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 in her. He did not intimate that he found her charming. Jane had still serious doubts as to her charm, and Brodrick's monstrous sincerity would have left her to perish of her doubt. She would not have had him different. It was because of _his_ moral quality, his sincerity, that she had liked him from the first. Most certainly she liked him. If she had not liked him she would not have come out so often to Roehampton and Wimbledon and Putney. She could not help but like him when he so liked her, and liked her, not for the things that she had done for literature, not for the things she had done for him, but for her own sake. That was what she had wanted, to be liked for her own sake, to be allowed to be a woman. Unlike Tanqueray, Brodrick not only allowed her, he positively encouraged her to be a woman. Evidently, in Brodrick's opinion she was just like any other woman. He could see no difference between her and, well, Gertrude Collett. Gertrude, Jane was sure, stood to Brodrick for all that was most essentially and admirably feminine. Why he required so much of Jane's presence when he could have Gertrude Collett's was more than Jane could understand. She was still inclined to her conjecture that he was using her to draw Miss Collett, playing her off against Miss Collett, stinging Miss Collett to the desired frenzy by hanging that admirable woman upon tenter-hooks. That was why Jane felt so safe with him; because, she argued, he couldn't do it if he had not felt safe with her. He was not in love with her. He was not even, like Tanqueray, in love with her genius.