o is impossible. _Im_--possible."

Jane left the room.

LV

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to be thrust forward this way in the full blaze, while Owen, withdrawn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 La