It seemed to Tanqueray that his acuter consciousness dated from the arrival of that maid. Rose, too, had developed nerves. The maid irritated Rose. She put her back up and rubbed her the wrong way in all the places where she was sorest. For Rose's weakness was that she couldn't tolerate any competition in her own line. She couldn't, as she said, abide sitting still and seeing the work taken out of her hands, seeing another woman clean _her_ house, and cook _her_ husband's dinner, and she knowing that she could do both ten times as well herself. She appealed to Tanqueray to know how he'd like it if she was to get a man in to write his books for him. She was always appealing to Tanqueray. When George wanted to know what, after all, was wrong with Susan, and declared that Susan seemed to him a most superior young woman, Rose said that was the worst of it. Susan was much too superior for her. She could see well enough, she said, that Susan knew that she was not a lady, and she could see that George knew that she knew. Else why did he say that Susan was superior? And sometimes George would be beside himself with fury and would roar, "Damn Susan!" And sometimes, but not often, he would be a torment and a tease. He would tell Rose that he loved Susan, that he adored Susan, that he couldn't live without her. He might part with Rose, but he couldn't possibly part with Susan. Susan was the symbol of his prosperity. Without Susan he would not feel celebrated any more. And sometimes Rose would laugh; and sometimes, in moments of extreme depression, she would deplore the irony of the success that had saddled her with Susan. And Tanqueray cursed Susan in his heart, as the cause of Rose's increasing tendency to conversation. It was there that she encroached. She invaded more and more the guarded territory of silence. She annexed outlying pieces of Tanqueray's sacred time, pursuing him with talk that it was intolerable to listen to. He blamed Prothero and Laura and Jane for that, as well as Susan. They were the first who had encouraged her to talk, and now she had got the habit. And it was there again that the really fine and poignant irony came in. Through her intercourse with Jane and Laura, Rose offered herself for comparison, and showed flagrantly imperfect. But for that, owing to Tanqueray's superhuman powers of abstraction, she might almost have passed unnoticed. As it was, he owned that her incorruptible simplicity preserved her, even at her worst, from being really dreadful. Once, after some speech of hers, there had followed an outburst of fury on Tanqueray's part and on Rose's a long period of dumbness.