Nineteen-eight was the year when everything happened. Jinny was hardly
out of danger when there was a crisis in the affairs of the "Monthly
Review." Levine who had been pestering his brother-in-law for the last
eighteen months, was pressing him hard now. The Review was passing out
of Brodrick's hands. When it came to the point he realized how unwilling
he was to let it go. He could only save it by buying Levine out. And he
couldn't do that. As the father of a family he had no business to risk
more money on his unprofitable dream.
It was impossible to conceal from Jane the fact that he was worried. She
saw it in his face. She lay awake, retarded somewhat in her recovery by
the thought that she was responsible for that and all his worries. He
had lost money over the Review and now he was going to lose the Review
itself, owing, she could perfectly well see, to her high-handed
editorship. It would go to his heart, she knew, to give it up; he had
been so attached to his dream. It would go to her heart, too. It was in
his dream, so to speak, that he had first met her; it had held them;
they had always been happy together in his dream. It was his link with
the otherwise inaccessible and intangible elements in her, the elements
that made for separation. She was determined that, whatever went, his
dream should not go. She could not forget that it had been she who had
all but wrecked it in its first precarious year when she had planted
George Tanqueray on an infatuated editor.
She had saved it then, and of course she could save it now. It wasn't
for nothing that she had been celebrated all these years. And it wasn't
for nothing that Hugh, poor dear, had been an angel, refusing all these
years to take a penny of her earnings for the house. He hadn't married
her for that. And there they were, her earnings, diminished by some
advances to her father's impecunious family, and by some extravagances
of her own, but still swollen by much saving to a sum more than
sufficient to buy Louis out.
Her genius, after all, was a valuable asset.
She lay in bed, embracing that thought, and drawing strength from it.
Before she was well enough to go out she went and confronted Louis in
his office.
Levine was human. He always had been; and he was moved by the sight of
his pale sister-in-law, risen from her bed, dangerously, to do this
thing. He was not hard on her. He suffered himself to be bought out for
a sum less than she offered a sum that no more than recouped him for his
losses. He didn't want, he said, to make money out of the thing, he only
wanted not to lose. He was glad to be quit of it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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