But it looked as if Jane Holland were about to break her charm.
"I hope," he said, "it hasn't spoilt you, Jinny?"
"What hasn't?"
"Your pop—your celebrity."
"Don't talk about it. It's bad enough when they——"
"They needn't. I must. Celebrity—you observe that I call it by no harsher name—celebrity is the beginning of the end. I don't want you to end that way."
"I shan't. It's not as if I were intrigued by it. You don't know how I hate it sometimes."
"You hate it, yet you're drawn."
"By what? By my vanity?"
"Not by your vanity, though there is that."
"By what, then?"
"Oh, Jinny, you're a woman."
"Mayn't I be?"
"No," he said brutally, "you mayn't."
For a moment her eyes pleaded: "Mayn't I be a woman?" But she was silent, and he answered her silence rather than her eyes.
"Because you've genius."
"Do you, you of all people, tie me down to that?"
He laughed. "Why not I?"
"Because it was you who told me not to keep back. You told me not to live alone. Don't you remember?"
He remembered. It was in the days when he first knew her.
"I did. Because you ran to the other extreme then. You were terrified of life."
"Because I was a woman. You told me to be a woman!"
"Because I was the only man you knew. How you remember things."
"That comes of living alone. I've never really forgotten anything you ever said to me. It's where I score."
"You had nobody but me to talk to then, if you remember."
"No. Nobody but you."
"And it wasn't enough for you."
"Oh, wasn't it? When you were never the same person for a week together. It was like knowing fifteen or twenty men."
He smiled. "I've always been the same man to you, Jinny. Haven't I?"
"I'm not so sure," said she.
"Anyhow, you were safe with me."
"From what?"
"From being 'had.' But now you've begun knowing all sorts of people——"
"Is that why you've kept away from me?"
He ignored her question. "Awful people, implacable, insatiable, pernicious, destructive people. The trackers down, the hangers-on, the persecutors, the pursuers. Did I ever pursue you?"
"No, George. I can't say you ever did. I can't see you pursuing any one."
"They will. And they'll have you at every turn."
"No. I'm safe. You see, I don't care for any of them."
"They'll 'have' you all the same. You lend yourself to being 'had.'"
"Do I?" She said it defiantly.
"No. You never lend—you give yourself. To be eaten up. You let everybody prey on you. You'd be preyed on by me, if I let you."
"Oh—you——"
"And yet," he said, "I wonder——"
He paused, considering her with brilliant but unhappy eyes.
"Jinny," he said, "where do you get the fire that you put into your books?"
"Where you get yours," she said.
Again he considered her. "Come out of it," he said. "Get away from these dreadful people, these dreadful, clever little people."
She smiled, recognizing them.
"Look at me," he said.
"Oh, you," she said again, with another intonation.
"Yes, me. I was born out of it."
"And I—wasn't I born? Look at me?" She turned to him, holding her head high.
"I am looking at you. I've been looking at you all the evening—and I see a difference already."
"What you see is the difference in my clothes. There is no difference in me."
It was he who was different. She looked at him, trying to penetrate the secret of his difference. There was a restlessness about him, a fever and the brilliance fever brought.
She looked at him and saw a creature dark and colourless, yet splendidly alive. She knew him by heart, every detail of him, the hair, close-cropped, that left clean the full backward curve of his head; his face with its patches of ash and bistre; his eyes, hazel, lucid, intent, sunk under irritable brows; his mouth, narrowish, the lower lip full, pushed forward with the slight prominence of its jaw, the upper lip accentuated by the tilt of its moustache. Tanqueray's face, his features, always seemed to her to lean forward as against a wind, suggesting things eager and in salient flight. They shared now in his difference, his excitement. His eyes as they looked at her had lost something of their old lucidity. They were more brilliant and yet somehow more obscure.
Then, suddenly, she saw how he was driven.
He was out on the first mad hunt with love. Love and he stalked the hills, questing the visionary maid.
It was not she. His trouble was as yet vague and purely impersonal. She saw (it was her business) by every infallible sign and token that it was not she. She saw, too, that he was enraged with her for this reason, that it was not she. That showed that he was approaching headlong the point of danger; and she, if she were his friend, was bound to keep him back. He was not in love with her or with any one, but he was in that insane mood when honourable men marry, sometimes disastrously. Any woman, even she, could draw him to her now by holding out her hand.
And between them there came a terror, creeping like a beast of prey, dumb, and holding them dumb. She searched for words to dispel it, but no words came; her heart beat too quickly; he must hear it beat. That was not the signal he was waiting for, that beating of her heart.
He tried to give himself the semblance and the sense of ease by walking about the room and examining the things in it. There were some that it had lacked before, signs that the young novelist had increased in material prosperity. Yes. He had liked her better when she had worked harder and was as poor as he. They had come to look on poverty as their protection from the ruinous world. He now realized that it had also been their protection from each other. He was too poor to marry.
He reflected with some bitterness that Jane was not, now.
She in her corner called him from his wanderings. She had made the coffee. He drank it where he stood, on the hearthrug, ignoring his old place on the sofa by her side.
She brooded there, leaving her cup untasted. She had man[oe]uvred to keep him. And now she wished that she had let him go.
"Aren't you going to drink your coffee?" he said.
"No.