still more downtrodden brother he represented selfish success. He
would have liked to linger in the conception that he had been
"approached" by the Promiscuous; but whatever might be thought in the
office of that periodical of some of his flights of fancy, there was
no want of vividness in his occasional suspicion that he passed there
for a familiar bore. The only thing that was clearly flattering was
the fact that the Promiscuous rarely published fiction. He should
therefore be associated with a deviation from a solemn habit, and
that would more than make up to him for a phrase in one of Mr.
Locket's inexorable earlier notes, a phrase which still rankled,
about his showing no symptom of the faculty really creative. "You
don't seem able to keep a character together," this pitiless monitor
had somewhere else remarked. Peter Baron, as he sat in his corner
while the train stopped, considered, in the befogged gaslight, the
bookstall standard of literature and asked himself whose character
had fallen to pieces now. Tormenting indeed had always seemed to him
such a fate as to have the creative head without the creative hand.

It should be mentioned, however, that before he started on his
mission to Mr. Locket his attention had been briefly engaged by an
incident occurring at Jersey Villas. On leaving the house (he lived
at No. 3, the door of which stood open to a small front garden), he
encountered the lady who, a week before, had taken possession of the
rooms on the ground floor, the "parlours" of Mrs. Bundy's
terminology. He had heard her, and from his window, two or three
times, had even seen her pass in and out, and this observation had
created in his mind a vague prejudice in her favour. Such a
prejudice, it was true, had been subjected to a violent test; it had
been fairly apparent that she had a light step, but it was still less
to be overlooked that she had a cottage piano. She had furthermore a