"She?"

"Jane."

"You've no reason to suppose she cares."

"Do you think he cared in the very least for her?"

"I think he may have--without knowing it."

"My dear, there's nothing that man doesn't know. He knows, for instance, all about _us_."

"Us?"

"You and I. We've both of us been there. And Nina."

"How _do_ you know?"

"She was flagrant!"

"Flagrant?"

"Flagrant isn't the word for it. She was flamboyant, magnificent, superb!"

"You forget she's my friend," said little Laura.

"She's mine. I'm not traducing her. Look at George Tanqueray. I defy any woman not to care for him. It's nothing to be ashamed of--like an infatuation for a stockbroker who has no use for you. It's--it's your apprenticeship at the hands of the master."

XIII

Nina inhabited a third floor in a terrace off the Strand, overlooking the river. You approached it by secret, tortuous ways that made you wonder.

In a small backroom, for an unspeakable half-hour, the two women had sat over the table facing each other, with Tanqueray's empty place between them. There had been moments when their sense of his ironic, immaterial presence had struck them dumb. It was as if this were the final, consummate stroke of the diabolic master. It had been as impossible to talk about him as if he had been sitting there and had overheard them.

They left him behind them in the other room, a room where there was no evidence of Tanqueray's ever having been. The place was incontestably and inalterably Nina's. There were things in it cared for by Nina with a superst.i.tious tenderness, portraits, miniatures, relics guarded, as it were, in shrines. And in their company were things that Nina had worn out and done with; things overturned, crushed, flung from her in a fury of rejection; things on which Nina had inflicted personal violence, provoked, you felt, by their too long and intimate a.s.sociation with her; signs everywhere of the pace at which she went through things. It was as if Nina had torn off shreds, fringes, whole layers of herself and left them there. You inferred behind her a long, half-savage ancestry of the open air. There were antlers about and the skins of animals. A hunting-crop hung by the chimney-piece. Foils, fishing-rods, golf-clubs staggered together in a corner. Nina herself, long-limbed, tawny, aquiline, had the look of wild and nervous adolescence prisoned within walls.

Beyond this confusion and disorder, her windows opened wide to London, to the constellated fires, the grey enchantment and silence of the river.

It was Nina who began it. Leaning back in a very low chair, with her legs crossed and her arms flung wide, a position almost insolent in its ease, she talked.

"Jinny," she said, "have you any idea how it happened?"

Jane made a sound of negation that was almost inaudible, and wholly inarticulate.

Nina pondered. "I believe," she said presently, "you _do_ know." She paused on that a moment. "It needn't have happened," she said. "It wouldn't if you'd shown him that you cared."

Jane looked at her then. "I did show him," she said. "That's how it happened."

"It couldn't. Not that way."

"It did. I waked him up. I made him restless, I made him want things.

But there was nothing--nothing----"

"You forget. I've seen him with you. What's more, I've seen him without you."

"Ah, but it wasn't _that_. Not for a moment. It could never have been _that_."

"You could have made it that. You could have made it anything you liked.

Jinny! If I'd been as sure of him as you were, I'd never have let him go. I'd have held on----"

Her hands' tense clutch on the arm of her chair showed how she would have held on.

"You see," said Jinny, "I was never sure of him."

A silence fell between them.

"You were in it," said Nina, troubling the silence. "It must--it must have been something you did to him."

"Or something I didn't do."

"Yes. Something you didn't do. You didn't know how."

Jane could have jumped at this sudden echo of her thought.

"And _she_ did," said Nina.

She got up and leaned against the chimney-piece, looking down on Jane.

"Poor Jinny," she said. "How I hated you three years ago."

Jane remembered. It was just three years since Nina had gone away without saying a word and hidden herself among the mountains where she was born. In her isolation she had conceived and brought forth her "Tales of the Marches." And a year ago she had come back to them, the Nina whom they knew.

"You can't hate me now," Jane said.

"I believe I would if you had been sure of him. But I don't hate you. I don't even hate her."

"Why should you?"

"Why should I? When I don't believe she's sure of him, either. She's called out the little temporary animal or the devil in him. That's what she's married. It won't last."

"No, Nina. Nicky said she was good."

"It's wonderful how good women manage these things."

"Not when they're absolutely simple."

"How do you know she's simple?"