A little while before Oleron would have thought himself mad to have embraced such an opinion; now he accepted the dizzying hypothesis without a quiver.

He began to examine the first and second Romillys.

From the moment of his doing so the thing advanced by leaps and bounds.  Swiftly he reviewed the history of the Romilly of the fifteen chapters.  He remembered clearly now that he had found her insufficient on the very first morning on which he had sat down to work in his new place.  Other instances of his aversion leaped up to confirm his obscure investigation.  There had come the night when he had hardly forborne to throw the whole thing into the fire; and the next morning he had begun the planning of the new Romilly.  It had been on that morning that Mrs. Barrett, overhearing him humming a brief phrase that the dripping of a tap the night before had suggested, had informed him that he was singing some air he had never in his life heard before, called “The Beckoning Fair One."...

The Beckoning Fair One!...

With scarcely a pause in thought he continued: 

The first Romilly having been definitely thrown over, the second had instantly fastened herself upon him, clamouring for birth in his brain.  He even fancied now, looking back, that there had been something like passion, hate almost, in the supplanting, and that more than once a stray thought given to his discarded creation had—­(it was astonishing how credible Oleron found the almost unthinkable idea)—­had offended the supplanter.

Yet that a malignancy almost homicidal should be extended to his fiction’s poor mortal prototype....

In spite of his inuring to a scale in which the horrible was now a thing to be fingered and turned this way and that, a “Good God!” broke from Oleron.

This intrusion of the first Romilly’s prototype into his thought again was a factor that for the moment brought his inquiry into the nature of his problem to a termination; the mere thought of Elsie was fatal to anything abstract.  For another thing, he could not yet think of that letter of Barrett’s, nor of a little scene that had followed it, without a mounting of colour and a quick contraction of the brow.  For, wisely or not, he had had that argument out at once.  Striding across the square on the following morning, he had bearded Barrett on his own doorstep.  Coming back again a few minutes later, he had been strongly of opinion that he had only made matters worse.  The man had been vagueness itself.  He had not been to be either challenged or browbeaten into anything more definite than a muttered farrago in which the words “Certain things ...  Mrs. Barrett ... respectable house ... if the cap fits ... proceedings that shall be nameless,” had been constantly repeated.

“Not that I make any charge—­” he had concluded.

“Charge!” Oleron had cried.

“I ’ave my idears of things, as I don’t doubt you ’ave yours—­”