"Whoever does come down on you?"
"John," said she, "was with me for two hours yesterday."
Brodrick lent his ear as to a very genuine grievance. John, since his bereavement, was hardly ever out of the house.
"And I suppose," he said, "he bored you?"
"No, but he will call when I'm writing."
"Why on earth don't you send him away?"
"I would, if Mabel hadn't died. But how can you when he's unhappy? It would hurt him so. And yet, supposing you were to die, what would John say if I were to call on him at the works every day, and play with his dynamos to distract my mind, or sit with him in his office rumpling his hair, and dislocating his ideas till he didn't know the difference between a steam-roller and an internal combustion engine? That's more or less what John does to me. The only thing is to get away."
However, it was for Brodrick to decide, she said. And Brodrick said he couldn't decide until he had thought it over.
She was very soon aware that she had caused a scandal in her husband's family by her proposal to go away for three months. The scandal was not altogether unconnected with George Tanqueray, since it was at his suggestion that she proposed to take this unprecedented step. If she had proposed to take it with him they could hardly have shown themselves more horrified.
She knew how monstrous her conduct must appear to them. She could see it all so clearly from their point of view. That had always been after all her poor merit, that she could see things from other people's point of view. Her vision indeed of them, of the way they took things, was apt to be so vivid, so engrossing that it left her with no point of view of her own. She carried into life itself and all its relations her virtue as an artist, that effacement of her observing self in favour of the thing observed.