s like that," he thought.

No, he had never known until now what Jane was; never seen until now
that the gods in giving her genius had given her one passion the more,
to complicate her, to increase tenfold her interest and her charm.

And, with the charm of Rose upon him, he could not tell whether, if he
had known, it would have made any difference. All he knew or cared to
know was that he was going to marry Rose the day after to-morrow.

He would have to ask Nicky to let him go back with him and stay the
night. Then he could tell him. And he could get out of telling Jane. He
liked teasing and tormenting her, but he did not want to stab her. Still
less did he want to stand by with the steel in his hand and see her
bleed.

He must get away from Jane.

XI

On the morning after Wendover Jane woke, bright-eyed and flushed with
dreams. Last night a folding splendour had hung over her till she slept.
It passed into her dreams, and joy woke her.

She sat up and swung her slender limbs over the bedside, and was caught,
agreeably, by her likeness in the long glass of the wardrobe.

She went to it and stood there, looking at herself. For the last three
months she had been afraid to face the woman in the glass. Sometimes she
had had to turn her head another way when she passed her. Every day the
woman in the glass grew more repulsively powerful and sombre, more
dreadfully like that portrait which George hated. She knew he couldn't
stand her when she looked like that. Looking like that, and George's
inability to stand her, and the celebrity that made her so absurd, she
put it all down to the peculiar malice and mischief of the thing that
had been, as she said, "tacked on" to her, the thing they called her
Genius.

And now she did not look like _that_ in the very least. She looked, to
her amazement, like any other woman.

Nobody had ever said that Jane was handsome. She hadn't one straight
feature, except her eyebrows which were too straight. She wasn't pretty,
either. There was something about her too large and dominating for that.
She had that baffling and provoking modern beauty which secures its
effect by some queerness, some vividness of accent, and triumphs by some
ugliness subdued. It was part of her queerness that she had the square
brows, the wide mouth, the large, innocent muzzle of a deer, and a neck
that carried her head high. With a queerness amounting to perversity
some gentle, fawn-like, ruminant w