And Rose had come to him when the madness of the quest was on him, a madness so strong that it overcame his perception of her social lapses. It was impossible to be unaware of some of them, of certain phrases, of the sudden wild flight of her aspirates. But these things were entangled with her adorable gestures, with the soft ways of her mouth, with her look when she hung about him, nursing him; so that a sane judgment was impossible. It was palpable, too, that Rose was not intellectual, that she was not even half-educated. But Tanqueray positively disliked the society of intellectual, cultivated women; they were all insipid after Jane. After Jane, he did not need intellectual companionship in his wife. He would still have Jane. And when he was tired of Jane there would, no doubt, be others; and when he was tired of all of them, there was himself. What he did need in his wife was the obstinate, dumb devotion of a creature that had no life apart from him; a creature so small that in clinging it would hang no weight on his heart. And he had found it in Rose. Why should he not marry her? She was now, he had learned, staying with her former mistress at Fleet, in Hampshire. The next morning he took a suitable train down to Fleet, and arrived, carrying the band-box, at the door of the house where Rose was. He sat a long time in the hall of the house with the band-box on his knees. He did not mind waiting. People went in and out of the hall and looked at him; and he did not care. He gloried in the society of the sacred band-box. He enjoyed the spectacle of his own eccentricity. At last he was shown into a little room where Rose came to him. She came from behind, from the garden, through the French window. She was at his side before he saw her. He felt her then, he felt her fear of him. He turned. "Rose," he said, "I've brought you the moon in a band-box." "Oh," said Rose, and her cry had a thick, sobbing vibration in it. He put his arm on her shoulder and drew her out of sight and kissed her, and she was not afraid of him any more. "Rose," he said, "have you thought it over?" "Yes, I have. Have you?" "I've thought of nothing else." "Sensible?" "Oh, Lord, yes." "You've thought of how I haven't a penny and never shall have?" "Yes." "And how I'm not clever, and how it isn't a bit as if I'd any head for studyin' and that?" "Yes, Rose." "Have you thought of how I'm not a lady? Not what you'd call a lady?" There was no answer to that, and so he kissed her. "And how you'd be if you was to marry some one who was a lady? Have you thought of that?" "I have." "Well then, it's this way. If you was a rich man I wouldn't marry you." She paused. "But you will, because I'm a poor one?" "Yes." "Thank God I'm poor." He drew her to him and she yielded, not wholly, but with a shrinking of her small body, and a soft, shy surrender of her lips. She was thinking, "If he married a lady he'd have to spend ten times on her what he need on me."