d. "'E's worked 'ard enough for it. The
way 'e works! He'll sit think-thinkin' for hours, before 'e seems as if
'e could get fair hold of a word----"

They had all stopped talking to Tanqueray and were listening to
Tanqueray's wife.

"Then 'e'll start writin', slow-like; and 'e'll go over it again and
again, a-scratchin' out and a-scratchin' out, till all 'is papers is a
marsh of ink; and 'e'll 'ave to write all that over again. And the study
and the care 'e gives to it you'd never think."

Nicky's ear leaned closer than ever, as if to shelter and protect her;
and Rose became aware that George's forehead was lowering upon her from
the other end of the table and trying to scowl her into silence.

After that Rose talked no more. She sat wondering miserably what it was
that she had done. It did not occur to her that what had annoyed him was
her vivid revelation of his method. The dinner she was enjoying so much
had suddenly become dreadful to her.

Her wonder and her dread still weighed on her, long after it was over,
when she was showing Mrs. Brodrick the house. Her joy and her pride in
it were dashed. Over all the house there hung the shadow of George's
awful scowl. It seemed to her that George's scowl must have had
something to do with Mrs. Brodrick; that she must have shamed him in
some way before the lady he thought so much of, who thought so much of
him. A little too much, Rose said to herself, seeing that she was a
married woman.

And for the first time there crept into Rose's obscurely suffering soul,
a fear and a jealousy of Mrs. Brodrick.

Jane felt it, and divined beneath it the suffering that was its cause.
It was not as if she had not known how George could make a woman suffer.

Her acutest sense of it came to her as they stood together in the
bedroom that she had been called on to admire. Rose's bedroom was a
wonder of whiteness; so was the great smooth double bed; but the
smoothest and the whitest thing in it was Tanqueray's pillow where
Tanqueray's head had never lain. There was a tiny dressing-room beyond,
and through the open door Jane caught a sight of the low camp-bed where,
night after night, Tanqueray's genius flung its victim down to sleep off
the orgy of the day's work. The dressing-room was a place where he could
hide from Rose by night as he hid from her by day.

And Rose, when they took the house, had been so proud of the
dressing-room.

Jane, seeing these things, resolved to remove t