"You darling," said Jane, and kissed her, and at that Rose burst into tears.
"I oughtn't to be keeping you here," she said. And they left the bedroom.
"Aren't you coming in?" said Jane.
Rose had turned away from her at Tanqueray's door.
"I can't," she whispered. "Not with me eyes all swelled up like this."
She went down-stairs to her little kitchen, where in the half-darkness she crouched down beside Minny who, with humped shoulders and head that nodded to the fender, dozed before the fire.
XXXVII
Laura Gunning was writing a letter to Tanqueray to congratulate him on his book and to explain why she had not come to his birthday party. It was simply impossible to get off now. Papa, she said, couldn't be left for five minutes, not even with the morning paper.
It was frightfully hard work getting all this into any intelligible form of words; getting it down at all was difficult. For the last hour she had been sitting there, starting and trembling at each rustle of the paper. Mr. Gunning could not settle down to reading now. He turned his paper over and over again in the vain search for distraction; he divided it into parts and became entangled in them; now he would cast them from him and trample them under his feet; and now they would be flapping about his head; he would be covered and utterly concealed in newspaper.