into the cool
luminosity of my own inaccessible parlour; and there always, reclining at
her ease upon my sofa, was the ineradicable presentment of Miss Whiffle.

At one o'clock I ventured to reclaim my own, and sat me down at table, a
scorched and glutinous wreck, too overcome with lassitude to tackle the
obnoxious meal of my own providing. And to the sofa, already made
familiar of that dishonoured towel, I was fain presently to confide the
empty problem of my own aching head.

All this was but the forerunner and earnest of a month's long martyrdom.
That night the sea had me by the nerves again, and for many nights
after; and, although I grew in time to a certain tolerance of the booming
monotony, it was the tolerance of a dully resigned, not an indifferent,
brain.

When it came to the second morning, not only the novel, but the mere idea
of my ever having contemplated writing one, was a thing with me to feebly
marvel over. And from that time I set myself down to exist and broil
only, doling out a languid interest to the locality, the shimmer of whose
baking hill-sides made all life a quivering, glaring phantom of itself.

Miss Whiffle tyrannized over me more or less according to her mood; but
she did not usurp my sitting-room again. I used to sit by the hour at
the lantern window, in a sort of greasy blankness, like a meat pudding,
and vacantly scrutinize the loiterers who passed by on the hot asphalt of
the Parade. Screened by the window curtains, I could see and hear without
endangering my own privacy; and many were the odd interchanges of speech
that fell from strangers unconscious of a listener.

One particularly festering day after dinner I had the excitement of quite
a pretty little quarrel for dessert. Miss Whiffle had stuffed me with
suet, in meat and pudding, to a point of stupefaction that stopped short
only of absolute insensibility; and in this state I took up my usual post
at the window, awaiting in swollen vacuity the possibilities of the
afternoon.

On the horizon violet-hot sea and sky showed scarce a line of demarcation
between them. Nearer in the waves snored stertorously from exhausted
lungs, as if the very tide were in extremis. Not a breath of air fanned
the pitiless Parade, and the sole accent on life came from a droning,
monotonous voice pitched from somewhere in querulous complaint.

"Frarsty!" it wailed, "Frarsty! I warnt thee!" and again, "I warnt thee,
Frarsty! Frarsty! Frar--r--r--rst