ook here. It would kill that book. I must have peace. This
is a beastly hole, I know, but there's peace in it. You don't know what
that damned book _is_."

She gave up the idea of a house; and seven months after her marriage,
she fell into a melancholy.

Sometimes, now, on a fine afternoon, she would go out into the streets
and look listlessly through shop-windows at hats and gowns and all the
pretty things she would have thought it sin so much as to desire to
wear. Where Rose lingered longest was outside those heavenly places
where you saw far off a flutter of white in the windows, which turned
out to be absurd, tiny, short-waisted frocks and diminutive
under-garments, and little heartrending shoes; things of desire, things
of impossible dream, to be approached with a sacred dumbness of the
heart.

The toy-shops, too, they carried her away in a flight; so that Rose
caught herself saying to herself, "Some day, perhaps, I shall be here
buying one of them fur animals, or that there Noah's ark."

Then, p'raps, she said to her very inmost self, things might be
different.

Sometimes she would go up to Hampstead, ridin', as she phrased it, in a
bus, to see her Aunt and Uncle and a friend she had, Polly White. Not
often; for Rose did not hold with gadding about when you had a husband;
besides, she was afraid of Aunt asking her, "Wot's _'E_ doin'?" (By
always referring to Tanqueray as "'E," Mrs. Eldred evaded the problem of
what she was expected to call the gentleman who had so singularly
married her husband's niece.) Most of all Rose dreaded the question,
"Wen is 'E goin' to take a little 'ouse?" For in Rose's world it is
somewhat of a reflection on a married man if he is not a householder.

And last time Mrs. Eldred's inquiries had taken a more terrible and
searching form. "Is 'E lookin' for anything to do besides 'Is writin'?"
Rose had said then that no, he needn't, they'd got enough; an answer
that brought Mrs. Eldred round to her point again. "Then why doesn't 'E
take a little 'ouse?"

Sometimes Polly White came to tea in Bloomsbury. Very seldom, though,
and only when Tanqueray was not there. Rose knew and Polly knew that her
friends had to keep away when her husband was about. As for _his_
friends, she had never caught a sight of them.

Then, all of a sudden, when Rose had given up wondering whether things
would ever be different, Tanqueray, instead of going up-stairs as usual,
sat down and lit a pipe as if he w