For last year, when it all began, she had had George Tanqueray. Tanqueray had stood between her and the dreadful little people. His greatness sheltered her from their dreadfulness, their cleverness, their littleness. He had softened all the horrors of her pitiless celebrity, so that she had not felt herself half so celebrated as she was. And now, six months after George's marriage, it was borne in upon her with appalling certitude that George was necessary to her, and that he was not there. He had not even written to her since he married. Then, as if he had a far-off sense of her need of him and of her agony, he wrote. Marriage had not destroyed his supernatural sympathy. Absolutely as if nothing had happened, he wrote. It was on the day after New Year's day, and if Jane had behaved as if nothing had happened she would have written to _him_. But because she needed him, she could not bring herself to write. "My dear Jinny," he wrote, "I haven't heard from you for centuries." (He must have expected, then, to hear.) "What's the matter? Is it Book?" And Jane wrote back, "It is. Will you look at it?" "Nothing would please me better," said Tanqueray by return. Not a word about his wife. Jane sent Hambleby (by return also) and regretted it the moment after. In two days a telegram followed. "Coming to see you to-day at four. Tanqueray." Absolutely as if nothing had happened, he came. Her blood sang a song in her brain; her heart and all her pulses beat with the joy and tumult of his coming. But when he was there, when he had flung himself into his old place by the fireside and sat smiling at her across the hearthrug, of a sudden her brain was on the watch, and her pulses and her heart were still. "What's been the matter?" he said. "You look worn out." "I am worn out." "With Book, Jinny?" She smiled and shook her head. "No. With people, George. Everlasting people. I have to work like ten horses, and when I think I've got a spare minute, just to rest in, some one takes it. Look there. And there. And there." His eyes followed her wild gesture. Innumerable little notes were stacked on Jinny's writing-table and lay littered among her manuscripts. Invitation cards, theatre tickets, telegrams were posted in every available space about the room, schedules of the tax the world levies on celebrity. Tanqueray's brows crumpled as he surveyed the scene. "Before I can write a line of Hambleby," said Jinny--"one little line--I've got to send answers to all that." "You don't mean to tell me," he said sternly, "that you dream of answering?" "If it could only end in dreaming." He groaned. "Here have I been away from you, how long? Six months, is it? Only six months, Jinny, just long enough to get married in, and you go and do the very things I told you not to. You're not to be trusted by yourself for a single minute. I told you what it would be like." "George dear, can't you do something? Can't you save me?"