"I try," she said sweetly, "to save you all."
He smiled now. "There are limits," he said, "even to your power of saving me. And to my capacity for being saved."
The words were charged with a significance that Brodrick himself was not aware of; as if the powers that worked in him obscurely had used him for the utterance of a divination not his own.
His secretary understood him better than he did himself. She had spent three years in understanding him. And now, for the first time in three years, her lucidity was painful.
She could not contemplate serenely the thing she thought she had seen. Therefore she drew a veil over it and refused to believe that it was there.
"He did not mean anything," said Gertrude to herself. "He is not the sort of man who means things." Which was true.
XX
Brodrick, living on Putney Heath, was surrounded by his family. It was only fifteen minutes' walk from his front door to his brother John's house in Augustus Road, Wimbledon; only five minutes from his back door to Henry's house in Roehampton Lane. You went by a narrow foot-track down the slope to get to Henry. You crossed the Heath by Wimbledon Common to get to John. If John and Henry wanted to get to each other, they had to pass by Brodrick's house.
Moor Grange was a half-way house, the great meeting-place of all the Brodricks.