"But I'm not your wife. Your wife wouldn't behave like this. Would you like me better if I didn't?" He held her arms in his arms, fiercely and tight, crushing her. "If," she said, "I was a virtuous woman, the sort of woman who sits on her husband's head like an uncomfortable crown?" "Jinny--if Gertrude were to hear you!" She loosened his arms and sat up and listened. "I hear Gertrude," she said. "Darling, your hair's all any way. Let me straighten it. It might be used in evidence against us." Gertrude indeed wore as she entered the ominously distant air of one who suspects a vision of iniquity. She took her place on the other side of the hearth and bent her head over her sewing. A thin stream of conversation flowed from Brodrick and from Jane, and under it she divined, she felt the tide that drew them. She herself sat silent and smooth and cool. She sat like one removed from mortality's commotion. But it was as if she were listening to the blood that beat in Brodrick's veins, and felt in herself the passion that ran there, in secret, exulting towards its end. At ten o'clock Jane rose and held out her hand to Gertrude. She was saying good-night. Brodrick sat abstracted for a moment. Presently he rose also and followed her with shining eyes. Gertrude's head bent lower and lower over her sewing. LII Before long Brodrick was aware that that month of spring had brought him the thing he most desired. He was appeased again with the hope of fatherhood. It tided him over the bad months of nineteen-seven, over the intolerable hours that Levine was giving him in the office of the "Monthly Review." It softened for him the hard fact that he could no longer afford his expensive dream. The old, reckless, personal ambition, the fantastic pride, had been overtaken by the ambition and the pride of race. He wanted to found, not a great magazine, but a family, to have more and more children like the solid little son they had called John Henry Brodrick. The child justified the double name. The blood of the Brodricks ran in him pure. He flattered the racial and paternal pride. He grew more and more the image of what Brodrick had been at his age. It was good to think that there would be more like him. Brodrick's pride in beholding him was such that he had almost forgotten that in this question of race there would be Jane to reckon with. In December, in the last night of nineteen-seven, a second son was born. A son so excessively small and feeble that the wonder was how he had contrived to be born at all. Brodrick when he first looked at him had a terrible misgiving. Supposing he had to face the chances of degeneration? There could be only one opinion, of course, as to the cause and the responsibility. He did not require Henry to tell him that. Not that he could think of it just then. He could think of nothing but Jinny pausing again, uncertain, though for a shorter time, before the dreadful open door.