d battered by travel, sallow
now, where it had once been bronze. She saw that his soul had passed
through strange climates.

It was borne in on her, as they continued in their silence, that she
knew something about him, something certain and terrible, something that
must, ultimately and inevitably, happen to him. She caught herself
secretly defining it. Tuberculosis--that was it; that was the certain
and inevitable thing. Of course; anybody would have seen it. That she
had not seen it at the first glance she attributed to the enchantment of
his personality that held her from any immediate consideration of his
singular physique. If it were not, indeed, his own magnificent oblivion.
When she looked, she could see how lean he was, how insufficiently
nourished. His clothes hung on him in folds; they were worn to an
incredible shabbiness. Yet he carried them with an indomitable
distinction. He had the grace, in flank and limb, of the wild thing made
swift by hunger.

Her seeing all this now made their silence unendurable. It also
suggested the thing she at last said.

"I'm distressed about Mrs. Tanqueray. I hope it's nothing serious."

Prothero's face was serious; more serious by far than Tanqueray's had
been.

"Too much contemplation," he said, "is bad for her. She isn't cut out
for a contemplative, though she's in a fair way of becoming a saint
and----"

She filled his blank, "And a martyr?"

"What can you expect when a man mates like that?"

"It's natural," she pleaded.

"Natural? It's one of the most unnatural marriages I've ever come
across. It's a crime against nature for a man like Tanqueray to have
taken that poor little woman--who is nature pure and simple--and condemn
her to----"

She drew back visibly. "I know. He doesn't see it," she said.

"He doesn't see anything. He doesn't even know she's there. How can he?
His genius runs to flesh and blood, and he hasn't room for any more of
it outside his own imagination. That's where you are with your great
realists."

She gazed at him, astonished, admiring. This visionary, this poet so
estranged from flesh and blood, had put his finger on the fact.

"You mean," she said, "a visionary would see more?"

He shrugged his shoulders at her reference.

"He would have more room," he said, "that would be all. He could at any
rate afford to take more risks."

They were silent again.

"I believe," he said presently, "somebody's coming. I shall have to go."