"Never again," she said, as if admonishing her feet. "Never again. There must be no more George Tanquerays. If I see one coming, I'll put a knife into myself, not hard enough to kill, but hard enough to hurt. I'll find out where it hurts most and keep it there. So that I mayn't forget. If I haven't the pluck to stick it in myself, I'll get you to do it for me. You'll only have to say 'George Tanqueray.'" Her murky face cleared suddenly. "Look here," she said. "I _believe_, if any woman is to do anything stupendous, it means virginity. But I _know_ it means that for you and me." XIV August and September came. One by one the houses in Kensington Square had put on their white masks; but in the narrow brown house at the corner, among all the decorous drawn blinds and the closed shutters, the top-floor window stared wide awake on the abandoned Square. Jane Holland had stayed in London because it was abandoned. She found a certain peace in the scattering and retreating in all directions of the terrible, converging, threatening multitudes of the clever little people, the multitudes that gather round celebrity, that pursue celebrity, that struggle and contend for celebrity among themselves. They had all gone away, carrying with them their own cleverness and Jane's celebrity. For her celebrity, at least her dreadful sense of it, vanished when they went. She could go in and out of the Square now, really hidden, guarding her secret, no longer in peril, feeling herself obscure. Not that she could really feel anything, or enjoy her obscurity or do anything with it now that she had got it. She was no longer a creature that felt or thought, or did things. You could not call it thinking, this possession of her mind by one tyrannous idea. Every morning she got up determined to get through the day without thinking of Tanqueray. But when she tried to read his face swam across the page, when she tried to write it thrust itself saliently, triumphantly, between her and the blank sheet. It seemed to say, "You'll never get rid of me that way." When she tried to eat he sat down beside her and took away her appetite. And whenever she dressed before the looking-glass he made her turn from her own reflection, saying to herself, "No wonder he didn't care for me, a woman with a face like that, fit to frighten the babies in Kensington Gardens." He drove her out of doors at last, and she became simply a thing that walked; a thing caught in a snare and shut up in a little space where it could walk; a thing once wild that had forgotten the madness and anguish of its capture, that turned and turned, till all its senses served the solitary, perpetual impulse of its turning. So Jane walked, without any sense of direction or deliverance, round and round in her cage of Kensington Gardens. She did not stop to ask herself how she was to go on. She had a sort of sense that she would go on somehow, if only she hardened her heart. So she hardened it.