leby.

Heavens, what a book he would be.

Hambleby! She was afraid at first to touch him, he was so fragile and so
divinely shy. Before she attempted, as Tanqueray would have said, to
deal with him, he had lived in her for weeks, stirring a delicate
excitement in her brain and a slight fever in her blood, as if she were
falling in love with him. She had never possessed so completely this
virgin ecstasy of vision, this beatitude that comes before the labour of
creation. She walked in it, restless but exultant.

And when it came to positively dealing with him, she found that she
hadn't got to deal. Hambleby did it all himself, so alive was he, so
possessed by the furious impulse to be born.

Now as long as Hambleby was there it was impossible for Jane to think
about Tanqueray, and she calculated that Hambleby would last about a
year. For a year, then, she might look to have peace from Tanqueray.

But in three months, towards the end of January, one half of Hambleby
was done. It then occurred to her that if she was to behave absolutely
as if nothing had happened she would have to show him to Tanqueray.
Instead of showing him to Tanqueray she took him to Nina Lempriere and
Laura Gunning.

That was how Jane came back to them. They sat till midnight over the
fire in Nina's room, three of them where there had once been four.

"Do you like him?" said Jane.

"Rather!" It was Nina who spoke first. She lay at all her length along
the hearthrug, recklessly, and her speech was innocent of the literary
taint.

"Jinny," said Laura, "he's divine. However did you think of him?"

"I didn't have to think. I simply saw him. Is there anything wrong with
him?"

"Not a thing."

If there had been a flaw in him Laura would have found it. Next to
Tanqueray she was the best critic of the four. There followed a
discussion of technical points that left Hambleby intact. Then Laura
spoke again.

"How George would have loved him."

Six months after, she still spoke of Tanqueray gently, as if he were
dead.

Nina broke their silence.

"Does anybody know what's become of Tanks?"

They did not answer.

"Doesn't that Nicholson man know?"

"Nicky thinks he's somewhere down in Sussex," said Jane.

"And where's she?"

"Wherever he is, I imagine."

"I gave her six months, if you remember."

"I wonder," said Laura, "why he doesn't turn up."

"Probably," said Nina, "because he doesn't want to."

"He might write. It isn't like h