"I was mendin' them," said she.
Half-an-hour later Rose and Tanqueray were walking up the East Heath Road towards their little house. Rose carried Tanqueray's gloves, and Tanqueray carried Minny, the cat, in a basket.
As they went they talked about Owen Prothero. And Tanqueray thanked God that, after all, there was something they could talk about.
LXVII
Dr. Brodrick had declared for the seventh time that Prothero was impossible.
His disease was advancing. Both lungs were attacked now. There was, as he perfectly well knew, consolidation at the apex of the left lung; the upper lobe had retracted, leaving his heart partially uncovered, and he knew it; you could detect also a distinct systolic murmur; and nobody could be more aware than Prothero of the gravity of these signs. Up till now, he, Brodrick, had been making a record case of him. The man had a fine constitution (he gave him credit for that); he had pluck; there was resistance, pugnacity in every nerve. He had one chance, a fighting chance. His life might be prolonged for years, if he would only rest.
And there he was, with all that terrible knowledge in him, sitting up in bed, driving that infernal pen of his as if his life depended on that. Scribbling verses, he was, working himself into such a state of excitement that his temperature had risen. He displayed, Brodrick said, an increasing nervous instability. When Brodrick told him that (if he wanted to know) his inspiration was hollow, had been hollow for months, and that he would recognize that as one of the worst symptoms in his case, Prothero said that his critics had always told him that. The worst symptom in his case, he declared, was that he couldn't laugh without coughing. When Brodrick said that it wasn't a laughing matter, he laughed till he spat blood and frightened himself. For he had (Brodrick had noticed it) a morbid horror of the sight of blood. You had to inject morphia after every hæmorrhage, to subdue that awful agitation.
All this the Doctor recounted to Laura, alone with her in her forlorn little drawing-room down-stairs. He unveiled for her intelligence the whole pathology of the case. It brought him back to what he had started with, Prothero's impossibility.
"What does he do for it?" he repeated. "He knows the consequences as well as I do."