And now, again, Tanqueray was obliged to abandon his vision of her pathos. The spectacle she presented inspired awe rather and amazement; though all that she called on you to observe, at the moment, was merely an insolent exhibition of a clever imp. The Kiddy was minute, but her achievements were enormous; she was ridiculous, but she was sublime.
She sat tight, tighter than ever, and went on. She wrote one charming book after another, at astonishingly short intervals, with every appearance of immemorial ease. She flung them to her scrambling public with a side wink at her friends. "They don't know how I'm fooling them," was her reiterated comment on her own performances.
Tanqueray exulted over them. They all went to Prothero's profit and his peace. It was not in him to make light of her popularity, or cast it in her hilarious face. Nor could he hope to equal her own incomparable levity. She would come to him, laughing, with the tale of her absurdly soaring royalties, and he would shout with her when she cried, "The irony of it, Tanks, the delicious irony! It all goes down to his account."
"He's got another ready for them," she announced one day.
She always spoke of her husband's poems as if they were so many bombs, hurled in the face of the enemy, her public. There was nothing like the pugnacity of the Kiddy in these years of Prothero's disaster.
She came to Tanqueray one evening, the evening before publication; she came secretly, while Owen was in Fleet Street. Her eyes blazed in a premature commencement of hostilities. She had come forth, Tanqueray knew, to brave it out, to show her serenity, and the coolness of her courage on the dreadful eve.
It was impossible to blink the danger. Prothero could not possibly escape this time. He had gone, as Tanqueray said, one better than his recent best. And Laura had got a book out, too, an enchanting book. It looked as if they were doomed, in sheer perversity, to appear together. Financial necessity, of course, might have compelled them to this indiscretion. Laura was bound eventually to have a book, to pay for Prothero's; there wasn't a publisher in London now who would take the risk of him. But as likely as not these wedded ones flung themselves thus on the public in a superb disdain, just to prove how little they cared what was said about them.
Laura was inclined to be reticent, but Tanqueray drew her out by congratulating her on her popularity, on the way she kept it up.
"Oh," she cried, "as if I didn't know what you think of it. Me and my popularity!"
"You don't know, and you don't care, you disgraceful Kiddy."