een reversed, could have taken into
his Jane's husband. She might have expected Tanqueray to meet her
husband, to shake hands with him, to dine with him, but not to feel or
to profess affection for him. So Tanqueray would probably expect her to
call upon his wife, to receive her, to dine with her, perhaps, but it
would end there.

It would end there, in hand-shakings and in frigid ceremony, this
friendship to which Tanqueray had lent himself with a precipitance that
resembled passion and a fervour that suggested fire.

Looking back, she wondered at what moment the real thing had begun. She
was certain that two months ago, on that evening in May after he had
dined with her, the moment, which was his moment, had been hers. She had
been divided from him by no more than a hair's-breadth. And she had let
him go for a scruple finer than a hair.

And yet it seemed to her that her scruple had not really counted. It
might have worked, somehow, at the moment; but she could not think of it
as containing all the calamitous weight of destiny. Her failure (it was
so pre-eminently _her_ failure) came of feeling and of understanding at
every moment far too much. It came of having eyes at the back of your
head and nerves that extended, prodigiously, beyond the confines of your
body. It was as if she understood with her body and felt with her brain,
passion and insight in her running disastrously together.

It came back to her that Tanqueray had always regarded her with interest
and uncertainty, as if he had wondered whether she were really like
other women. In his moment he had searched her for their secret, and her
scruple had worked so far that he judged her lacking in the instinct of
response.

Her heart, of course, he must have heard. It had positively screamed at
him. But her heart was not what had concerned him at any moment. She
remembered how she had said to him that night, "Mayn't I be a woman?"
and he had answered her brutally. What _had_ concerned him was her
genius. If there had been twenty women in her he would have made her
sacrifice them all to that. He had cared for it to the point of
tenderness, of passion. She had scores of his letters in a drawer,
there; love-letters written to her genius. She knew one of them, the
last, by heart. It was written at Hampstead.

"Jinny," it had said, "I'm on my knees, with my hat off, at your feet.
I'm in the dust, Jinny, kissing your feet. Shivers of exquisite
adoration are goin