"It hurts me, too, Kiddy. I can't stand it when I see the filthy curs rushing at him. They've got to be kicked into a corner. I'm prepared for them, this time."
He rose and went to his desk and returned with an article in proof which he gave to her.
"Just look through that and see if it's any good."
It was his vindication of Owen Prothero.
"Oh——"
She drew in her breath. "How you have fought for him."
"I'm fighting for my own honour and glory, too."
He drew her attention to a passage where he called upon Heaven to forbid that he should appear to apologize for so great a man. He was only concerned with explaining why Prothero was and would remain unacceptable to a generation of brokers; which was not so much a defence of Prothero as an indictment of his generation. She would see how he had rubbed it in.
She followed, panting a little in her excitement, the admirable points he made. There, where he showed that there was no reason why this Celt should be an alien to the Saxon race. Because (her heart leaped as she followed) his genius had all the robust and virile qualities. He was not the creature of a creed, or a conviction, or a theory; neither was he a fantastic dreamer. He was a man of realities, the very type (Tanqueray had rubbed that well in) that hard-headed Englishmen adore, a surgeon, a physician, a traveller, a fighter among fighting men. He had never blinked a fact (Laura smiled as she remembered how Owen had said that that was what a Brodrick never did); he had never shirked a danger. But (Tanqueray, in a new paragraph, had plunged into the heart of his subject) on the top of it all he was a seer; a man who saw through the things that other men see. And to say that he saw, that he saw through things, was the humblest and simplest statement of his case. To him the visible world was a veil worn thin by the pressure of the reality behind it; it had the translucence that belongs to it in the form of its eternity. He was in a position to judge. He had lived face to face and hand to hand with all forms of corporeal horror, and there was no mass of disease or of corruption that he did not see in its resplendent and divine transparency. It was simple and self-evident to him that the world of bodies was made so and not otherwise. It was also clear as daylight that the entire scheme of things existed solely to unfold and multiply and vary the everlasting-to-everlasting-world-without-end communion between God and the soul. To him this communion was a fact, a fact above all facts, the supremely and only interesting fact. It was so natural a thing that he sang about it as spontaneously as other poets sing about their love and their mistresses. So simple and so self-evident was it that he had called his latest and greatest poems "Transparences."
"It sounds," she said, "as if you saw what he sees."