he sat tight, tighter than ever, and went on. She wrote one charming
book after another, at astonishingly short intervals, with every
appearance of immemorial ease. She flung them to her scrambling public
with a side wink at her friends. "They don't know how I'm fooling them,"
was her reiterated comment on her own performances.

Tanqueray exulted over them. They all went to Prothero's profit and his
peace. It was not in him to make light of her popularity, or cast it in
her hilarious face. Nor could he hope to equal her own incomparable
levity. She would come to him, laughing, with the tale of her absurdly
soaring royalties, and he would shout with her when she cried, "The
irony of it, Tanks, the delicious irony! It all goes down to his
account."

"He's got another ready for them," she announced one day.

She always spoke of her husband's poems as if they were so many bombs,
hurled in the face of the enemy, her public. There was nothing like the
pugnacity of the Kiddy in these years of Prothero's disaster.

She came to Tanqueray one evening, the evening before publication; she
came secretly, while Owen was in Fleet Street. Her eyes blazed in a
premature commencement of hostilities. She had come forth, Tanqueray
knew, to brave it out, to show her serenity, and the coolness of her
courage on the dreadful eve.

It was impossible to blink the danger. Prothero could not possibly
escape this time. He had gone, as Tanqueray said, one better than his
recent best. And Laura had got a book out, too, an enchanting book. It
looked as if they were doomed, in sheer perversity, to appear together.
Financial necessity, of course, might have compelled them to this
indiscretion. Laura was bound eventually to have a book, to pay for
Prothero's; there wasn't a publisher in London now who would take the
risk of him. But as likely as not these wedded ones flung themselves
thus on the public in a superb disdain, just to prove how little they
cared what was said about them.

Laura was inclined to be reticent, but Tanqueray drew her out by
congratulating her on her popularity, on the way she kept it up.

"Oh," she cried, "as if I didn't know what you think of it. Me and my
popularity!"

"You don't know, and you don't care, you disgraceful Kiddy."

She lifted her face, a face tender and a little tremulous, that yet held
itself bravely to be smitten as it told him that indeed she did not
care.

"I think your popularity, _and_ you, my