child, the most beautiful sight
I've ever seen for many a long year."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"You may laugh at me," she said.

"'E isn't laughin' at you," Rose interjected. She was generally admitted
to Tanqueray's conferences with Laura. She sat by the fire with her
knees very wide apart, nursing Minny.

"He isn't, indeed," said Tanqueray. "He thinks you a marvellous Kiddy;
and he bows his knee before your popularity. How you contrive to turn
anything so horrible into anything so adorable he doesn't know and never
will know."

"Dear me. I'm only dumping down earth for Owen's roses."

"That's what I mean. That's the miracle. Every novel you write blossoms
into a splendid poem."

It was what she meant. She had never meant anything so much. It was the
miracle that her marriage perpetually renewed for her, this process of
divine transmutation, by which her work passed into Owen's and became
perfect. It passed, if you like, through a sordid medium, through pounds
and shillings and pence, but there again, the medium itself was
transmuted, sanctified by its use, by the thing accomplished. She
touched a consummation beyond consummation of their marriage.

"I'm glad you see it as I do," she said. She had not thought that he
would see.

"Of course I see it." He sat silent a moment regarding his vision;
smooth-browed, close-lipped, a purified and transmuted Tanqueray.

"What do you expect," he said presently, "to happen?"

"I expect what always has happened, and worse."

"So do I. I said in the beginning that he hadn't a chance. There isn't a
place for him anywhere in his own generation. He might just as well go
on the Stock Exchange and try to float a company by singing to the
brokers. It's a generation of brokers."

"Beasts!"

"Aunt's lodger is a broker," said Rose. "Old furniture--real--and
pictures is _'is_ line."

"Aunt's lodger, I assure you, will be thoroughly well damned if he takes
any stock in Owen."

"'E 'asn't seen Mr. Prothero," said Rose, "and you'll frighten Minny if
you use such language."

Tanqueray ignored the interruption. "Owen, you see, is dangerous. He
regards the entire Stock Exchange as a bankrupt concern. The Stock
Exchange resents the imputation and makes things dangerous for Owen. If
a man will insist on belonging to all the centuries that have been, and
all the centuries that will be, he's bound to have a bad time in his
own. You can't have it both ways."

"I know. He kn