had left his proofs untouched on the writing-table, and had
settled himself comfortably to his pipe, with the voluptuous
satisfaction of a man who has put off a disagreeable duty. He felt that
delicious turmoil of ideas which with him accompanied the building up of
a story round its central character. Not that he yet understood that
character. Wyndham had his intuitions, but he was not the man to trust
them as such; it was his habit to verify them by a subsequent logic. His
literary conscience allowed nothing to take the place of the
experimental method, the careful observation, and arranging of minute
facts, intimate analytical study from the life. No action was too small,
no emotion too insignificant, for his uncompromising realism. He had
applied the same method to his own experience. Whatever came in his way,
the tragedy or comedy of his daily life, his moods of passion and
apathy, the aspirations of his better moments, all underwent the same
disintegrating process. He had the power of standing aloof from himself,
of arresting the flight of his own sensations, and criticising his own
actions as a disinterested spectator. Thus he made no experiment on
others that he had not first tried on his own person. If any man ever
understood himself, that man was Langley Wyndham. He was by no means
vain of this distinction; on the contrary, he would have said that as a
man's inner consciousness is the only thing he has any direct knowledge
of, he must be a fool if he can live with himself--the closest of all
human relations--for thirty-five years without understanding his own
character.

What he really prided himself on was his knowledge of other people,
especially of women. Unfortunately, for the first few years of his
literary life he knew no women intimately: he had many acquaintances
among them, a few enemies, but no friends; and the little he knew of
individuals had not tended to raise his opinion of women in general.
Consequently he drew them all, as he saw them, from the outside; the
best sort with a certain delicacy and clearness of outline, the result
of unerring eyesight and the gift of style; the worst sort with an
incisive, almost brutal touch that suggested the black lines bitten out
by some powerful acid. His work "took" because of its coarser qualities,
the accentuated bitterness, the startling irony, the vigorous,
characteristic phrase. Those black strokes were not introduced to throw
up the grey wash or pencil