"So very small," he murmured, "and yet so fierce."
"Just think," she went on, "how I'm enjoying myself."
"Just think," said Prothero, "how I am not."
"Then" (she returned it triumphantly), "you're paying for my enjoyment, which is what you want."
The clock struck six. She went out of the room, and returned, bringing an overcoat which she said had grown miles too big for him. She warmed it at the fire and helped him on with it, and disappeared for a moment under its flapping wings, so large was that overcoat.
All the way to Fleet Street, Prothero, wrapped in his warm overcoat, meditated tenderly on his wife's humour.
LVI
Nothing, Tanqueray said, could be more pathetic than the Kiddy spreading her diminutive skirts before Prothero, to shelter that colossal figure.
But the Kiddy, ever since Tanqueray had known her, had refused to be pathetic; she had clenched her small fists to repel the debilitating touch of sympathy. She was always breaking loose from the hands that tried to restrain her, always facing things in spite of her terror, always plunging, armoured, indomitable, into the thick of the fight. And she had always come through somehow, unconquered, with her wounds in front. The wounds he had divined rather than seen, ever since he, in their first deplorable encounter, had stuck a knife into her. She had turned that defeat, he remembered, into a brilliant personal triumph; she had forced him to admire her; she had worn over that mark, as it were, a gay and pretty gown.