Nina said nothing. She was thinking that it must be pretty serious if Jinny was not prepared to be sincere about it.
"That's what I want to prove," said Jane softly, "that there isn't any handicap. That's why I want to win."
Her feeling was that she must keep her family out of these discussions. She had gone too far the other night in the things that she had said to Tanqueray, that Tanqueray had forced her to say. She had made herself afraid of him. Her admissions had been so many base disloyalties to Hugh. She was not going to admit anything to Nina, least of all that she found her enviable, as she stood there, stripped for the race, carrying nothing but her genius. It was so horribly true (as Nina had once said) that the lash had been laid across her naked shoulders to turn her into the course when she had swerved from it. It had happened every time, every time; so invariably as to prove that for Nina virginity was the sacred, the infrangible, predestined law, the one condition.
But the conditions, she said aloud, were nobody's business but your own. She refused to be judged by anything but the result. It was absurd to talk about winning and handicapping; as if creative art was a handicap, as if there were any joy or any end in it beyond the act of creation. You defeated your end if you insisted on conditions, if you allowed anything extraneous to count as much as that.
The flush on her face showed what currents moved her to her protest.
"Does it seem to you, then, that I've defeated my end?" Nina pressed her point home implacably.
Jane strung herself to the pain of it.
"Not you." She paused for her stroke. "Nor yet I."
She rose with it. She wanted to get away from Nina who seemed terrible to her at that moment. She shrank from meeting Nina's eyes.
Nina was left meditating on her friend's beautiful hypocrisy.