celebrities pressed round her, voluble in commiseration. Of course, if she wasn't going, they wouldn't go. They didn't want to. They would sacrifice a thousand plays, but not an evening with Jane Holland. They bowed before her in all the postures and ceremonies of their adoration. And Jane Holland looked at them curiously with her tired eyes; and Tanqueray looked at her. He wondered how on earth she was going to get rid of them.

She did it with a dexterity he would hardly have given her credit for. Her tired eyes helped her.

Then, as the door was closing on them, she turned to him.

"Are you going with them," she said, "or will you stay with me?"

"I am certainly not going with them——" He paused, hesitating.

"Then—you'll stay?" For the first time in their intercourse she hesitated too.

"But you're tired?" he said.

"Not now."

She smiled appealingly, but not like a woman sure of the success of her appeal.

That lapse of certainty marked a difference in their relations. He chose to put it down to the strange circumstance of her celebrity; and, though he hesitated, he stayed. To stay was, after all, the thing which at the moment he most wanted to do. And the thing which Tanqueray most wanted to do at the moment that he invariably did. This temper of his had but one drawback, that it left him at the moment's mercy.

That was what he felt now when he found himself alone with her for the first time in many weeks.

She wondered how far he had seen through her. She had made the others go that he might stay with her, a palpable man[oe]uvre. Of course she would not have lent herself to it for any ordinary man. His genius justified her.

Six weeks ago she would not have had to retreat behind his genius. Six weeks ago she had never thought of his genius as a thing apart from him. There was her own genius, if it came to that. It had its rights. Six weeks ago she would not have had to apologize to herself for keeping him.

"I didn't know you could change your mind so quickly," he said.

"If you had my mind, George, you'd want to change it."

"What's wrong with your mind, Jinny?"

"It won't work."

"Ah, it's come to that, has it? I knew it would."

She led the way into another room, the room she wrote in. Jane lived alone. Sometimes he had wondered how she liked it.

There was defiance in her choice of that top floor in the old house in Kensington Square. To make sure her splendid isolation, she had cut herself off by a boarded, a barricaded staircase, closed with a door at the foot. Tanqueray knew well that consecrated, book-lined room, and the place of everything it held. He had his own place there, the place of honour and affection. His portrait (a mere photograph) was on her writing-table. His "Works"—five novels—were on a shelf by themselves at the head of her chair, where she could lay her hands on them.

For they had found each other before the world had found her. That was the charm which had drawn them together, which, more than any of her charms, had held him until now. She had preserved the incomparable innocence of a great artist; she was free, with the freedom of a great nature, from what Tanqueray, who loathed it, called the "literary taint." They both avoided the circles where it spread deepest, in their nervous terror of the social process, of "getting to know the right people." They confessed that, in the beginning, they had fought shy even of each other, lest one of them should develop a hideous susceptibility and impart the taint. There were points at which they both might have touched the aristocracy of journalism; but they had had no dealings with its proletariat or its demi-monde. Below these infernal circles they had discerned the fringe of the bottomless pit, popularity, which he, the Master, told her was "the unclean thing." So that in nineteen hundred and two George Tanqueray, as a novelist, stood almost undiscovered on his tremendous height.

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