It was impossible to blink the danger. Prothero could not possibly escape this time. He had gone, as Tanqueray said, one better than his recent best. And Laura had got a book out, too, an enchanting book. It looked as if they were doomed, in sheer perversity, to appear together. Financial necessity, of course, might have compelled them to this indiscretion. Laura was bound eventually to have a book, to pay for Prothero's; there wasn't a publisher in London now who would take the risk of him. But as likely as not these wedded ones flung themselves thus on the public in a superb disdain, just to prove how little they cared what was said about them. Laura was inclined to be reticent, but Tanqueray drew her out by congratulating her on her popularity, on the way she kept it up. "Oh," she cried, "as if I didn't know what you think of it. Me and my popularity!" "You don't know, and you don't care, you disgraceful Kiddy." She lifted her face, a face tender and a little tremulous, that yet held itself bravely to be smitten as it told him that indeed she did not care. "I think your popularity, _and_ you, my child, the most beautiful sight I've ever seen for many a long year." She shrugged her shoulders. "You may laugh at me," she said. "'E isn't laughin' at you," Rose interjected. She was generally admitted to Tanqueray's conferences with Laura. She sat by the fire with her knees very wide apart, nursing Minny. "He isn't, indeed," said Tanqueray. "He thinks you a marvellous Kiddy; and he bows his knee before your popularity. How you contrive to turn anything so horrible into anything so adorable he doesn't know and never will know." "Dear me. I'm only dumping down earth for Owen's roses." "That's what I mean. That's the miracle. Every novel you write blossoms into a splendid poem." It was what she meant. She had never meant anything so much. It was the miracle that her marriage perpetually renewed for her, this process of divine transmutation, by which her work passed into Owen's and became perfect. It passed, if you like, through a sordid medium, through pounds and shillings and pence, but there again, the medium itself was transmuted, sanctified by its use, by the thing accomplished. She touched a consummation beyond consummation of their marriage. "I'm glad you see it as I do," she said. She had not thought that he would see. "Of course I see it." He sat silent a moment regarding his vision; smooth-browed, close-lipped, a purified and transmuted Tanqueray. "What do you expect," he said presently, "to happen?" "I expect what always has happened, and worse." "So do I. I said in the beginning that he hadn't a chance. There isn't a place for him anywhere in his own generation. He might just as well go on the Stock Exchange and try to float a company by singing to the brokers. It's a generation of brokers." "Beasts!" "Aunt's lodger is a broker," said Rose. "Old furniture--real--and pictures is _'is_ line."