"Do. She'll get him work on Brodrick's paper."
He went away, meditating on Nina and her medical, surgical poet. She would have to write to Jinny now. But she wouldn't take him to see her. She was determined to keep him to herself. That was why none of them had seen anything of Nina for six months. There was (he came back to it again) something very murky about Nina. And Nina, with her murkiness, was manifestly in love with this spiritual, this mystical young man. So amazing was the part set her in the mortal comedy. He would give a good deal to know what Prothero thought of Nina.
Prothero could have told him that he thought of Nina as he thought of his own youth.
He was of her mother's race and from her country of the Marches. He knew more about Nina than Tanqueray had ever known. He knew the Lemprieres, a family of untamed hereditary wildness. He knew Nina as the survival of a hereditary doom, a tragedy untiring, relentless, repeated year after year and foreseen with a terrible certainty. He knew that it had left her with her bare genius, her temperament and her nerves.
It was of all things most improbable that he should be here in London, lodged in one room, with only the bare boards of it between him and Nina Lempriere.
The improbability of it struck Nina as she went to and fro in the inner room, preparing their supper.
There had been no acquaintance between her and young Prothero, the medical student. If their ways met it was only by accident, at long intervals, and always, she remembered, out of doors, on her mountains. They used to pass each other with eyes unseeing, fixed in their own dream. That was fifteen years ago. In all that time she had not seen him.
He had drawn her now by his shyness, his horror of other people, his perfect satisfaction in their solitary communion. Virgin from his wild places, he had told her that she was the only woman he was not afraid of. He had attached himself to her manifestly, persistently, with the fidelity of a wild thing won by sheer absence of pursuit. She had let him come and go, violently aware of him, but seeming unaware. He would sit for hours in her room, reading while she wrote, forgetting that up-stairs his fire was dying in the grate.
He had embraced Poverty like a saint. He regarded it as the blessed state of every man who desired to obey his own genius at all costs. He was all right, he said. He had lived on rice in the jungle. He could live on rice at a pinch now. And he could publish his poems if he got work on the papers. On this point Nina found him engagingly, innocently open to suggestion. She had suggested a series of articles on the problem of the East. He had written the articles, but in such a style and in such a spirit that no editor had as yet dared to publish them.
It was possible that he would have a chance with Brodrick who was braver than other editors. Brodrick was his one chance.