She lifted her face, a face tender and a little tremulous, that yet held itself bravely to be smitten as it told him that indeed she did not care.
"I think your popularity, and you, my child, the most beautiful sight I've ever seen for many a long year."
She shrugged her shoulders.
"You may laugh at me," she said.
"'E isn't laughin' at you," Rose interjected. She was generally admitted to Tanqueray's conferences with Laura. She sat by the fire with her knees very wide apart, nursing Minny.
"He isn't, indeed," said Tanqueray. "He thinks you a marvellous Kiddy; and he bows his knee before your popularity. How you contrive to turn anything so horrible into anything so adorable he doesn't know and never will know."
"Dear me. I'm only dumping down earth for Owen's roses."
"That's what I mean. That's the miracle. Every novel you write blossoms into a splendid poem."
It was what she meant. She had never meant anything so much. It was the miracle that her marriage perpetually renewed for her, this process of divine transmutation, by which her work passed into Owen's and became perfect. It passed, if you like, through a sordid medium, through pounds and shillings and pence, but there again, the medium itself was transmuted, sanctified by its use, by the thing accomplished. She touched a consummation beyond consummation of their marriage.
"I'm glad you see it as I do," she said. She had not thought that he would see.