en
foresaw that in time she might come to love it for that reason. But at
the moment she was surrendered to it for its own sake.

She was beginning to understand the way of genius, of the will to
create. She had discovered the secret and the rhythm of its life. It was
subject to the law of the supersensible. To love anything more than this
thing was to lose it. You had to come to it clean from all desire, naked
of all possession. Placable to the small, perishing affections, it
abhorred the shining, dangerous powers, the rival immortalities. It
could not be expected to endure such love as she had had for Tanqueray.
It rejoiced in taking Tanqueray away from her. For the divine thing fed
on suffering, on poverty, solitude, frustration. It took toll of the
blood and nerves and of the splendour of the passions. And to those who
did not stay to count the cost or measure the ruin, it gave back
immeasurable, immortal things. It rewarded supremely the supreme
surrender.

Nina Lempriere was right. Virginity was the law, the indispensable
condition.

The quiet, inassailable knowledge of this truth had underlain
Tanqueray's most irritable utterances. Tanqueray had meant that when he
said, "The Lord our God is a consuming fire."

Jane saw now that there had been something wrong with her and with all
that she had done since the idea of Tanqueray possessed her. She could
put her finger on the flaws wrought by the deflected and divided flame.
She had been caught and bound in the dark places of the house of life,
and had worked there, seeing things only by flashes, by the capricious
impulse of the fire, struggling, between the fall and rise of passion,
to recover the perfection of the passionless hour. She had attained only
the semblance of perfection, through sheer dexterity, a skill she had in
fitting together with delicate precision the fragments of the broken
dream. She defied even Tanqueray to tell the difference between the
thing she had patched and mended and the thing she had brought forth
whole.

She had been wonderful, standing there before Tanqueray, with her feet
bound and her hands raised above the hands that tortured her, doing
amazing things.

There was nothing amazing about Hambleby or a whole population of
Hamblebys, given a heavenly silence, a virgin solitude, and a creator
possessed by no power except the impulse to create. Within the four
walls of her room, and in the quiet Square, nothing moved, nothing
bre