e absurd idea of Rose
having a mind.

Rose made a little sound in her throat like a laugh. She had not
laughed, she had hardly smiled, for many months now.

"The doctor--'e's fair pleased. 'E says I'll 'ave to go out walkin' now,
for Joey's sake."

"Poor Joey."

He stooped and stroked the little animal, who stood on ridiculous
hind-legs, straining to lick his hand.

"His hair doesn't come on, Rose----"

"It hasn't been brushed proper. You should brush a Pom's 'air
backwards----"

"Of course, and it hasn't been brushed backwards. He can bark all right,
anyhow. There's nothing wrong with his lungs."

"He won't bark at you no more, now he knows you."

She leaned her face to the furry head on her shoulder, and he recognized
Minny by the strange pattern of his back and tail. Minny was not
beautiful.

"It's Minny," she said. "You used to like Minny."

It struck him with something like a pang that she held him like a child
at her breast. She saw his look and smiled up at him.

"I may keep him, too?"

At that he kissed her.

By the end of that evening Tanqueray had not written a word. He could
only turn over the pages of his manuscript, in wonder at the mechanical
industry that had covered so much paper with such awful quantities of
ink. Here and there he recognized a phrase, and then he was aware, very
miserably aware, that the thing was his masterpiece. He wondered, and
with agony, how on earth he was going to finish it if they came about
him like this and destroyed his peace.

It wasn't the idea of the house. The house was bad enough; the house
indeed was abominable. It was Rose. It was more than Rose; it was
everything; it was the touch, the intimate, unendurable strain and
pressure of life.

It was all very well for Prothero to talk. His genius was safe, it was
indestructible. It had the immunity of the transcendent. It worked, not
in flesh and blood, but in a divine material. Whatever Prothero did it
remained unmoved, untroubled by the impact of mortality. Prothero could
afford his descents, his immersions in the stuff of life. He, Tanqueray,
could not, for life was the stuff he worked in. To immerse himself was
suicidal; it was the dyer plunging into his own vat.

Because his genius was a thing of flesh and blood, flesh and blood was
the danger always at its threshold, the enemy in its house. For the same
reason it was sufficient to itself. It fulfilled the functions, it
enjoyed the excitements an