esting and very
incomprehensible and very sad. He looked at the books on the shelf close
to the table and read George Tanqueray's name on them. He frowned
slightly at the books and turned away.

She sat down. He did not take the chair she indicated, but chose another
where he could see her rather better. He was certainly a man who knew
his own mind.

"I've called," he said, "a great many times. But I've always missed
you."

"So at last you gave it up? Like everybody else."

"Does it look as if I'd given it up?"

She could not say it did.

"No," he said. "I never give anything up. In that I'm not like everybody
else."

He wasn't, she reflected. And yet somehow he ought to have been. There
was nothing so very remarkable about him.

He smiled. "I believe," he said, "you thought I was the man come to tune
the piano."

"Did I look as if I did?"

"A little."

"Do I now?" She was beginning to like Brodrick.

"Not so much. As it happens, I have come partly for the pleasure of
seeing you and partly--to discuss, if you don't mind, some business."

Jane was aware of a certain relief. If it was that he came for----

"I don't know whether you've heard that I'm bringing out a magazine?"

"Oh yes. I remember you were bringing it out----"

"I was thinking of bringing it out when I last met you. It may interest
you, because it's to have nothing in it that isn't literature. I'm going
in for novels, short stories, essays, poems. No politics."

"Won't that limit your circulation?"

"Of course it'll limit it. Still, it's not easy to keep honest if you go
in for politics."

"I see. Rather than not be honest you prefer to limit your circulation?"

He blushed like a man detected in some meanness; the supreme meanness of
vaunting his own honesty.

"Oh, well, I don't know about that. Politics means my brother-in-law. If
I keep them out I keep him out, and run the thing my own way. I dare say
that's all there is in it."

Certainly she liked him. He struck her as powerful and determined. With
his magazine, he had the air of charging, sublimely, at the head of the
forlorn hope of literature.

"It's taken me all this time to get the capital together. But I've got
it."

"Yes. You would get it."

He looked up gravely inquiring.

"You strike me as being able to get things."

He flushed with pleasure. "Do I? I don't know. If I can get the authors
I want I believe I can make the magazine one of the big things of the