himself off for ever from his vision.

Looking back, he saw that his fear of the world had been nothing to his
fear of women, of the half-spiritual, half-sensual snare. He had put
away this fear, and stood the ultimate test. He had tied himself to a
woman and bowed his neck for her to cling to. He would have judged this
attitude perilous in the extreme, incompatible with vision, with seeing
anything but two diminutive feet and the inches of earth they stood in.
And it was only since he had done this dangerous thing and done it
thoroughly, only since he had staked his soul to redeem his body, that
his vision had become secure. It really stayed. He could turn from it,
but it was always with him; he could hold and command it at his will.

She was right. If he could take that from her, if he was in for it to
that extent, why _did_ he bother about the other stupid things?

And yet he bothered. All that autumn he worked harder than ever at his
journalism. He seemed to gather to himself all the jobs that were going
on the "Morning Telegraph." He went the round of the theatres on first
nights, reporting for the "Morning Telegraph" on plays that were beneath
the notice of its official dramatic critic. He reviewed poetry and
_belles lettres_ for the "Morning Telegraph;" and he did a great deal of
work for it down in Fleet Street with a paste-pot and a pair of
scissors.

Prothero's genius had liberated itself for the time being in his last
poem; it was detached from him; it wandered free, like a blessed spirit
invisible, while Prothero's brain agonized and journalized as Laura
said. There was no compromise this time, no propitiation, no playing
with the beautiful prose of his occasional essays. He plunged from his
heavenly height sheer into the worst blackness of the pit; he contorted
himself there in his obscure creation of paragraphs and columns. His
spirit writhed like a fine flame, trammelled and tortured by the
grossness of the stuff it kindled, and the more it writhed the more he
piled on the paragraphs and columns. He seemed, Laura said, to take a
pleasure in seeing how much he could pile on without extinguishing it.

In December he caught cold coming out of a theatre on a night of north
wind and sleet, and he was laid up for three weeks with bronchitis.

And at night, that winter, when sounds of coughing came from the
Consumption Hospital, they were answered through the open windows of the
house with the iron gate. A