It seemed to have struck everybody all at once that Prothero was impossible. That conviction was growing more and more upon his publishers. His poems, they assured him, were no longer worth the paper they were written on. As for his job on the "Morning Telegraph," he was aware that he held it only on sufferance, drawing a momentary and precarious income. He owed everything to Brodrick. He depended on Brodrick. He knew what manner of men these Brodricks were. Inexhaustibly kind to undeserved misfortune, a little impatient of mere incompetence, implacable to continuous idiocy. Prothero they regarded as a continuous idiot.

His impossibility appeared more flagrant in the face of Laura's marvellous achievement. Laura's luck persisted (she declared) because she couldn't bear it, because it was a fantastic refinement of torture to be thrust forward this way in the full blaze, while Owen, withdrawn into the columns of the "Morning Telegraph," became increasingly obscure. It made her feel iniquitous, as if she had taken from him his high place and his praise. Of course she knew that it was not his place or his praise that she had taken; degradation at the hands of her appraisers set him high. Obscurity, since it meant secrecy, was what he had desired for himself, and what she ought to have desired for him. She knew the uses of unpopularity. It kept him perfect; sacred in a way, and uncontaminated. It preserved, perpetually, the clearness of his vision. His genius was cut loose from everything extraneous. It swung in ether, solitary and pure, a crystal world, not yet breathed upon.

She would not have had it otherwise. It was through Owen's obscurity that her happiness had become so secure and so complete. It made her the unique guardian of a high and secret shrine. She had never been one who could be carried away by emotion in a crowd. The presence of her fellow-worshippers had always checked her impulse to adore. It was as much as she could do to admit two or three holy ones, Nina or Jane or Tanqueray, to a place beside her where she knelt.

As for the wretched money that he worried about, she wouldn't have liked him to have made it, if he could. An opulent poet was ridiculous, the perversion of the sublime. If one of them was to be made absurd by the possession of a large and comfortable income she preferred that it should be she.

The size of Laura's income, contrasted, as Prothero persisted in contrasting it, with her own size, was excessively absurd. Large and comfortable as it appeared to Prothero, it was not yet so large nor was it so comfortable that Laura could lie back and rest on it. She was heartrending, irritating, maddening to Prothero in her refusals to lie back on it and rest. She toiled prodigiously, incessantly, indefatigably. She implored Prothero to admit that if she was prodigious and incessant, she was indefatigable, she never tired. There was nothing wonderful in what she did. She had caught the silly trick of it. It could be done, she assured him, standing on your head. She enjoyed doing it. The wonderful thing was that she should be paid for her enjoyment, instead of having to pay for it, like other people. He argued vainly that once you had achieved an income it was no longer necessary to set your teeth and go at it like that.

And the more he argued the more Laura laughed at him. "I can't help it," she said; "I've got the habit. You'll never break me of it, after all these years."

For the Kiddy, even in her affluence, was hounded and driven by the memory of her former poverty. She had no illusions. She had never had them; and there was nothing spectral about her fear. After all, looking at it sanely, it didn't amount to so very much, what she had made. And it wasn't really an income; it was only a little miserable capital. It had no stability. It might at any moment cease. She might have an illness, or Owen might have one; he very probably would, considering the pace he went at it. Or the "Morning Telegraph" might throw him over. All sorts of things might happen. In her experience they generally did.

Of course, in a way Owen was right. They didn't want all the money. But what he didn't see was that you had to make ten times more than you wanted, in order to secure, ultimately, an income. And then, in the first excitement of it, she had rather launched out. To begin with, she had bought the house, to keep out the other lodgers. They were always bringing coughs and colds about the place and giving them to Owen. And she had had two rooms thrown into one so as to give Owen's long legs space to ramp up and down in. The den he had chosen had been too small for him. He was better, she thought, since he had had his great room. The house justified itself. It was reassuring to know that whatever happened they would have a roof over their heads. But it could not be denied that she had been extravagant.

And Owen had been the least shade extravagant too. He had found a poet even more unpopular, more impecunious than himself, a youth with no balance, and no power to right himself when he toppled over; and he had given him a hundred pounds in one lump sum to set him on his legs again. And on the top of that he had routed out a tipsy medical student from a slum, and "advanced him," as the medical student put it, twenty pounds to go to America with.

He had just come to her in her room where she sat toiling, and had confessed with a childlike, contrite innocence the things that he had done.

"It was a sudden impulse," he said. "I yielded to it."

"Oh, Owen dear, don't have another soon. These impulses are ruinous."

He sat down, overburdened with his crime, a heartrending spectacle to Laura.

"Well," she said, "I suppose it was worth it. It must have given you an exquisite pleasure."

"It did. That's where the iniquity comes in. It gave me an exquisite pleasure at your expense."

"You give me an exquisite pleasure," she said, "in everything you do."

Her lips made a sign for him to come to her, and he came and knelt at her feet and took her hands in his. He bowed his head over them and kissed them.

"Do you know what you are?" she said. "You're a divine prodigal."

"Yes," he said, kissing her, "I'm a prodigal, a dissolute, good-for-noting wastrel. I adore you and your little holy hands; but I'm not the least use to you. You ink your blessed little fingers to the bone for me, and I take your earnings and fling them away—in—in——" He grew incoherent with kissing.

"In one night's spiritual debauchery," said she. She was pleased with her way of putting it; she was pleased, immeasurably pleased with him.

But Owen was not pleased in the very least.

"That," said he, "is precisely what I do."

He rose and stood before her, regarding her with troubled, darkening eyes. He was indeed a mark for the immortal ironies. He had struggled to support and protect her, this unspeakably dear and inconceivably small woman; he looked on her still as a sick child whom he had made well, and here he was, living on her, living on Laura. The position was incredible, abominable, but it was his.

She looked at him with deep-blue, adoring eyes, and there was a pain in her heart as she saw how thin his hands were, and how his clothes hung away from his sunken waist.

"Oh," she cried, "what a little beast I am, to make you feel like that, when you're journalizing and agonizing day and night, and when it's your own savings that you flung. It was, dear," she insisted.

"Yes, and as I've flung them, I'll have to live on you for a year at least. It all comes back to that."

"I wish you wouldn't come back to it. Can't you see, can't you see," she implored, "how, literally, I'm living on you?"

"If you only did!"

"But I do, I do. In the real things, the things that matter. I cling and suck like a vampire. Why can't you have the courage of your opinions?"

"My opinions? I haven't any. Hence, no doubt, my lack of courage."

"Your convictions, then, whatever you call the things you do have. You think, and I think, that money doesn't matter. You won't even allow that it exists, and for you it doesn't exist, it can't. Well then, why make such a fuss about it? And what does it matter which of us earns it, or who spends it?"

He seemed to be considering her point. Then he put it violently from him.

"That's the argument of all the humbugs, all the consecrated hypocrites that have ever been. All the lazy, long-haired, rickety freaks and loafers who go nourishing their damned spirituality at some woman's physical expense. The thing's indecent, it's unspeakable. Those Brodricks are perfectly right."

Laura raised her head. "They? What have they got to do with you and me?"

"A good deal. They supply me with work, which they don't want me to do, in order to keep me from sponging on my wife. They are admirable men. They represent the sanity and decency of the world pronouncing judgment on the fact. No Brodrick ever blinked a fact. When people ask the Brodricks, What does that fellow Prothero do? they shrug their shoulders and say, 'He has visions, and his wife pays for them.'"

"But I don't. It's the public that pays for them. And your wife has a savage joy in making it pay. If it wasn't for that I should loathe my celebrity more than Jinny ever loathed hers. It makes me feel sillier."

"Poor little thing," said Prothero.

"Well—it's hard that I should have to entertain imbeciles who wouldn't read you if they were paid."

He knew that that was the sting of it for her.

"They're all right," he said. "It's your funny little humour that they like. I like it, too."

But Laura snapped her teeth and said, "Damn! Damn my humour! Well—when they use it as a brickbat to hurl at your head."

She quoted furiously, "'While her husband still sings to deaf ears, Mrs. Prothero has found the secret of capturing her public. She has made her way straight to its heart. And the heart of Mrs. Prothero's public is unmistakably in the right place.' Oh—if Mrs. Prothero's public knew what Mrs. Prothero thinks of it. I give them what they want, do I? As if I gave it them because they want it. If they only knew why I give it, and how I'm fooling them all the time! How I make them pay—for you! Just think, Owen, of the splendid, the diabolical irony of it!"

"So very small," he murmured, "and yet so fierce."

"Just think," she went on, "how I'm enjoying myself."

"Just think," said Prothero, "how I am not."

"Then" (she returned it triumphantly), "you're paying for my enjoyment, which is what you want."

The clock struck six. She went out of the room, and returned, bringing an overcoat which she said had grown miles too big for him. She warmed it at the fire and helped him on with it, and disappeared for a moment under its flapping wings, so large was that overcoat.

All the way to Fleet Street, Prothero, wrapped in his warm overcoat, meditated tenderly on his wife's humour.

---