"Not much. It looks as if I couldn't do things without you."
A look of heavenly happiness came upon her face, and passed.
"That isn't so, George. There never was anybody less dependent on other people. That's why nothing has ever stopped you. Nothing ever will. Whereas—you're right about me. Anything might stop me."
"Could I stop you?"
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.