ay had his faults, but it was not in him to bring
the creature he loved to suffering and dishonour. And the alternative,
in Rose's case, was not dishonour, but frustration, which meant
suffering for them both. He would have to give Rose up unless he married
her.

At the moment, and the moment's vision was enough for him, he saw no
reason why he should not marry her. He wanted to obtain her at once and
to keep her for ever. She was not a lady and she knew it; but she had a
gentleness, a fineness of the heart which was the secret of her
unpremeditated charm. Without it Rose might have been as pretty as she
pleased, she would not have pleased Tanqueray. He could withstand any
manifestly unspiritual appeal, restrained by his own fineness and an
invincible disdain. Therefore, when the divine folly fell upon him, he
was like a thing fresh from the last touch of the creator, every sense
in him unworn and delicate and alert.

And Rose had come to him when the madness of the quest was on him, a
madness so strong that it overcame his perception of her social lapses.
It was impossible to be unaware of some of them, of certain phrases, of
the sudden wild flight of her aspirates. But these things were entangled
with her adorable gestures, with the soft ways of her mouth, with her
look when she hung about him, nursing him; so that a sane judgment was
impossible.

It was palpable, too, that Rose was not intellectual, that she was not
even half-educated. But Tanqueray positively disliked the society of
intellectual, cultivated women; they were all insipid after Jane. After
Jane, he did not need intellectual companionship in his wife. He would
still have Jane. And when he was tired of Jane there would, no doubt, be
others; and when he was tired of all of them, there was himself.

What he did need in his wife was the obstinate, dumb devotion of a
creature that had no life apart from him; a creature so small that in
clinging it would hang no weight on his heart. And he had found it in
Rose.

Why should he not marry her?

She was now, he had learned, staying with her former mistress at Fleet,
in Hampshire.

The next morning he took a suitable train down to Fleet, and arrived,
carrying the band-box, at the door of the house where Rose was. He sat a
long time in the hall of the house with the band-box on his knees. He
did not mind waiting. People went in and out of the hall and looked at
him; and he did not care. He gloried in the s