, as if admonishing her feet. "Never again. There
must be no more George Tanquerays. If I see one coming, I'll put a knife
into myself, not hard enough to kill, but hard enough to hurt. I'll find
out where it hurts most and keep it there. So that I mayn't forget. If I
haven't the pluck to stick it in myself, I'll get you to do it for me.
You'll only have to say 'George Tanqueray.'"

Her murky face cleared suddenly.

"Look here," she said. "I _believe_, if any woman is to do anything
stupendous, it means virginity. But I _know_ it means that for you and
me."

XIV

August and September came. One by one the houses in Kensington Square
had put on their white masks; but in the narrow brown house at the
corner, among all the decorous drawn blinds and the closed shutters, the
top-floor window stared wide awake on the abandoned Square.

Jane Holland had stayed in London because it was abandoned. She found a
certain peace in the scattering and retreating in all directions of the
terrible, converging, threatening multitudes of the clever little
people, the multitudes that gather round celebrity, that pursue
celebrity, that struggle and contend for celebrity among themselves.
They had all gone away, carrying with them their own cleverness and
Jane's celebrity. For her celebrity, at least her dreadful sense of it,
vanished when they went.

She could go in and out of the Square now, really hidden, guarding her
secret, no longer in peril, feeling herself obscure.

Not that she could really feel anything, or enjoy her obscurity or do
anything with it now that she had got it. She was no longer a creature
that felt or thought, or did things. You could not call it thinking,
this possession of her mind by one tyrannous idea. Every morning she got
up determined to get through the day without thinking of Tanqueray. But
when she tried to read his face swam across the page, when she tried to
write it thrust itself saliently, triumphantly, between her and the
blank sheet. It seemed to say, "You'll never get rid of me that way."
When she tried to eat he sat down beside her and took away her appetite.
And whenever she dressed before the looking-glass he made her turn from
her own reflection, saying to herself, "No wonder he didn't care for me,
a woman with a face like that, fit to frighten the babies in Kensington
Gardens."

He drove her out of doors at last, and she became simply a thing that
walked; a thing caught in a snare