Prothero did know. That was why he asked. He turned to Jane again. He was afraid, he said, that the Review, in Brodrick's hands, would be too good to live. "_Is_ it too good to live, Gertrude?" said she. Gertrude looked at Brodrick as if she thought that _he_ was. "I don't think Mr. Brodrick will let it die," she said. "If he takes a thing up you can trust him to carry it through. He can fight for his own. He's a born fighter." Down at her end of the table beside Brodrick, Laura listened. "It has been a bit of a struggle, I imagine, up till now," said Prothero to Jane. "Up till now" (it was Gertrude who answered) "his hands have been tied. But now it's absolutely his own thing. He has realized his dream." If she had seen Prothero's eyes she would have been reminded that Brodrick's dream had been realized for him by his wife. She saw nothing but Brodrick. For Gertrude the "Monthly Review" _was_ Brodrick. She drew him for Prothero's benefit as the champion of the lost cause of literature. She framed the portrait as it were in a golden laurel wreath. Eddy Heron cried, "Hear, hear!" and "Go it, Gertrude!" and Winny wanted to know if her uncle's ears weren't tingling. She was told that an editor's ears were past tingling. But he flushed slightly when Gertrude crowned herself and him. They were all listening to her now. "I assure you," she was saying, "_we_ are not afraid." She was one with Brodrick, his interests and his dream. She was congratulated (by Jane) on her championship of the champion, and Brodrick was heard murmuring something to the effect that nobody need be frightened; they were safe enough. It struck Laura that Brodrick looked singularly unsatisfied for a man who has realized his dream. "All the same," said Prothero, "it was rash of you to take those poems I sent you." "Dear Owen," said Jane, "do you think they'll sink him?" "As far as that goes," Brodrick said, "we're going to have a novel of George Tanqueray's. That'll show you what we can afford." "Or what George can afford," said Jane. It was the first spark she had emitted. But it consumed the heavy subject. "By the way," said Caro Bickersteth, "where _is_ George Tanqueray?" Laura said that he was somewhere in the country. He was always in the country now. "Without his wife," said Caro, and nobody contradicted her. She went on. "You great geniuses ought not to marry, any more than lunatics. The law ought to provide for it. Genius, in either party, if you can establish the fact, should annul the contract, like--like any other crucial disability." "Or," Jane amended, "why not make the marriage of geniuses a criminal act, like suicide? You can always acquit them afterwards on the ground of temporary insanity." "How would you deal," said Brodrick suddenly, "with mixed marriages?" "Mixed----?" Caro feigned bewilderment. "When a norm--an ordinary--person marries a genius? It's a racial difference." ("Distinctly," Caro murmured.)