Laura said that she would have enough to do, editing his poems and his memoirs. Jane had not realized the memoirs. They were, Laura told her, mainly a record of his life as a physician and a surgeon, a record so simple that it only unconsciously revealed the man he was. George Tanqueray had insisted on her publishing this first.
"I hated doing it for some things," she said. "It looks too like a concession to this detestable British public. But I can't rest, Jinny, till we've made him known. They'll see that he didn't shirk, that he could beat the practical men—the men they worship—at their own game, that he did something for the Empire. Then they'll accept the rest. There's an awful irony in it, but I'm convinced that's the way his immortality will come."
"It'll come anyway," said Jane.
"It'll come soonest this way. They'll believe in him to-morrow, because of the things he did with his hands. His hands were wonderful. Ah, Jinny, how could I ever want to write again?"
"What will you do, dear child? How will you live?"
"I'll live as he did." She said it fiercely. "I'll live by journalism. It doesn't matter how I live."
"There are so many things," she said, "that don't matter, after all."
Nicky and Nina passed.
"Do you think," said he, "she's happy?"
"Who? Jane? Or Laura?"