u're about at the end of your money);
and here you are, deliberately proposing to withdraw a thing that will
probably make your name, and to substitute for it something that ten to
one nobody on earth will ever want to read--and small blame to them!
Really, you try my patience!"

Oleron had shaken his head slowly as she had talked. It was an old story
between them. The noisy, able, practical journalist was an admirable
friend--up to a certain point; beyond that ... well, each of us knows
that point beyond which we stand alone. Elsie Bengough sometimes said
that had she had one-tenth part of Oleron's genius there were few things
she could not have done--thus making that genius a quantitatively
divisible thing, a sort of ingredient, to be added to or subtracted
from in the admixture of his work. That it was a qualitative thing,
essential, indivisible, informing, passed her comprehension. Their
spirits parted company at that point. Oleron knew it. She did not appear
to know it.

"Yes, yes, yes," he said a little wearily, by-and-by, "practically you're
quite right, entirely right, and I haven't a word to say. If I could only
turn _Romilly_ over to you you'd make an enormous success of her. But
that can't be, and I, for my part, am seriously doubting whether she's
worth my while. You know what that means."

"What does it mean?" she demanded bluntly.

"Well," he said, smiling wanly, "what _does_ it mean when you're
convinced a thing isn't worth doing? You simply don't do it."

Miss Bengough's eyes swept the ceiling for assistance against this
impossible man.

"What utter rubbish!" she broke out at last. "Why, when I saw you last
you were simply oozing _Romilly_; you were turning her off at the rate of
four chapters a week; if you hadn't moved you'd have had her three-parts
done by now. What on earth possessed you to move right in the middle of
your most important work?"

Oleron tried to put her off with a recital of inconveniences, but she
wouldn't have it. Perhaps in her heart she partly suspected the reason.
He was simply mortally weary of the narrow circumstances of his life. He
had had twenty years of it--twenty years of garrets and roof-chambers
and dingy flats and shabby lodgings, and he was tired of dinginess and
shabbiness. The reward was as far off as ever--or if it was not, he no
longer cared as once he would have cared to put out his hand and take it.
It is all very well to tell a man who is at the point of