as I thought he was."

"I wish," she said, "you'd contrive to forget him, and it, and
everything."

"Everything?"

"You know what I mean. The horrid thing that's happened to me. My--my
celebrity." She brought it out with a little shiver of revolt.

He laughed. "But when you remind me of it every minute? When it's
everlastingly, if I may say so, on the carpet?"

Her eyes followed his. It was evident that she had bought a new one.

"It doesn't mean what you think it does. It isn't, it really isn't as
bad as that----"

"I was afraid."

"You needn't be. I'm still living from hand to mouth, only rather larger
mouthfuls."

"Why apologize?"

"I can't help it. You make me feel like some horrid literary parvenu."

"_I_ make you feel----?"

"Yes. You--you. You don't think me a parvenu, do you?" she pleaded.

"You know what I think you."

"I don't. I only know what you used to think me."

"I think the same."

"Tell me--tell me."

"I think, if you can hold yourself together for the next five years,
you'll write a superb book, Jinny. But it all depends on what you do
with yourself in the next five years."

He paused.

"At the present moment there's hardly any one--of our generation, mind
you--who counts except you and I."

He paused again.

"If you and I have done anything decent it's because, first of all, our
families have cast us off."

"Mine hasn't yet."

"It's only a question of time if you go on," said Tanqueray.

He had never seen Jane's family. He knew vaguely that her father was the
rector of a small parish in Dorset, and that he had had two wives in
such rapid succession that their effect from a distance, so Tanqueray
said, was scandalously simultaneous. The rector, indeed, had married his
first wife for the sake of a child, and his second for the child's sake.
He had thus achieved a younger family so numerous that it had kept him
from providing properly for Jane. It was what Tanqueray called the
"consecrated immorality" of Jane's father that had set Jane free.

Tanqueray's father was a retired colonel. A man of action, of rash and
inconsiderate action, he regarded Tanqueray with a disapproval so warm
and generous that it left the young man freer, if anything, than Jane.

"Anyhow," he went on, "we haven't let ourselves be drawn in. And yet
that's our temptation, yours and mine."

Again he paused.

"If we were painters or musicians we should be safer. Their art draws
them by one divine