure strayed in and out of Jane's mind without disturbing her renewed communion with Hambleby.

Up till now she had contrived to keep the very existence of Hambleby a secret from her publishers. But they had got wind of him somehow, and had written many times inquiring when he would be ready? As if she could tell, as if her object was to get him ready, and not rather to prolong the divine moments of his creation. She would have liked to have kept him with her in perpetual manuscript, for in this state he still seemed a part of herself. Publicity of any sort was a profanation. When published he would be made to stand in shop windows coarsely labelled, offering himself for sale at four-and-six; he would go into the houses of people who couldn't possibly appreciate him, and would suffer unspeakable things at their hands. As the supreme indignity, he would be reviewed. And she, his creator, would be living on him, profiting by his degradation at percentages which made her blush. To be thinking of what Hambleby would "fetch" was an outrage to his delicate perfection.

But she had to think of it; and after all, when she had reckoned it up, he would not "fetch" so very much. She had failed to gather in one half of the golden harvest. The serial rights of Hambleby lay rotting in the field. George used to manage all these dreadful things for her. For though George was not much cleverer than she he liked to think he was. It was his weakness to imagine that he had a head for business. And in the perversity of things he had really done better for her than he had ever done for himself. That was the irony of it; when, if she could, she would have taken her luck and shared it with him.

Anyhow, business without George had been very uninteresting; and therefore she had not attended to it. There had been opportunities as golden as you please, but she had not seized them. There had been glorious openings for Hambleby, far-reaching prospects, noble vistas, if only he had been born six months sooner. And when George said that Hambleby would be popular, he was, of course, only tormenting her. He never meant half of the unpleasant things he said.

It was now April. Hambleby waited only for the crowning chapter. The arrangements for his publication had been made, all but the date, which was left unsettled, in case at the last moment a new opening should be found.

At four o'clock on an April afternoon Jane was meditating on her affairs when the staircase bell rang somewhat imperiously. It sounded like somebody determined to get in. A month ago she would have taken no notice of it. Now she was afraid not to open her door lest Tanqueray should be there.

It was not Tanqueray. It was Hugh Brodrick.

For a second she wondered at him, not taking him in. She had forgotten that Brodrick existed. It was his eyes she recognized him by. They were fixed on her, smiling at her wonder. He stood on the little square of landing between the door and the foot of the staircase.

"Of course," he said. "You're just going out?"

"No, do come in."

"May I? I don't believe you know in the least who I am."

"I do, really. I'm very glad to see you."

He followed her up the stairs and into her sitting-room, the small white-painted sitting-room, with its three straight windows looking on the Square. He went to one of the windows and looked out.

"Yes," he said, "there is a charm about it."

He spoke as if his mind had been long occupied with this place she lived in; as if they had disputed together many times as to the attraction of Kensington Square, and he had been won over, at last, reluctantly, to her view. It all strengthened the impression he gave of being absorbed in her.

He turned to her.

"You like living here? All alone? Cut off from everybody?"

She remembered then how they had really discussed this question.

"I like it very much indeed."

"Well——" (He said it sadly.) "Do you write in this room? At that table?"

"Yes."

He looked at the table as if he thought it all very interesting and very incomprehensible and very sad. He looked at the books on the shelf close to the table and read George Tanqueray's name on them. He frowned slightly at the books and turned away.

She sat down. He did not take the chair she indicated, but chose another where he could see her rather better. He was certainly a man who knew his own mind.

"I've called," he said, "a great many times. But I've always missed you."

"So at last you gave it up? Like everybody else."

"Does it look as if I'd given it up?"

She could not say it did.

"No," he said. "I never give anything up. In that I'm not like everybody else."

He wasn't, she reflected. And yet somehow he ought to have been. There was nothing so very remarkable about him.

He smiled. "I believe," he said, "you thought I was the man come to tune the piano."

"Did I look as if I did?"

"A little."

"Do I now?" She was beginning to like Brodrick.

"Not so much. As it happens, I have come partly for the pleasure of seeing you and partly—to discuss, if you don't mind, some business."

Jane was aware of a certain relief. If it was that he came for——

"I don't know whether you've heard that I'm bringing out a magazine?"

"Oh yes. I remember you were bringing it out——"

"I was thinking of bringing it out when I last met you. It may interest you, because it's to have nothing in it that isn't literature. I'm going in for novels, short stories, essays, poems. No politics."

"Won't that limit your circulation?"

"Of course it'll limit it. Still, it's not easy to keep honest if you go in for politics."

"I see. Rather than not be honest you prefer to limit your circulation?"

He blushed like a man detected in some meanness; the supreme meanness of vaunting his own honesty.

"Oh, well, I don't know about that. Politics means my brother-in-law. If I keep them out I keep him out, and run the thing my own way. I dare say that's all there is in it."

Certainly she liked him. He struck her as powerful and determined. With his magazine, he had the air of charging, sublimely, at the head of the forlorn hope of literature.

"It's taken me all this time to get the capital together. But I've got it."

"Yes. You would get it."

He looked up gravely inquiring.

"You strike me as being able to get things."

He flushed with pleasure. "Do I? I don't know. If I can get the authors I want I believe I can make the magazine one of the big things of the century." He said it quietly, as if inspired by caution rather than enthusiasm. "They'll make it—if I can get them."

"Are they so difficult?"

"The ones I want are. I don't want any but the best."

She smiled.

"It's all very well to smile; but this kind of magazine hasn't really been tried before. There's room for it."

"Oh, oceans of room."

"And it will have all the room there is. Now's its moment. All the good old magazines are dead."

"And gone to heaven because they were so good."

"Because they were old. My magazine will be young."

"There has been frightful mortality among the young."

"I know the things you mean. They were decadent, neurotic, morbid, worse than old. My magazine will be really young. It's the young writers that I want. And there isn't one of them I want as much as you."

She seemed to have hardly heard him.

"Have you asked Mr. Tanqueray?"

"Not yet. You're the first I've asked. The very first."

"You should have asked him first."

"I didn't want him first."

"You should have wanted him. Why" (she persisted), "did you come to me before him?"

"Because you're so much more valuable to me."

"In what way?"

"Your name is better known."

"It oughtn't to be. If it's names you want——" She gave him a string of them.

"Your name stands for more."

"And Mr. Tanqueray's? Does it not stand?"

He hesitated.

She insisted. "If mine does."

"I am corrupt," said Brodrick, "and mercenary and brutal."

"I wish you weren't," said she, so earnestly that he laughed.

"My dear Miss Holland, we cannot blink the fact that you have a name and he hasn't."

"Or that my name sells and his doesn't. Is that it?"

"Not altogether. If I couldn't get you I'd try to get him."

"Would you? How do you know that you're going to get me?"

He smiled. "I don't. I only know that I'm prepared, if I may say so, to pay for you."

"Oh," she said, "it isn't that."

He smiled again at her horror.

"I know it isn't that. Still——" He named a round sum, a sum so perfect in its roundness that it took her breath away. With such a sum she could do all that she wanted for her sister Effy at once, and secure herself against gross poverty for years.

"It's more than we could give Mr. Tanqueray."

"Is it?"

"Much more."

"That's what's so awful," she said.

He noticed how she clenched her hands as she said it.

"It's not my fault, is it?"

"Oh—I don't care whose fault it is!"

"But you care?"

"Yes." She almost whispered it.

He was struck by that sudden drop from vehemence to pathos.

"He is a very great friend of yours?"

"Yes."

"And—he's just married, isn't he?"

"Yes. And he isn't very well off. I don't think he could afford——" she said.

He coloured painfully as if she had suspected him of a desire to traffic in Tanqueray's poverty.

"We should pay him very well," he said.

"His book" (she pressed it on him), "is not arranged for."

"And yours is?"

"Practically it is. The contract's drawn up, but the date's not settled."

"If the date's not settled, surely I've still a chance?"

"And he," she said, "has still a chance if—I fail you?"

---

"And he," she said, "has still a chance if—I fail you?"

---

"Of course—if you fail me."

"And supposing that I hadn't got a book?"

"But you have."

"Supposing?"

"Then I should fall back on Mr. Tanqueray."

"Fall back on him!—The date is settled."

"But I thought——"

"I've settled it."

"Oh. And it can't be unsettled?"

"It can't—possibly."

"Why not?"

She meditated. "Because—it would spoil the chances of the book."

"I see. The chances of the book."

Their eyes met in conflict. It was as if they were measuring each other's moral value.

"I should make you a bigger offer, Miss Holland," he said; "only I believe you don't want that."

"No. Certainly I don't want that."

He paused. "Do you mind telling me if you've any other chance?"

"None. Not the ghost of one."

"So that, but for this all-important question of the date, I might have had you?"

"You might have had me."

"I'm almost glad," he said, "to have lost you—that way."

"Which way?" said she.

At that moment a servant of the house brought in tea. She announced that Mr. Nicholson was down-stairs and would like to see Miss Holland.

"Very well. You'll stay?" Jane said to Brodrick.

He did. He was, Jane reflected, the sort of man who stayed.

"Here's Mr. Brodrick," said she, as Nicky entered. "He's going to make all our fortunes."

"His own, too, I hope," said Brodrick. But he looked sulky, as if he resented Nicholson's coming in.

"Of course," he said, "they tell me the whole thing's a dream, a delusion, that it won't pay. But I know how to make it pay. The reason why magazines go smash is because they're owned by men with no business connections, no business organization, no business capacity. I couldn't do it if I hadn't the 'Telegraph' at my back. Practically I make the paper pay for the magazine."

And he went into it, in his quick, quiet voice, expounding and expanding his scheme, laying it down fairly and squarely, with lucidity but no apparent ardour.

It was Nicky who was excited. Jane could see cupidity in Nicky's eyes as Brodrick talked about his magazine. Brodrick dwelt now on the commercial side of it which had no interest for Nicky. Yet Nicky was excited. He wanted badly to get into Brodrick's magazine, and Brodrick wanted, Brodrick was determined to keep him out. There was a brief struggle between Nicky's decency and his desire; and then Nicky's desire and Brodrick's determination fairly skirmished together in the open. Brodrick tried heavily to keep Nicky off it. But Nicky hovered airily, intangibly about it. He fanned it as with wings; when Brodrick dropped it he picked it up, he sustained it, he kept it flying high. Every movement intimated in Nicky's most exquisite manner that if Brodrick really meant it, if he had positively surrendered to the expensive dream, if he wanted, in short, to keep it up and keep it high, he couldn't be off letting Nicky in.

Brodrick's shameless intention had been to out-stay Nicky. And as long as Nicky's approaches were so delicate as to provoke only delicate evasions, Brodrick stayed. But in the end poor Nicky turned desperate and put it to him point-blank. "Was there, or was there not to be a place for poets in the magazine?"

At that Brodrick got up and went.

"Nicky," said Jane, as the door closed on the retreating editor, "he came for my book, and I've made him take George Tanqueray's instead."

"I wish," said he, "you'd make him take my poems. But you can't. Nobody can make Brodrick do anything he doesn't want to."

"Oh——" said Jane, and dismissed Brodrick. "It's ages since I've seen you."

"I heard that you were immersed, and so I kept away."

"That was very good of you," said she.

It struck her when she had said it that perhaps it was not altogether what Nicky would have liked her to say.

"I was immersed," she said, "in Hambleby."

"Is he finished?"

"All but. I'm waiting to put a crown upon his head."

"Were you by any chance making it—the crown?"

"I haven't even begun to make it."

"I shan't spoil him then if I stay?"

"No. I doubt if anything could spoil him now."

"You've got him so safe?"

"So safe. And yet, Nicky, there are moments when I can hardly bear to think of Hambleby for fear he shouldn't be all right. It's almost as if he came too easily."

"He couldn't. All my best things come," said Nicky "—like that!"

A furious sweep of Nicky's arm simulated the onrush of his inspiration.

"Oh, Nicky, how splendid it must be to be so certain."

"It is," said Nicky solemnly.

After all, it argued some divine compensation somewhere that a thing so destitute should remain unaware of its destitution, that a creature so futile and diminutive should be sustained by this conviction of his greatness. For he was certain. Nothing could annihilate the illusion by which Nicky lived. But it was enough to destroy all certainty in anybody else, and there were moments when the presence of Nicky had this shattering effect on Jane. She could not have faced him until Hambleby was beyond his power to slay.

But Nicky, so far from enlarging on his certainty, meditated with his eyes fixed on the clock.

"You don't dine, do you," he said suddenly, "till half-past seven?"

"You'll stay, won't you?"

"I think I mustn't, thanks. I only wanted to know how long I had."

"You've really half-an-hour, if you won't dine."

"I say, you're not expecting anybody else?"

"I didn't expect Mr. Brodrick. I've kept everybody out so long that they've left off coming."

"I wonder," said he, still meditating, "if I've come too soon."

She held her breath. Nicky's voice was charged with a curious emotion.

"I knew," he went on, "it wasn't any use my coming as long as you were immersed. I wouldn't for worlds do anything that could possibly injure your career."

"Oh—my career——"

"The question is," he meditated, "would it?"

"Your coming, Nicky?"

"My not keeping away. I suppose I ought to be content to stand aside and watch it, your genius, when it's so tremendous. I've no right to get in its way——"

"You don't—you don't."

"I wouldn't. I always should be standing aside and watching. That," said Nicky, "would be, you see, my attitude."

"Dear Nicky," she murmured, "it's a beautiful attitude. It couldn't—your attitude—be anything but beautiful."

"Only, of course," he added, "I'd be there."

"But you are. You are there. And it's delightful to have you."

His face, which had turned very white, flushed, but not with pleasure. It quivered with some sombre and sultry wave of pain.

"I meant," he said, "if I were always there."

His eyes searched her. She would not look at him.

"Nobody," she said, "can be—always."

"You wouldn't know it. You wouldn't see me—when you were immersed."

"I'm afraid," she said, "I always am, I always shall be—immersed."

"Won't there be moments?"

"Oh, moments! Very few."

"I wouldn't care how few there were," he said. "I know there can't be many."

She understood him. There was nothing on earth like Nicky's delicacy. He was telling her that he would accept any terms, the very lowest; that he knew how Tanqueray had impoverished her; that he could live on moments, the moments Tanqueray had left.

"There are none, Nicky. None," she said.

"I see this isn't one of them."

"All the moments—when there are any—will be more or less like this. I'm sorry," she said.

"So am I," said he. It was as if they were saying they were sorry he could not dine.

So monstrous was Nicky's capacity for illusion that he went away thinking he had given Jane up for the sake of her career.

And Jane tried to think of Nicky and be sorry for him. But she couldn't. She was immoderately happy. She had given up Brodrick's magazine and Brodrick's money for Tanqueray's sake. Tanks would have his chance. He would be able to take a house, and then that little wife of his wouldn't have to sit with her hands before her, fretting her heart away because of Tanks. She was pleased, too, because she had made Brodrick do what he hadn't meant and didn't want to do.

But as she lay in bed that night, not thinking of Brodrick, she saw suddenly Brodrick's eyes fixed on her with a look in them which she had not regarded at the time; and she heard him saying, in that queer, quiet voice of his, "I'm almost glad to have lost you this way."

"I wonder," she said to herself, "if he really spotted me."

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