ist.

"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