They gave themselves up to the proofs, and it was late when she heard that Nina had crept from her savage lair and was now in London. It was very queer, she thought, that Nina had not told her she was coming.
She called the next day at Adelphi Terrace. She found Nina in her front room, at work on the proofs that Brodrick had sent her.
Nina met her friend's reproaches with a perfect frankness. She had not told her she was coming, because she didn't know how long she was going to stay, and she had wanted, in any case, to be let alone. That was yesterday. To-day what she wanted more than anything was to see Jane. She hadn't read her book, and wasn't going to until she had fairly done with her own. She had heard of it from Tanqueray, and was afraid of it. Jane, she declared, was too tremendous, too overwhelming. She could only save herself by keeping clear of her.
"I should have thought," Jane said, "you were safe enough—after that last." She had told her what she had thought of it in the first moments of her arrival. "Safe, at any rate, from me."
"You're the last person I shall ever be safe from. There you are, always just ahead of me. I'm exhausted if I look at you. You make me feel as if I never could keep up."
"But why? There's no comparison between your pace and mine."
"It's not your pace, Jinny, it's your handicap that frightens me."
"My handicap?"
"Well—a baby, a husband, and all those Brodricks and Levines. I've got to see you carrying all that weight, and winning; and it takes the heart out of me."
"If I did win, wouldn't it prove that the handicap wasn't what you thought it?"