"It hasn't been brushed proper. You should brush a Pom's 'air backwards——"
"Of course, and it hasn't been brushed backwards. He can bark all right, anyhow. There's nothing wrong with his lungs."
"He won't bark at you no more, now he knows you."
She leaned her face to the furry head on her shoulder, and he recognized Minny by the strange pattern of his back and tail. Minny was not beautiful.
"It's Minny," she said. "You used to like Minny."
It struck him with something like a pang that she held him like a child at her breast. She saw his look and smiled up at him.
"I may keep him, too?"
At that he kissed her.
By the end of that evening Tanqueray had not written a word. He could only turn over the pages of his manuscript, in wonder at the mechanical industry that had covered so much paper with such awful quantities of ink. Here and there he recognized a phrase, and then he was aware, very miserably aware, that the thing was his masterpiece. He wondered, and with agony, how on earth he was going to finish it if they came about him like this and destroyed his peace.
It wasn't the idea of the house. The house was bad enough; the house indeed was abominable. It was Rose. It was more than Rose; it was everything; it was the touch, the intimate, unendurable strain and pressure of life.