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