"Never again," she murmured. "Promise me, never again till you're well." "Never again." He smiled as he answered. Dr. Brodrick, calling late that night, was informed by Laura of the extent to which he had been disobeyed. He thundered at her and threatened, a Brodrick beside himself with fury. "Do you suppose," she said, "it isn't awful for me to have to stand by and see it, and do nothing? What can I do?" He looked down at her. The little thing had a will of her own; she was indeed, for her size, preposterously over-charged with will. Never had he seen a small creature so indomitably determined. He put it to her. She had a will; why couldn't she use it? "His will is stronger than mine," she said. "And his genius is stronger than his will." "You overrate the importance of it. What does it matter if he never writes another line?" It seemed to her that he charged him with futility, that he echoed--and in this hour!--the voice of the world that tried to make futile everything he did. "It doesn't matter to you," she said. "You never understood his genius; you never cared about it." "Do you mean to tell me that you--_you_ care about it more than you care about him? Upon my word, I don't know what you women are made of." "What could I do?" she said. "I had to use my own judgment." "You had not. You had to use mine." He paused impressively. "It's no use, my child, fighting against the facts." To Henry Laura was a little angry child, crying over the bitter dose of life. He had got to make her take it. He towered over her, a Brodrick, the incarnate spirit of fact. It was a spirit that revolted her. She stood her ground and defied it in its insufferable tyranny. She thought of how these men, these Brodricks, behaved to genius wherever they met it; how, among them, they had driven poor Jinny all but mad, martyrizing her in the name of fact. As for Owen, she knew what they had thought and said of him, how they judged him by the facts. If it came to that she could fight the Doctor with his own weapons. If he wanted facts he should have them; he should have all the facts. "_This_ isn't what's killing him," she said. "It's all the other things, the things he was made to do. Going out to Manchuria--that began it. He ought never to have been sent there. Then--five years on that abominable paper. Think how he slaved on it. You don't know what it was to him. To have to sit in stuffy theatres and offices; to turn out at night in vile weather; to have to work whether he was fit to work or not." He looked down at her very quietly and kindly. It was when people were really outrageous that a Brodrick came out in his inexhaustible patience and forbearance. "You say he had to do all these things. Is that the fact?" "No," said Laura, passionately, "it's the truth." "What do you mean by that?" "I mean it's what it amounted to. They--they drove him to it with their everlasting criticism and fault-finding and complaining."