o be altogether fit.

So he found confusion in his judgment and mystery in his vision of her,
while his heart made and unmade her image ten times a day.

He went out and tramped the lanes and fields for miles beyond Hampstead.
He lay stretched out there on his green slopes, trying not to think
about Jane. For all this exercise fatigued him, and made it impossible
for him to think of anything else. And when he got back into his room
its solitude was intolerable. For ten days he had not spoken to any
woman but his landlady. Every morning, before he sat down to write, he
had to struggle with his terror of Mrs. Eldred. It was growing on him
like a nervous malady.

An ordinary man would have said of Mrs. Eldred that she was rather a
large woman. To Tanqueray, in his malady, she appeared immense. The
appeal of her immensity was not merely to the eye. It fascinated and
demoralized the imagination. Tanqueray's imagination was sane when it
was at work, handling the stuff of life; it saw all things
unexaggerated, unabridged. But the power went wild when he turned it out
to play. It played with Mrs. Eldred's proportions till it became
tormented with visions of shapeless and ungovernable size. He saw her
figure looming in the doorway, brooding over his table and his bed,
rolling through space to inconceivable confines which it burst. For
though this mass moved slowly, it was never still. When it stood it
quivered. Worse than anything, when it spoke it wheezed.

He had gathered from Mrs. Eldred that her conversation (if you could
call it conversation) was the foredoomed beginning of his day. He braced
himself to it every morning, but at last his nerves gave way, and he
forgot himself so far as to implore her for God's sake not to talk to
him.

The large woman replied placably that if he would leave everything to
her, it would not be necessary for her to talk.

He left everything. At the end of the week his peace was charged to him
at a figure which surprised him by its moderation.

Still he was haunted by one abominable fear, the fear of being ill,
frightfully ill, and dying in some vast portion of her arms. Under the
obsession of this thought he passed whole hours sitting at his desk,
bowed forward, with his face hidden in his hands.

He was roused from it one evening by a sound that came from the other
end of the room, somewhere near the sideboard. It startled him, because,
being unaccompanied by any wheezing, it could no