anything so
absurd! "You'll never finish _Romilly_ here." ... Why not? Was this her
idea of the luxury that saps the springs of action and brings a man down
to indolence and dropping out of the race? The place was well enough--it
was entirely charming, for that matter--but it was not so demoralising as
all that! No; Elsie had missed the mark that time....

He moved his chair to look round the room that smiled, positively
smiled, in the firelight. He too smiled, as if pity was to be
entertained for a maligned apartment. Even that slight lack of robust
colour he had remarked was not noticeable in the soft glow. The drawn
chintz curtains--they had a flowered and trellised pattern, with baskets
and oaten pipes--fell in long quiet folds to the window-seats; the rows
of bindings in old bookcases took the light richly; the last trace of
sallowness had gone with the daylight; and, if the truth must be told,
it had been Elsie herself who had seemed a little out of the picture.

That reflection struck him a little, and presently he returned to it.
Yes, the room had, quite accidentally, done Miss Bengough a disservice
that afternoon. It had, in some subtle but unmistakable way, placed her,
marked a contrast of qualities. Assuming for the sake of argument the
slightly ridiculous proposition that the room in which Oleron sat _was_
characterised by a certain sparsity and lack of vigour; so much the worse
for Miss Bengough; she certainly erred on the side of redundancy and
general muchness. And if one must contrast abstract qualities, Oleron
inclined to the austere in taste....

Yes, here Oleron had made a distinct discovery; he wondered he had not
made it before. He pictured Miss Bengough again as she had appeared
that afternoon--large, showy, moistly pink, with that quality of the
prize bloom exuding, as it were, from her; and instantly she suffered in
his thought. He even recognised now that he had noticed something odd at
the time, and that unconsciously his attitude, even while she had been
there, had been one of criticism. The mechanism of her was a little
obvious; her melting humidity was the result of analysable processes; and
behind her there had seemed to lurk some dim shape emblematic of
mortality. He had never, during the ten years of their intimacy, dreamed
for a moment of asking her to marry him; none the less, he now felt for
the first time a thankfulness that he had not done so....

Then, suddenly and swiftly, his f