Gradually his power was draining away.  The Abomination fastened on Oleron’s power.  The steady sapping sometimes left him for many hours of prostration gazing vacantly up at his red-tinged ceiling, idly suffering such fancies as came of themselves to have their way with him.  Even the strongest of his memories had no more than a precarious hold upon his attention.  Sometimes a flitting half-memory, of a novel to be written, a novel it was important that he should write, tantalised him for a space before vanishing again; and sometimes whole novels, perfect, splendid, established to endure, rose magically before him.  And sometimes the memories were absurdly remote and trivial, of garrets he had inhabited and lodgings that had sheltered him, and so forth.  Oleron had known a good deal about such things in his time, but all that was now past.  He had at last found a place which he did not intend to leave until they fetched him out—­a place that some might have thought a little on the green-sick side, that others might have considered to be a little too redolent of long-dead and morbid things for a living man to be mewed up in, but ah, so irresistible, with such an authority of its own, with such an associate of its own, and a place of such delights when once a man had ceased to struggle against its inexorable will!  A novel?  Somebody ought to write a novel about a place like that!  There must be lots to write about in a place like that if one could but get to the bottom of it!  It had probably already been painted, by a man called Madley who had lived there ... but Oleron had not known this Madley—­had a strong feeling that he wouldn’t have liked him—­would rather he had lived somewhere else—­really couldn’t stand the fellow—­hated him, Madley, in fact. (Aha!  That was a joke!).  He seriously doubted whether the man had led the life he ought; Oleron was in two minds sometimes whether he wouldn’t tell that long-nosed guardian of the public morals across the way about him; but probably he knew, and had made his praying hullabaloos for him also.  That was his line.  Why, Oleron himself had had a dust-up with him about something or other ... some girl or other ...  Elsie Bengough her name was, he remembered....

Oleron had moments of deep uneasiness about this Elsie Bengough.  Or rather, he was not so much uneasy about her as restless about the things she did.  Chief of these was the way in which she persisted in thrusting herself into his thoughts; and, whenever he was quick enough, he sent her packing the moment she made her appearance there.  The truth was that she was not merely a bore; she had always been that; it had now come to the pitch when her very presence in his fancy was inimical to the full enjoyment of certain experiences....  She had no tact; really ought to have known that people are not at home to the thoughts of everybody all the time; ought in mere politeness to have allowed him certain seasons quite to himself; and was monstrously ignorant of things