"Do you call _this_ a home?" said Brodrick. "Why not? It's all I want." "Is it?" he said savagely, and left her. He was intensely disagreeable; but that also, she told herself, was for the last time. As long as Brodrick was there she could listen to the voice inside her, murmuring incessantly of last times, and ordering her to keep out of it and let the poor woman have her chance. But when he was gone another voice, that was there too, told her that she could not keep out of it. She was being drawn in again, into the toils of life. When it had seemed to her that she drew, she was being drawn. She was drawn by all the things that she had cut herself off from, by holding hands, and searching eyes, and unforgotten tendernesses. In the half-darkness of her room the faces she had been living with were all about her. She felt again the brushing of Winny's hair over her cheek. She heard Winny's mother saying that she liked her. She saw Brodrick sitting opposite her, and the look with which he had watched her when he thought she was asleep. And when the inward admonitory voice reiterated, "Don't be drawn," the other answered, "Whether I'm out of it or in it the poor woman hasn't got a chance." XXX It had not occurred to Gertrude that she had a chance. To have calculated chances would have seemed to her the last profanity, so consecrated was her attitude to Brodrick and to all that was Brodrick's. Her chance was, and it always had been, the chance of serving him. She had it. What more, she said to herself, could a woman want? The peace she had folded round Brodrick wrapped her too. In the quiet hours, measured by the silver-chiming clock, nothing had happened to disturb her beautiful serenity. It was by the cultivation of a beautiful serenity that she had hoped to strengthen her appeal to Brodrick and her position in his house. In the beginning that position had been so fragile and infirm that she had had then no trust in its continuance. Three years ago she had come to him, understanding that she was not to stay. She was a far removed, impoverished cousin of Mrs. John Brodrick's. Hence her claim. They had stretched the point of cousinship to shelter the proprieties so sacred to every Brodrick. He had not wanted her. He preferred a housekeeper who was not a lady, who would not have to be, as he expressed it, all over the place. But he was sorry for the impoverished lady and he had let her come. Then his sister Sophy had urged him to keep her on until he married. Sophy meant until he married the lady she intended him to marry. He had not married that lady nor any other; he was not going to marry at all, he told them. But he had kept Gertrude on.