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.