"Oh—struggle along somehow."
"I wouldn't struggle too hard." He meditated. "Look here, our natural tendency, yours and mine, is to believe that it's people that do all the mischief, and not that the thing itself goes. We'll believe anything rather than that. But we've got to recognize that it's capricious. It comes and goes."
"Still, people do count. My brother-in-law, John Brodrick, makes it go. Whereas you, Tanks, I own you make it come."
"Oh, I make it come, do I?"
He wondered, "What does Brodrick do?"
His smile persisted, so that she divined his wonder.
She turned from him ever so little, and he saw a sadness in her face, thus estranged and averted. He thought he knew the source of it and its secret. It also was a gift from the unseen.
When he had left her she went up-stairs and cast herself upon the bed where her little son lay naked, and abandoned herself to her maternal passion.
And Gertrude stood there in the nursery, and watched her; and like Tanqueray, she thought she knew.