f a theatre: then she would
flit away, leaving the poor, empty carcase that had lodged her to mumm
on as best it could without her--a sorry lay figure to his eyes, heaped
with imperfections and sullied with commonplace. She would reappear, it
might be, in an at first unnoticed lady, met at some fashionable evening
party, exhibition, bazaar, or dinner; to flit from her, in turn, after
a few months, and stand as a graceful shop-girl at some large drapery
warehouse into which he had strayed on an unaccustomed errand. Then she
would forsake this figure and redisclose herself in the guise of some
popular authoress, piano-player, or fiddleress, at whose shrine he would
worship for perhaps a twelvemonth. Once she was a dancing-girl at the
Royal Moorish Palace of Varieties, though during her whole continuance
at that establishment he never once exchanged a word with her, nor
did she first or last ever dream of his existence. He knew that a
ten-minutes' conversation in the wings with the substance would send
the elusive haunter scurrying fearfully away into some other even less
accessible mask-figure.

She was a blonde, a brunette, tall, petite, svelte, straight-featured,
full, curvilinear. Only one quality remained unalterable: her
instability of tenure. In Borne's phrase, nothing was permanent in her
but change.

'It is odd,' he said to himself, 'that this experience of mine, or
idiosyncrasy, or whatever it is, which would be sheer waste of time
for other men, creates sober business for me.' For all these dreams he
translated into plaster, and found that by them he was hitting a public
taste he had never deliberately aimed at, and mostly despised. He was,
in short, in danger of drifting away from a solid artistic reputation to
a popularity which might possibly be as brief as it would be brilliant
and exciting.

'You will be caught some day, my friend,' Somers would occasionally
observe to him. 'I don't mean to say entangled in anything
discreditable, for I admit that you are in practice as ideal as
in theory. I mean the process will be reversed. Some woman, whose
Well-Beloved flits about as yours does now, will catch your eye, and
you'll stick to her like a limpet, while she follows her Phantom and
leaves you to ache as you will.'

'You may be right; but I think you are wrong,' said Pierston. 'As
flesh she dies daily, like the Apostle's corporeal self; because when I
grapple with the reality she's no longer in it, so that