Brodrick was very tender to her when, lying in bed again, recovering from her rash adventure, she told him what she had done. But she divined under his tenderness an acute embarrassment; she could see that he wished she hadn't done it, and wished it not only for her sake but for his own. She could see that she had not, in nineteen-eight, repeated the glorious success of nineteen-three. The deed he thought so adorable when she did it in the innocence of her unwedded will, he regarded somehow as impermissible in his wife. Then, by its sheer extravagance, it was flattering to his male pride; now, by the same conspicuous quality, it was not. As for his family, it was clear that they condemned the transaction as an unjustifiable and fantastic folly. Brodrick was not sure that he did not count it as one of the disasters of nineteen-eight. The year was thick with them. There was Jane's collapse. Jane, by a natural perversity had chosen nineteen-eight, of all years, to write a book in. She had begun the work in the spring and had broken down with the first effort. There was not only Jane; there was Jane's child, so lamentably unlike a Brodrick. The shedding of his first crop of hair was followed by a darker down, revealing Jane. Not that anybody could have objected to Jane's hair. But there was Jane's delicacy. An alarming tendency to waste, and an incessant, violent, inveterate screaming proclaimed him her son, the heir of an unstable nervous system. Jane's time and what strength she had were divided between her sick child and Mabel Brodrick. For in this dreadful year Mabel had become worse. Her malady had declared itself. There were rumours and hushed hints of a possible operation. Henry was against it; he doubted whether she would survive the shock. It was not to be thought of at present; not as long as things, he said, remained quiescent. John Brodrick, as he waited, had grown greyer; he was gentler also and less important, less visibly the unsurprised master of the expected. The lines on his face had multiplied and softened in an expression as of wonder why this unspeakable thing should have happened to him of all men and to his wife of all women. Poor Mabel who had never done anything---- That was the way they put it now among themselves, Mabel's shortcoming. She had never done anything to deserve this misery. Lying on her couch in the square, solid house in Augustus Road, Wimbledon, Mabel covered her nullity with the imperial purple of her doom. In the family she was supreme by divine right of suffering. Again, every day, Jane trod the path over the Heath to Wimbledon. And sometimes Henry found her at John's house and drove her back in his motor (he had a motor now). Once, boxed up with him in the closed car (it was March and the wind was cold over the Heath), she surprised him with a question. "Henry, is it true that if Mabel had had children she'd have been all right?"