But you couldn't keep him off. He was mad, apparently, with the sheer lust of danger. He would go. "If you do," Brodrick had said finally, "you go at your own risk."
And he had gone, leaving the editor profoundly uncomfortable. Brodrick, in these days, found himself reiterating, "He would go, he would go." And all the time he felt that he had sent the poor long poet to his death, because of Jane Holland.
He saw a great deal of Jane Holland in the weeks that followed Prothero's departure.
They had reached the first month of autumn, and Jane was sitting out on the lawn in Brodrick's garden. The slender, new-born body of Prothero's Poems lay in her lap. Eddy Heron stretched himself at her feet. Winny hung over her shoulder. Every now and then the child swept back her long hair that brushed Jane's face, in the excitement of her efforts to see what, as she phrased it, Mr. Prothero had done. Opposite them Mrs. Heron and Gertrude Collett sat quietly sewing.
Eddy, who loved to tease his mother, was talking about Jane as if she wasn't there.
"I say, Mummy, don't you like her awfully?"
"Of course I like her," said Mrs. Heron, smiling at her son.
"Why do you like me?" said Jane, whose vision of Owen Prothero was again obscured by Winny's hair.
"Why do we like anybody?" said Mrs. Heron, with her inassailable reserve.
"You can't get out of it that way, Mum. You don't just go liking anybody. You like jolly few. We're an awful family for not liking people. Aren't we, Gee-Gee?"