It was at this moment that he realized that he would have to tell her about Rose; also that he would be hanged if he knew how to. She had been manifestly unhappy when he last saw her. Now he saw, not only that she was happy, but that he was responsible for her happiness. This was worse than anything he had yet imagined. It gave him his first definite feeling of treachery toward Jane. Her reference to Nicky came like a reprieve. How was it, he said, that they were let in for him? Or rather, why had they ever let him in? "It was you, Jane, who did it." "No, George; it was you. You introduced him." He owned it. "I did it because I hoped you'd fall in love with him." She saw that there was a devil in him that still longed to torment her. "That," said she, "would have been very bad for Nicky." "Yes. But it would have been very good for you." She had her moment of torment; then she recovered. "I thought," said she, "that was the one thing I was not to do." "You're not to do it seriously. But you couldn't fall in love with Nicky seriously. Could you? Could anybody?" "Why are you so unkind to Nicky?" "Because he's so ungovernably a man of letters." "He isn't. He only thinks he is." "He thinks he's Shelley, because his father's a squire." "That saves him. No man of letters, if he tried all night, could think anything so deliciously absurd. Don't you wish _you_ could feel like that!" He rose to it, his very excitement kindling his intellectual flame. "To feel myself an immortal, a blessed god!" They played together, profanely, with the idea that Nicky was after all divine. "Such a tragic little god," said Jane, with a pitiful mouth, "a little god without a single apostle or a prophet--nobody," she wailed, "to spread the knowledge of him." "I say--_we_'ll build an altar on Wendover, to Nicky as the Unknown God." "He won't like that, our calling him unknown." "Let's call him the Unapparent--the Undeveloped. He is the Undeveloped." "In one aspect. In another he's a finished poem, an incarnate lyric----" "An ode to immortality on legs----" "Nicky hasn't any legs. He's a breath--a perpetual aspiration." "Oh, at aspiring he beats Shelley into apoplexy." "He stands for the imperishable illusion----" "The stupendous hope----" "And, after all, he adores _you_." "And nobody else does," said Tanqueray. "That's Nicky's achievement. He _does_ see what you are. It's his little claim to immortality. Just think, George, when Nicky dies and goes to heaven he'll turn up at the gates of the poets' paradise, and they'll let him in on the strength of that. The angel of the singing stars will come up to him and say, 'Nicky, you sing abominably, but you can see. You saw George Tanqueray when nobody else could. Your sonnets and your ballads are forgiven you; and we've got a nice place for you, Nicky, near Keats and Shelley.' Because it wouldn't be heaven for Nicky if he wasn't near them." "How about _them_, though?"