But Tanqueray had no lower power he could fall back upon when his genius failed him. And apparently it had failed him now. In forty-eight hours he had accomplished nothing. At the end of the forty-ninth hour wasted, he drew his pen through what he had written and sank into a depth as yet unknown to him. His genius had before now appeared to him as an insane hallucination. But still he had cared for it supremely. Now, the horrible thing was that he did not care. His genius was of all things that which interested him least. He was possessed by one trouble and by one want, the more devastating because it was aimless and obscure. That came of dining with Jane Holland. He was not in love with Jane. On the contrary, he was very angry with her for wanting him to be in love with her when he could not be. And he was angry with himself for wanting to be in love with her when he could not be, when his heart (by which the psychologist meant his senses) was not in it. But wherever his heart was, his thoughts, when he let them go, were always running upon Jane. They ran on her now. He conceived of her more than ever as the unfit. "She's too damnably clever," he kept saying to himself, "too damnably clever." And he took up her last book just to see again how damnably clever she was. In an instant he was at her feet. She wasn't clever when she wrote that. What a genius she had, what a burning, flashing, laughing genius. It matched his own; it rose to it, giving him flame for flame. Almost as clear-eyed it was, and tenderer hearted. Reading Jane Holland, Tanqueray became depressed or exalted according to his mood. He was now depressed. But he could not leave her. In spirit he remained at her feet. He bowed himself in the dust. "I couldn't have done it," he said, "to save my life. I shall never do anything like that." He wrote and told her so. But he did not go to see her, as he would have done six weeks ago. And then he began wondering how she conceived these things if she did not feel them. "I don't believe," he said, "that she doesn't feel. She's like me." Too like him to 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.