an George
Tanqueray. He repudiated with furious contempt any charge of
inspiration. There was no such thing as inspiration. There was instinct,
and there was eyesight. The rest was all infernal torment and labour in
the sweat of your brow. All this Tanqueray believed sincerely.

It would have been hard to find a creature so subtle and at the same
time so unsophisticated as he.

For five years his genius, his temperament and his poverty had combined
to keep him in a half-savage virgin solitude. Men had penetrated it,
among them one or two distinguished in his own profession. But as for
their women, the wives and daughters of the distinguished, he had shrunk
perceptibly from their advances. He condemned their manner as a shade
too patronizing to his proud obscurity. And now, at two-and-thirty, of
three women whom he really knew, he only really cared for one, Jane
Holland.

He had further escaped the social round by shifting his abode
incessantly, flying from the town to the country, and from the country
back to the town, driven from each haunt, he declared, by people,
persistent, insufferable people.

For the last week he had been what he called settled at Hampstead. The
charm of Hampstead was that nobody whom he knew lived there.

He had chosen the house because it stood at a corner, in a road too
steep for traffic. He had chosen his rooms because they looked on to a
green slope with a row of willows at the bottom and a row of willows at
the top, and because, beyond the willows, he could see the line of a low
hill, pure and sharp against the sky. At sunset the grass of his slope
turned to a more piercing green and its patches of brown earth to
purple. He looked at the sublime procession of his willows and reminded
himself with ecstasy that there was not a soul in Hampstead whom he
knew. And that suburb appeared to him an enchanted place where at last
he had found peace. He would stay there for ever, in those two rooms.

Here, on the morning after he had dined with Jane Holland, he sat down
to write. And he wrote, but with a fury that destroyed more than it
created. In those days Tanqueray could never count upon his genius. The
thing would stay with him peaceably for months at a time; but it never
let him know the precise moment of its arrival or departure. At times it
seemed the one certainty in an otherwise dubious world, at other times
it was a creature of unmistakably feminine caprice. He courted it, and
it avo