as judging, like posterity, by the results. The largeness and the
perfection of them pointed to a struggle in which poor Jinny must have
been torn in pieces. Her very anxiety to conceal the signs of laceration
betrayed the extent to which she had been torn. She had not gone so far
in her hypocrisy as to argue that the struggle was the cause of the
perfection, and you could only conclude that, if the conditions had
been perfect, there would have been no end to the vast performances of
Jinny. That was how she measured her.

It looked as if whatever you did to her you couldn't stop Jinny, any
more than you could stop George Tanqueray. Jinny, if you came to think
of it, had the superior impetus. George, after all, had carefully
removed obstruction from his path. Jinny had taken the risk, and had
swept on, reckless, regardless.

It was beautiful, her pretending not to see it; beautiful, too, her not
letting you allow for it in appraising her achievement, lest it should
seem somehow, to diminish yours. As if she had not said herself that the
idea of rivalry was absurd.

Nina knew it. Her fear lay deeper than the idea of rivalry. She had no
vision of failure in her career as long as she kept to it. The great
thing was to be certain of the designs of destiny; so certain that you
acquiesced. And she was certain now; she was even thankful for the hand
and its scourge on her shoulders, turning her back again on to the
splendid course. It marked her honourably; it was the sign and
certificate of her fitness. She was aware also that, beyond the splendid
course, there was no path for her. She would have been sure of herself
there but that her nerves remembered how she had once swerved. She had
instincts born of that experience; they kept her on the look-out for
danger, for the sudden starting up of the thing that had made her
swerve. What she dreaded now was some irreparable damage to her genius.

She was narrowed down to that, her bare genius. Since there was nothing
else; since, as she had said long ago, she had been made to pay for it
with all she had and all she might have had, she cherished it fiercely
now. Her state was one of jealousy and fear, a perpetual premonition of
disaster. She had tried to forget the existence of Jane's book, because
Tanqueray had said it was tremendous, and she felt that, if it were as
tremendous as all that, it was bound to obscure for a moment her vision
of her own.

If the designs of destiny w