himself to my model,
was I, by painful degrees, exchanging brains with him? I laughed; but I
was unhinged. I had been smoking too many cigarettes during these three
weeks, and the vampire thought continued to flit obscenely between me and
the pure seascape. I saw myself the inheritor of Trewlove's cast-off
personality, his inelegancies of movement, his religious opinions, his
bagginess at the knees, his mournful, pensile whiskers--

This would never do! I must concentrate my mind on the play.
Let me see--The title can wait. Two married couples have just been
examined at Dunmow, and awarded the 'historic' flitch for conjugal
happiness. Call them A and Mrs. A, B and Mrs. B. On returning to the
hotel with their trophies, it is discovered that B and Mrs. A are old
flames, while each finds a mistaken reason to suspect that A and Mrs. B
have also met years before, and at least dallied with courtship. Thus
while their spouses alternately rage with suspicion and invent devices to
conceal their own defaults, A and Mrs. B sit innocently nursing their
illusions and their symbolical flitches. The situation holds plenty of
comedy, and the main motive begins to explain itself. Now then for
anagnorisis, comic peripeteia, division into acts, and the rest of the
wallet!

I smoked another two cigarettes and flung away a third in despair.
Useless! The plaguey thing refused to take shape. I sprang up and paced
the sands, dogged by an invisible Cozens piping thin reproaches above the
hum of the breakers.

Suddenly I came to a halt. Why _this_ play? Why expend vain efforts on
this particular complication when in a drawer at home lay two acts of a
comedy ready written, and the third and final act sketched out? The
burden of months broke its straps and fell from me as I pondered. _My
Tenant_ was the name of the thing, and I had thrust it aside only when the
idea of _Larks in Aspic_ occurred to me--not in any disgust. And really,
now, what I remembered of it seemed to me astonishingly good!

I pulled out my watch, and as I did so there flashed on me--in that sudden
freakish way which the best ideas affect--a new and brilliant idea for the
plot of _My Tenant_. The whole of the third and concluding act spread
itself instantaneously before me. I knew then and there why the play had
been laid aside. It had waited for this, and it wanted only this. I held
the thing now, compact and tight, within my five fingers: as tight and