Rose in the sitting-room was kneeling by the hearth where she had just set a saucer of milk. With one hand she was loosening very gently from her shoulder the claws of Minny, the cat, who clung to her breast, scrambling, with the passion and desperation of his kind. Her other hand restrained with a soft caressing movement Joey's approaches to the saucer. Joey, though trembling with excitement, sat fascinated, obedient to her gesture. Joey was puny and hairless as ever, but in Rose's face as she looked at him there was a flush of maternal tenderness and gravity. A slightly sallow tinge under its sudden bloom told how Rose had suffered from the sedentary life. All this Tanqueray saw as he entered. It held him on the threshold, unmoved by the rushing assault and lacerating bark of the little dog, who resented his intrusion. Rose got up and came to him, lifting a frightened, pleading face. "Oh, George," she said, "don't make me send them away. Let me keep them." "I suppose you must keep them if you want them." "I never said I wanted them. Aunt _would_ bring them. She thought they'd be something to occupy my mind, like." Tanqueray smiled, in spite of his gentleness, at the absurd idea of Rose having a mind. Rose made a little sound in her throat like a laugh. She had not laughed, she had hardly smiled, for many months now. "The doctor--'e's fair pleased. 'E says I'll 'ave to go out walkin' now, for Joey's sake." "Poor Joey." He stooped and stroked the little animal, who stood on ridiculous hind-legs, straining to lick his hand. "His hair doesn't come on, Rose----" "It hasn't been brushed proper. You should brush a Pom's 'air backwards----" "Of course, and it hasn't been brushed backwards. He can bark all right, anyhow. There's nothing wrong with his lungs." "He won't bark at you no more, now he knows you." She leaned her face to the furry head on her shoulder, and he recognized Minny by the strange pattern of his back and tail. Minny was not beautiful. "It's Minny," she said. "You used to like Minny." It struck him with something like a pang that she held him like a child at her breast. She saw his look and smiled up at him. "I may keep him, too?" At that he kissed her. By the end of that evening Tanqueray had not written a word. He could only turn over the pages of his manuscript, in wonder at the mechanical industry that had covered so much paper with such awful quantities of ink. Here and there he recognized a phrase, and then he was aware, very miserably aware, that the thing was his masterpiece. He wondered, and with agony, how on earth he was going to finish it if they came about him like this and destroyed his peace. It wasn't the idea of the house. The house was bad enough; the house indeed was abominable. It was Rose. It was more than Rose; it was everything; it was the touch, the intimate, unendurable strain and pressure of life.