family had an immense capacity for disapproval; it was
awful, as Eddy had observed, for not liking people. It was bound, in its
formidable integrity, to disapprove of her. She had felt that she had
disarmed its criticism only by becoming ill and making it sorry for her.

She had not been a week in Dr. Brodrick's house before she discovered
that these kind people had been sorry for her all the time. They were
sorry for her because she had to work hard, because she had no home and
no family visible about her. They refused to regard Nina and Laura as a
family, or the flat in Kensington Square as in any reasonable sense a
home. Jane could see that they were trying to make up to her for the
things that she had missed.

And in being sorry for Jane Holland they had lost sight of her
celebrity. They had not referred to it since the day, three months ago,
when she had first come to them, a brilliant, distracting alien. They
were still a little perturbed by the brilliance and distraction, and it
was as an alien that she moved among them still.

It was as an alien (she could see it plainly) that they were really
sorry for her. They seemed to agree with her in regarding her genius as
a thing tacked on to her, a thing disastrous, undesirable. They were
anxious to show her that its presence did not destroy for any of them
her personal charm. They betrayed their opinion that her charm existed
in spite rather than because of it.

Thus, by this shedding of her celebrity, Jane in the houses of the
Brodricks had found peace. She was secure from all the destroyers, from
the clever little people, from everything that carried with it the
dreadful literary taint. Brodrick's family was divinely innocent of the
literary taint. The worst that could be said of Brodrick was that he
would have liked to have it; but, under his editorial surface, he was
clean.

It was in Hugh Brodrick's house, that the immunity, the peace was most
profound. Hugh was not gregarious. Tanqueray could not have more
abhorred the social round. He had come near it, he had told her, in his
anxiety to know _her_, but his object attained, he had instantly dropped
out of it.

She knew where she was with him. In their long, subdued confidences he
had given her the sense that she had become the dominant interest, the
most important fact in his social life. And that, again, not because of
her genius, but, he almost definitely intimated, because of some mystic
moral quality