By the end of the afternoon it seemed to her an inevitable consummation, the marriage of Mr. Brodrick and Miss Collett. She could almost see it working, the predestined attraction of the eternally compatible, the incomparably fit. And when Brodrick left off taking any notice of Miss Collett, and finally lured Jane away into the library on the flimsiest pretence, she wondered what game he was up to. Perhaps in his innocence he was blind to Miss Collett's adoration. He was not sure of Miss Collett. He was trying to draw her.
Jane, intensely interested, advanced from theory to theory of Brodrick and Miss Collett while Brodrick removed himself to the writing-table, and turned on her a mysterious back.
"I want to show you something," he said.
She went to him. In the bared centre of the writing-table he had placed a great pile of manuscript. He drew out his chair for her, so that she could sit down and look well at the wonder.
Her heart leaped to the handwriting and to George Tanqueray's name on the title-page.
"You've seen it?" he said.
"No. Mr. Tanqueray never shows his work."
From some lair in the back of the desk he swept forward a prodigious array of galley proofs. Tanqueray's novel was in the first number of the "Monthly Review."
"Oh!" she cried, looking up at him.
"I've pleased you?" he said.