But when Nicky actually did it (in the spring of nineteen-nine) Prothero applied to Brodrick for a holiday. He wanted badly to get out of town. He could not—when it came to the agonizing point—he could not face Nicky.
At least that was the account of the matter which Tanqueray gave to Brodrick when the question of Prothero's impossibility came up again at Moor Grange. Brodrick was indignant at Prothero's wanting a holiday, and a month's holiday. It was preposterous. But Jane had implored him to let him have it.
Jinny would give a good deal, Tanqueray imagined, to get out of town too. It was more terrible for her to face Nicky than for any of them. Tanqueray himself was hiding from him at that moment in Brodrick's study. But Jinny, with that superb and incomprehensible courage that women have, was facing him down there in the drawing-room.
It was in the drawing-room, later on in the afternoon, that Brodrick found his wife, shrunk into a corner of the sofa and mopping her face with a pocket-handkerchief. Tanqueray had one knee on the sofa and one arm flung tenderly round Jinny's shoulder. He met, smiling, the husband's standstill of imperturbable inquiry.
"It's all right, Brodrick," he said. "I've revived her. I've been talking to her like a father."
He stood looking down at her, and commented—
"Nicky brought a book of poems out and Jinny cried."
"It was th—th—the last straw," sobbed Jinny.
Brodrick left them together, just to show how imperturbable he was.
"George," she said, "it was horrible. Poor Nicky stood there where you are, waiting for me to say things. And I couldn't, I couldn't, and he saw it. He saw it and turned white——"