Part 56

"She wants to know if I'll have Effy."

"Effy?"

"My half-sister."

"Well?"

"I think, George, I may have to have her."

"Have her? It's you who'll be had. Don't I tell you you're always being had?"

He looked down at her half-tenderly, smiling at the pathos, the absurd pathos of her face. He was the same George Tanqueray that he had always been, except he was no longer restless, no longer excited.

"Jinny," he said, "if you begin to gather round you a family, or even the rudiments of a family, you're done for. And so is Hambleby."

She said nothing.

"Can you afford to have him done for?"

"If it would help them, George."

"You want to help them?"

"Of course I do."

"But you can't help them without Hambleby. It's he who goes out and rakes in the shekels, not you."

"Ye-es. I know he does."

"Apart from Hambleby what are you? A simple idiot."

Jane's face expressed her profound and contrite persuasion of this truth.

"Well," he said, "have you written to the lady?"

"Not yet."

"Then sit down and write to her now exactly what I tell you. It will be a beautiful letter; in your manner, not mine."

He stood over her and dictated the letter. It had a firmness of intention that no letter of Jinny's to her people had hitherto expressed, but in all other respects it was a masterly reproduction of Jinny's style.

"I am going to post this myself," he said, "because I can't trust you for a minute."

He ran out bareheaded and came back again.

"You can't do without me," he said, "you can't do without me for a minute."

He sat down in his old place, and began, always as if nothing had happened. "And now about Hambleby. Another day, Jinny, and I should have been too late to save him."

"But, George, it's awful. They'll never understand. They don't realize the deadly grind. They see me moving in scenes of leisured splendour."

"Tell them you don't move in scenes of leisured anything."

"The scenes I do move in! I was so happy once, when I hadn't any money, when nobody but you knew anything about me."