ys appealing to Tanqueray.
When George wanted to know what, after all, was wrong with Susan, and
declared that Susan seemed to him a most superior young woman, Rose said
that was the worst of it. Susan was much too superior for her. She could
see well enough, she said, that Susan knew that she was not a lady, and
she could see that George knew that she knew. Else why did he say that
Susan was superior? And sometimes George would be beside himself with
fury and would roar, "Damn Susan!" And sometimes, but not often, he
would be a torment and a tease. He would tell Rose that he loved Susan,
that he adored Susan, that he couldn't live without her. He might part
with Rose, but he couldn't possibly part with Susan. Susan was the
symbol of his prosperity. Without Susan he would not feel celebrated any
more.

And sometimes Rose would laugh; and sometimes, in moments of extreme
depression, she would deplore the irony of the success that had saddled
her with Susan. And Tanqueray cursed Susan in his heart, as the cause of
Rose's increasing tendency to conversation.

It was there that she encroached. She invaded more and more the guarded
territory of silence. She annexed outlying pieces of Tanqueray's sacred
time, pursuing him with talk that it was intolerable to listen to.

He blamed Prothero and Laura and Jane for that, as well as Susan. They
were the first who had encouraged her to talk, and now she had got the
habit.

And it was there again that the really fine and poignant irony came in.
Through her intercourse with Jane and Laura, Rose offered herself for
comparison, and showed flagrantly imperfect. But for that, owing to
Tanqueray's superhuman powers of abstraction, she might almost have
passed unnoticed. As it was, he owned that her incorruptible simplicity
preserved her, even at her worst, from being really dreadful.

Once, after some speech of hers, there had followed an outburst of fury
on Tanqueray's part and on Rose's a long period of dumbness.

He was, he always had been, most aware of her after seeing Jane
Brodrick. From every meeting with Jane he came to her gloomy and
depressed and irritable. And the meetings were growing more frequent. He
saw Jane now at less and less intervals. He couldn't go on without
seeing her. A fortnight was about as long as he could stand it. He had a
sense of just struggling through, somehow, in the days that passed
between the night (it was a Thursday) when he had dined at Putney