Part 38

"Have you liked it as much as you used to like our other days?"

"Oh more, far more." Then, remembering how those other days had been indeed theirs and nobody else's, she added, "In spite of poor Nicky."

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."