Laura was the poorest of them all, and she lived on a top-floor in Albert Street, Camden Town, under desperate restrictions of time and space. For she had a family, and the peculiarity and the awkwardness of Laura's family was that it was always there. She spoke of it briefly as Papa.
It was four years now since Mr. Gunning's sunstroke and his bankruptcy; for four years his mind had been giving way, very slowly and softly, and now he was living, without knowing it, on what Laura wrote. Nobody but Laura knew what heavy odds she fought against, struggling to bring her diminutive talent to perfection. Poverty was always putting temptation in her way. She knew that she had chosen the most expensive and the least remunerative form of her delightful art. She knew that there were things she could do, concessions she could make, sacrifices, a thousand facile extensions of the limit, a thousand imponderable infidelities to the perfection she adored. But they were sins, and though poverty pinched her for it, she had never committed one of them.
And yet Laura was cruel to her small genius. It was delicate, and she drove it with all the strength of her hard, indomitable will. She would turn it on to any rough journalistic work that came to her hand. It had not yet lost its beauty and its freshness. But it was threatened. They were beginning, Nina said, to wonder how long Laura would hold out.
It was not Poverty that had wrecked her. She could bear that. Poverty had been good to her; it had put her woman's talent to the test, justifying its existence, proving it a marketable thing. She rejoiced in her benign adversity, and woman-like, she hated herself for rejoicing. For there was always the thought that if she had not been cursed, as to her talent, with this perverse instinct for perfection, Papa would not have had to live, as he did live, miserably, on a top-floor in Camden Town.
It was May and the keen light raked her room, laying its bareness still more bare. It was furnished, Laura's room, with an extreme austerity. There was a little square of blue drugget under the deal table that stood against the wall, and one green serge curtain at each window. There was a cupboard and an easy-chair for Mr. Gunning on one side of the fireplace next the window. On the other, the dark side, was Laura's writing-table, with a book-shelf above it. Another book-shelf faced the fireplace. That was all.
Here, for three years, Laura had worked, hardly ever alone, and hardly ever in silence, except when the old man dozed in the easy-chair.
Some rooms, however disguised by their furniture, have a haunted air, an atmosphere of spiritual joy or tragedy, nobility or holiness, or spiritual squalor. Ghostly fragments, torn portions of the manifold self, are lodged there; they drift for ever and ever between the four walls of the room and penetrate and torment you with its secret. Prothero, coming into Laura's room, was smitten and pierced with a sense of mortal pathos, a small and lonely pathos, holding itself aloof, drifting about him, a poor broken ghost, too proud to approach him or to cling.
Laura was at home. She was writing, snatching at the few golden moments of her day, while apart from and unaware of her, sunken in his seat, the old man dozed by the fireside. From time to time she glanced at him, and then her face set under its tenderness, as if it fronted, unflinching, an immovable, perpetual fear.
Prothero, as he crossed her threshold, had taken in the unhappy, childlike figure, and that other figure, sunken in its seat, slumbering, inert, the image of decay. He stood still for a moment before Laura, as a man stands when he is struck with wonder.
He took without speaking the hand, the ridiculously small, thin hand she gave him, touching it as if he were afraid lest he might hurt the fragile thing.