It was all very well for Prothero to talk. His genius was safe, it was indestructible. It had the immunity of the transcendent. It worked, not in flesh and blood, but in a divine material. Whatever Prothero did it remained unmoved, untroubled by the impact of mortality. Prothero could afford his descents, his immersions in the stuff of life. He, Tanqueray, could not, for life was the stuff he worked in. To immerse himself was suicidal; it was the dyer plunging into his own vat. Because his genius was a thing of flesh and blood, flesh and blood was the danger always at its threshold, the enemy in its house. For the same reason it was sufficient to itself. It fulfilled the functions, it enjoyed the excitements and the satisfactions of sense. It reproduced reality so infallibly, so solidly, so completely, that it took reality's place; it made him unconscious of his wife's existence and of the things that went on beneath him in the ground-floor sitting-room. Yet he was not and had never been indifferent to life itself. He approached it, not with precaution or prejudice or any cold discretion, but with the supreme restraint of passion on guard against its own violence. If he had given himself to it, what a grip it would have had on him, what a terrible, destructive grip; if, say, he had found his mate; if he had married a woman, who, exulting in life, would have drawn him into it. Rose had not drawn him in. She had done nothing assailing and destructive. She was, in some respects, the most admirable wife a man bent on solitude could have selected. The little thing had never got in his way. She was no longer disturbing to the intellect, nor agitating to the heart; and she satisfied, sufficiently, the infrequent craving of his senses. Up till now he would hardly have known that he was married; it had been so easy to ignore her. But to-day she had been forced on his attention. The truth about Rose had been presented to him very plainly and boldly by Prothero, by the doctor, by Mrs. Eldred and by Jane. It was the same naked truth that in his novels he himself presented with the utmost plainness and boldness to the British public. His genius knew no other law but truth to Nature, trust in Nature, unbroken fidelity to Nature. And now it was Nature that arraigned his genius for its frustration of her purposes in Rose. His genius had made Rose the victim of its own incessant, inextinguishable lust and impulse to create. Eleven o'clock struck and he had not written a line. Through his window he heard the front door open and Rose's little feet on the pavement, and Rose's voice calling into the darkness her old call, "Puss--Puss--Puss. Minny--Min--Min--Minny. Puss--Puss--Puss." He sighed. He had realized for the first time that he was married. XXIV