"As if," said Nina, "_we_ weren't authors." "My dear Nina, nobody would think it of us. Nobody would have thought it of Jinny if she hadn't gone and got celebrated." "You'll be celebrated yourself some day." "I shall be dead," said he. "I shan't know anything about it." At this point Prothero, with an exquisite vagueness, stated that he wanted to get work on a paper. He was not, he intimated, looking to his poems to keep him. On the contrary, he would have to keep them. Tanqueray wondered if he realized how disastrous, how ruinous they were. He had no doubt about Nina's poet. But there were poets and poets. There were dubious, delicate splendours, for ever trembling on the verge of immortality. And there were the infrequent, enormous stars that wheel on immeasurable orbits, so distant that they seem of all transitory things most transitory. Prothero was one of these. There was not much chance for him in his generation. His poems were too portentously inspired. They were the poems of a saint, a seer, an exile from life and time. He stood alone on the ultimate, untrodden shores, watching strange tides and the courses of unknown worlds. On any reasonable calculation he could not hope to make himself heard for half a century, if then. There was something about him alien and terrible, inaccessibly divine. The form of his poems was uncouth, almost ugly. Their harmonies, stupendous and unforeseen, struck the ear with the shock of discord. It was, of course, absurd that he should want work on a paper; still more absurd that he should think, or that Nina should think, that Tanqueray could get it for him. He didn't, it appeared, expect anybody to get it for him. He just wrote things, things that he thought were adequately imbecile, and shot them into letter-boxes. As to what became of them, Tanqueray had never seen anybody more unsolicitous, more reckless of the dark event. He went away with Prothero's poems in his pocket. Nina followed him and held him on the doorstep. "You do believe in him?" she said. "What's the good of _my_ believing in him? I can't help him. I can't help myself. He's got to wait, Nina, like the rest of us. It won't hurt him." "It will. He can't wait, George. He's desperately poor. You must do something." "What can I do?" "There are things," she said, "that people always do." "I could offer him a five-pound note; but he wouldn't take it." "No. He wouldn't take it. You can do better than that. You can get him to meet that man of yours." "What man?" "That magazine man, Brodrick." He laughed. "Considering that I all but did for him and his magazine! Brodrick's Jane Holland's man, not mine, you know. Have you told Jane about Prothero?" "No." A faint flame leaped in her face and died. "You'd better," he said. "She can do anything with Brodrick. She could even make him take a poem. Why didn't you ask Prothero to meet her?" "I haven't seen her for six months." "Is that your fault or hers?" "Neither."