Even before she went away, even lying quiet, she had been aware that life was having its triumphant will of her. She had known all along, of course, that (as Owen Prothero had told her) she was sound through and through. Her vitality was unconquerable. Nothing could wreck her. Even Henry would own that her body, when they gave it a chance, was as fine a physical envelope as any woman could wish to have. Lying quiet, she had been inclined to agree with Henry that genius--her genius at any rate--was a neurosis; and she was not going to be neurotic any more. Whatever it was, it had made things terribly complicated. And to Jane lying quiet they had become absurdly simple. She herself was simplified. She had been torn in pieces; and in putting herself together again she had left out the dangerous, disintegrating, virile element. Whatever happened now, she would no longer suffer from the presence in her of two sexes contending for the mastery. Through it all, through all her dreadful virility, she had always been persistently and preposterously feminine. And lying quiet she was more than ever what George Tanqueray had said she was not to be--a mere woman. Therefore to Jane, lying quiet, there had been no question of how she was to go on. But to Jane on her feet again, in all her ungovernable, disastrous energy, the question was as insistent as Tanqueray himself. Her genius had recognized its own vehicle in her body restored to perfect health, and three years' repression had given it ten times its power to dominate and torture. It had thriven on the very tragedies that had brought her low. It knew its hour and claimed her. She was close upon thirty-nine. It would probably claim her without remission for the next seven years. It had been relentless enough in its youth; it would be terrible in its maturity. The struggle, if she struggled, would tear her as she had never yet been torn. She would have to surrender, or at any rate to make terms with it. It was useless to fall back upon the old compromises and adjustments. Tanqueray's solution was the only possible, the only tolerable one. But it depended perilously upon Hugh's consent. She went to him in his study where he sat peaceably smoking in the half-hour before bed-time. Brodrick merely raised his eyebrows as she laid it before him--her monstrous proposal to go away--for three months. He asked her if three months was not rather a long time for a woman to leave her home and her children? "I know," she said, "but if I don't----" "Well?" "I shall go to pieces." He looked at her critically, incredulously. "Why can't you say at once what's wrong?" he said. "Is there anything you want that you don't have here? Is there any mortal thing that can be done that isn't done?" "Not any mortal thing." "What is it then?" "Hugh dear, did it never strike you that you are a very large family? And that when it comes down on me it's in the proportion of about seven to one?"