He blamed Prothero and Laura and Jane for that, as well as Susan. They were the first who had encouraged her to talk, and now she had got the habit.
And it was there again that the really fine and poignant irony came in. Through her intercourse with Jane and Laura, Rose offered herself for comparison, and showed flagrantly imperfect. But for that, owing to Tanqueray's superhuman powers of abstraction, she might almost have passed unnoticed. As it was, he owned that her incorruptible simplicity preserved her, even at her worst, from being really dreadful.
Once, after some speech of hers, there had followed an outburst of fury on Tanqueray's part and on Rose's a long period of dumbness.
He was, he always had been, most aware of her after seeing Jane Brodrick. From every meeting with Jane he came to her gloomy and depressed and irritable. And the meetings were growing more frequent. He saw Jane now at less and less intervals. He couldn't go on without seeing her. A fortnight was about as long as he could stand it. He had a sense of just struggling through, somehow, in the days that passed between the night (it was a Thursday) when he had dined at Putney and Monday afternoon when Jane had promised that she would come to Hampstead.
On Monday a telegram arrived for Tanqueray. The brisk director of a great publishing firm in New York desired (at the last moment before his departure) an appointment with the novelist for that afternoon. The affair was of extreme importance. The American meant business. It would be madness not to see him, even though he should miss Jinny.
All morning Tanqueray sulked because of that American.
Rose was cowed by his mood. At luncheon she prepared herself to sit dumb lest she should irritate him. She had soft movements that would have conciliated a worse ruffian than Tanqueray in his mood. She rebuked the importunities of Joey in asides so tender that they couldn't have irritated anybody. But Tanqueray remained irritated. He couldn't eat his luncheon, and said so.
And then Rose said something, out loud. That wasn't her fault, she said. And Tanqueray told her that he hadn't said it was. Then, maddened by her thought, she (as she put it to herself afterwards) fair burst with it.
"I wish I'd never set eyes on that Susan!" said she.
Tanqueray at the moment was trying to make notes in his memorandum-book. He might be able to cut short that interview if he started with all his points clear.