Not for his life could he have told what made him ask her that question,
whether an insane impulse, or a purely intellectual desire to complete
his knowledge of her, to know how deep she had gone in and what his
power was, whether he could, indeed, "stop" her.
"You?" she said, and her voice had a long, profound and passionate
vibration. He had not dreamed that such a tone could have been wrung
from Jane.
Her eyes met his. Steady they were and deep, under their level brows;
but in them, too, was that sudden, unexpected quality. Something in her
startled him with its intensity.
Her voice, her look, had made it impossible for him to tell her about
Rose. It was not the moment.
"I didn't know she was like that," he thought.
No, he had never known until now what Jane was; never seen until now
that the gods in giving her genius had given her one passion the more,
to complicate her, to increase tenfold her interest and her charm.
And, with the charm of Rose upon him, he could not tell whether, if he
had known, it would have made any difference. All he knew or cared to
know was that he was going to marry Rose the day after to-morrow.
He would have to ask Nicky to let him go back with him and stay the
night. Then he could tell him. And he could get out of telling Jane. He
liked teasing and tormenting her, but he did not want to stab her. Still
less did he want to stand by with the steel in his hand and see her
bleed.
He must get away from Jane.
XI
On the morning after Wendover Jane woke, bright-eyed and flushed with
dreams. Last night a folding splendour had hung over her till she slept.
It passed into her dreams, and joy woke her.
She sat up and swung her slender limbs over the bedside, and was caught,
agreeably, by her likeness in the long glass of the wardrobe.
She went to it and stood there, looking at herself. For the last three
months she had been afraid to face the woman in the glass. Sometimes she
had had to turn her head another way when she passed her. Every day the
woman in the glass grew more repulsively powerful and sombre, more
dreadfully like that portrait which George hated. She knew he couldn't
stand her when she looked like that. Looking like that, and George's
inability to stand her, and the celebrity that made her so absurd, she
put it all down to the peculiar malice and mischief of the thing that
had been, as she said, "tacked on" to her, the thing they called her
Genius.
And now she did not look like _that_ in the very least. She looked, to
her amazement, like any other woman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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