impossible man.

"What utter rubbish!" she broke out at last. "Why, when I saw you last
you were simply oozing _Romilly_; you were turning her off at the rate of
four chapters a week; if you hadn't moved you'd have had her three-parts
done by now. What on earth possessed you to move right in the middle of
your most important work?"

Oleron tried to put her off with a recital of inconveniences, but she
wouldn't have it. Perhaps in her heart she partly suspected the reason.
He was simply mortally weary of the narrow circumstances of his life. He
had had twenty years of it--twenty years of garrets and roof-chambers
and dingy flats and shabby lodgings, and he was tired of dinginess and
shabbiness. The reward was as far off as ever--or if it was not, he no
longer cared as once he would have cared to put out his hand and take it.
It is all very well to tell a man who is at the point of exhaustion that
only another effort is required of him; if he cannot make it he is as far
off as ever....

"Anyway," Oleron summed up, "I'm happier here than I've been for a long
time. That's some sort of a justification."

"And doing no work," said Miss Bengough pointedly.

At that a trifling petulance that had been gathering in Oleron came to a
head.

"And why should I do nothing but work?" he demanded. "How much happier am
I for it? I don't say I don't love my work--when it's done; but I hate
doing it. Sometimes it's an intolerable burden that I simply long to be