After that Rose talked no more. She sat wondering miserably what it was that she had done. It did not occur to her that what had annoyed him was her vivid revelation of his method. The dinner she was enjoying so much had suddenly become dreadful to her.
Her wonder and her dread still weighed on her, long after it was over, when she was showing Mrs. Brodrick the house. Her joy and her pride in it were dashed. Over all the house there hung the shadow of George's awful scowl. It seemed to her that George's scowl must have had something to do with Mrs. Brodrick; that she must have shamed him in some way before the lady he thought so much of, who thought so much of him. A little too much, Rose said to herself, seeing that she was a married woman.
And for the first time there crept into Rose's obscurely suffering soul, a fear and a jealousy of Mrs. Brodrick.
Jane felt it, and divined beneath it the suffering that was its cause. It was not as if she had not known how George could make a woman suffer.
Her acutest sense of it came to her as they stood together in the bedroom that she had been called on to admire. Rose's bedroom was a wonder of whiteness; so was the great smooth double bed; but the smoothest and the whitest thing in it was Tanqueray's pillow where Tanqueray's head had never lain. There was a tiny dressing-room beyond, and through the open door Jane caught a sight of the low camp-bed where, night after night, Tanqueray's genius flung its victim down to sleep off the orgy of the day's work. The dressing-room was a place where he could hide from Rose by night as he hid from her by day.
And Rose, when they took the house, had been so proud of the dressing-room.
Jane, seeing these things, resolved to remove the fear and jealousy. She must let Rose see that she was not dangerous; and she knew how.
She began by asking Rose when she was coming out to Putney? And Rose answered that she was busy and couldn't say for sure.
"You won't be busy in August, will you? If you'll come then I'll show you a room you haven't seen, the prettiest room in the house."
Rose drew in her breath. Her face had the soft flush in it that came when she was deeply moved.