Tanqueray, "it's more serious than I thought."

His eyes rested on her, their terrible lucidity softened by some veil.
"Do you like him, Jinny?" he said.

"Do I like him? Yes."

"Why do you like him?"

"I think, perhaps, because he's good."

"That's how he has you, is it?"

He paused.

"Brodrick doesn't know you, Jinny, as I know you."

"That's it," she said. "I wonder if you do."

"I think I do. Better, perhaps, in some ways, than you know yourself."

He was silent for a little time. The sound of his slow feet on the
gravel measured the moments of his thought.

"Jinny," he said at last, "I'm going to talk truth to you." Again he
paused. "Because I don't think anybody else will."

"There are things," he said, "that are necessary to women like Mrs.
Levine and Mrs. Heron, that are not necessary to you. You have moments
when your need of these things is such that you think life isn't worth
living unless you get them. Those moments are bound to come, because
you're human. But they pass. They pass. Especially if you don't attend
to them. The real, permanent, indestructible thing in you is the need,
the craving, the impulse to create Hamblebys. It can't pass. You know
that. What you won't admit is that you're mistaking the temporary,
passing impulse for a permanent one. No woman will tell you that it's
temporary. They'll all take the sentimental view of it, as you do.
Because, Jinny, the devilish thing about it is that, when this folly
falls upon a woman, she thinks it's a divine folly."

He looked at her again with the penetrating eyes that saw everything.

"It may be," he said. "It may be. But the chances are it isn't."

"Tanks," she said, "you're very hard on me."

"That's just what I'm not. I'm tenderer to you than you are yourself."

It was hard to take in, the idea of his tenderness to her.

"Think--think, before you're drawn in."

"I am thinking," she said.

Tanqueray's voice insisted. "It's easy to get in; but it isn't so jolly
easy to get out."

"And if I don't want," she murmured, "to get out----?"

He looked at her and smiled, reluctantly, as if compelled by what he saw
in her.

"It's your confounded Jinniness!"

At last he had acknowledged it, her quality. He revolted against it, as
a thing more provoking, more incorrigible than mere womanhood.

"It'll always tug you one way and your genius another. I'm only asking
you which is likely to be stronger?"

"Do I know, George? Do _you_