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“Agonies!” said Miss Whiffle.

“Toothache?”

“Neuralgia, sir, for my sins.”

“Is there–is there no remedy?”

She was taken with a sharp spasm of laughter, mirthless, but consciously expressive of all the familiar processes of self-effacement under torture.

“I arks nothing but my duty, sir,” she said. “That is the myrrh and balsam to a racking ‘ed. Not but what I owns to a shrinking like unto death over the thought of what lays before me this very morning. Rest and quiet is needful, but it’s little I shall get of either out of a kitching fire in the dog days. And what would you fancy for your dinner, sir?”

“I am sorry,” I murmured, “that you should suffer on my account. I suppose there is nothing cold–“

“Not enough, sir, in all the ‘ouse to bait a mousetrap. Nor would I inconvenience you, if not for your own kind suggestion. But potted meats is ‘andy and ever sweet, and if I might make bold to propose a tin–“

“Very well. Get me what you like, Miss Whiffle.”

“I must arks your pardin, sir. But to walk out in this ‘eat, and every rolling pebble under my foot a knife through my ‘ed–no, sir. I make bold to claim that consideration for myself.”

“Leave it to me, then. I will do my own catering this morning.”

Then I added, in the forlorn hope of justifying my moral ineptitude to myself, “If you take my advice, you will lie down.”

“And where, sir?” she answered, with a particularly patient smile. “The beds is unmade as yet, sir,” she went on, in a suffering decline, “and rumpled sheets is thorns to a bursting brain.”

Then she looked meaningly at the sitting-room sofa.

“I made bold to think, if you ‘ad‘appened to been a-going to bathe, the only quiet place in the ‘ouse–” she murmured, in semi-detached sentences, and put her hand to her brow.

Five minutes later (I fear no one will credit it) I was outside the house, and Miss Whiffle was installed, towel and all, upon my sofa.

For a moment I really think the outrageous absurdity of the situation did goad me to the tottering point of rebellion. I had not the courage, however, to let myself go, and, as usual, succumbed to the tyranny of circumstances.

It was a blazing morning. The flat sea lay panting on its coasts, as if, for all its liquid sparkle, it were athirst; and the town, under the oven of its hills, burned red-hot, like pottery in a kiln.

I went and bought my tinned meat (a form of preserve quite odious to me) and strolled back disconsolately to the Parade. Occasionally, flitting past the lantern window, I would steal a side glance into the cool luminosity of my own inaccessible parlour; and there always, reclining at her ease upon my sofa, was the ineradicable presentment of Miss Whiffle.

At one o’clock I ventured to reclaim my own, and sat me down at table, a scorched and glutinous wreck, too overcome with lassitude to tackle the obnoxious meal of my own providing. And to the sofa, already made familiar of that dishonoured towel, I was fain presently to confide the empty problem of my own aching head.

All this was but the forerunner and earnest of a month’s long martyrdom. That night the sea had me by the nerves again, and for many nights after; and, although I grew in time to a certain tolerance of the booming monotony, it was the tolerance of a dully resigned, not an indifferent, brain.

When it came to the second morning, not only the novel, but the mere idea of my ever having contemplated writing one, was a thing with me to feebly marvel over. And from that time I set myself down to exist and broil only, doling out a languid interest to the locality, the shimmer of whose baking hill-sides made all life a quivering, glaring phantom of itself.

Miss Whiffle tyrannized over me more or less according to her mood; but she did not usurp my sitting-room again. I used to sit by the hour at the lantern window, in a sort of greasy blankness, like a meat pudding, and vacantly scrutinize the loiterers who passed by on the hot asphalt of the Parade. Screened by the window curtains, I could see and hear without endangering my own privacy; and many were the odd interchanges of speech that fell from strangers unconscious of a listener.