That reflection struck him a little, and presently he returned to it. Yes, the room had, quite accidentally, done Miss Bengough a disservice
that afternoon. It had, in some subtle but unmistakable way, placed her,
marked a contrast of qualities. Assuming for the sake of argument the
slightly ridiculous proposition that the room in which Oleron sat _was_
characterised by a certain sparsity and lack of vigour; so much the worse
for Miss Bengough; she certainly erred on the side of redundancy and
general muchness. And if one must contrast abstract qualities, Oleron
inclined to the austere in taste.... Yes, here Oleron had made a distinct discovery; he wondered he had not
made it before. He pictured Miss Bengough again as she had appeared
that afternoon--large, showy, moistly pink, with that quality of the
prize bloom exuding, as it were, from her; and instantly she suffered in
his thought. He even recognised now that he had noticed something odd at
the time, and that unconsciously his attitude, even while she had been
there, had been one of criticism. The mechanism of her was a little
obvious; her melting humidity was the result of analysable processes; and
behind her there had seemed to lurk some dim shape emblematic of
mortality. He had never, during the ten years of their intimacy, dreamed
for a moment of asking her to marry him; none the less, he now felt for
the first time a thankfulness that he had not done so....

Then, suddenly and swiftly, his face flamed that he should be thinking
thus of his friend. What! Elsie Bengough, with whom he had spent weeks
and weeks of afternoons--she, the good chum, on whose help he would have
counted had all the rest of the world failed him--she, whose loyalty to
him would not, he knew, swerve as long as there was breath in her--Elsie
to be even in thought dissected thus! He was an ingrate and a cad....

Had she been there in that moment he would have abased himself before
her. For ten minutes and more he sat, still gazing into the fire, with that
humiliating red fading slowly from his cheeks. All was still within and
without, save for a tiny musical tinkling that came from his kitchen--the
dripping of water from an imperfectly turned-off tap into the vessel
beneath it. Mechanically he began to beat with his finger to the faintly
heard falling of the drops; the tiny regular movement seemed to hasten
that shameful withdrawal from his face. He grew cool once more; and when
he resumed his meditation he was all unconscious that he took it up again
at the same point.... It was not only her florid superfluity of build that he had approached in
the attitude of criticism; he was conscious also of the wide differences
between her mind and his own. He felt no thankfulness that up to a
certain point their natures had ever run companionably side by side; he
was now full of questions beyond that point. Their intellects diverged;
there was no denying it; and, looking back, he was inclined to doubt
whether there had been any real coincidence. True, he had read his
writings to her and she had appeared to speak comprehendingly and to the
point; but what can a man do who, having assumed that another sees as he
does, is suddenly brought up sharp by something that falsifies and
discredits all that has gone before? He doubted all now.... It did for a
moment occur to him that the man who demands of a friend more than can be
given to him is in danger of losing that friend, but he put the thought
aside. Again he ceased to think, and again moved his finger to the distant
dripping of the tap....

And now (he resumed by-and-by), if these things were true of Elsie
Bengough, they were also true of the creation of which she was the
prototype--Romilly Bishop. And since he could say of Romilly what for
very shame he could not say of Elsie, he gave his thoughts rein. He did
so in that smiling, fire-lighted room, to the accompaniment of the
faintly heard tap. There was no longer any doubt about it; he hated the central character
of his novel. Even as he had described her physically she overpowered
the senses; she was coarse-fibred, over-coloured, rank. It became true
the moment he formulated his thought; Gulliver had described the
Brobdingnagian maids-of-honour thus: and mentally and spiritually she
corresponded--was unsensitive, limited, common. The model (he closed his
eyes for a moment)--the model stuck out through fifteen vulgar and
blatant chapters to such a pitch that, without seeing the reason, he had
been unable to begin the sixteenth. He marvelled that it had only just
dawned upon him. And _this_ was to have been his Beatrice, his vision! As Elsie she was to
have gone into the furnace of his art, and she was to have come out the
Woman all men desire! Her thoughts were to have been culled from his own
finest, her form from his dearest dreams, and her setting wherever he
could find one fit for her worth. He had brooded long before making the
attempt; then one day he had felt her stir within him as a mother feels
a quickening, and he had begun to write; and so he had added chapter to
chapter....

And those fifteen sodden chapters were what he had produced! Again he sat, softly moving his finger....

Then he bestirred himself. She must go, all fifteen chapters of her. That was settled. For what was
to take her place his mind was a blank; but one thing at a time; a man
is not excused from taking the wrong course because the right one is not
immediately revealed to him. Better would come if it was to come;
in the meantime--

He rose, fetched the fifteen chapters, and read them over before he
should drop them into the fire. But instead of putting them into the fire he let them fall from his hand. He became conscious of the dripping of the tap again. It had a tinkling
gamut of four or five notes, on which it rang irregular changes, and it
was foolishly sweet and dulcimer-like. In his mind Oleron could see the
gathering of each drop, its little tremble on the lip of the tap, and the
tiny percussion of its fall, "Plink--plunk," minimised almost to
inaudibility. Following the lowest note there seemed to be a brief
phrase, irregularly repeated; and presently Oleron found himself waiting
for the recurrence of this phrase. It was quite pretty.... But it did not conduce to wakefulness, and Oleron dozed over his fire. When he awoke again the fire had burned low and the flames of the candles
were licking the rims of the Sheffield sticks. Sluggishly he rose,
yawned, went his nightly round of door-locks and window-fastenings, and
passed into his bedroom. Soon he slept soundly. But a curious little sequel followed on the morrow. Mrs. Barrett usually
tapped, not at his door, but at the wooden wall beyond which lay Oleron's
bed; and then Oleron rose, put on his dressing-gown, and admitted her. He
was not conscious that as he did so that morning he hummed an air; but
Mrs. Barrett lingered with her hand on the door-knob and her face a
little averted and smiling. "De-ar me!"