In Audrey Craven he had found the indispensable thing--intimacy without love, or even, as he understood the word, friendship.
He recalled the evening when he had first seen her--the hot, crowded drawing-room, the heavy atmosphere, the dull faces coming and going, and the figure of Audrey flashing through it all.
And now, on a dull evening, some three weeks after Audrey's dinner-party, he was alone in his study, smoking, as he leaned back in his easy-chair, in one of those dreamy moods which with him meant fiction in the making, the tobacco-smoke curling round his head the Pythian fumes of his inspiration.
To find out what lay at the bottom of this shifting personality, what elemental thoughts and feelings, if any, the real Audrey was composed of; to see for himself the play of circumstances on her plastic nature, and know what reaction it was capable of--in a word, to experimentalise in cold blood on the living nerve and brain tissue, was his plan of work for the year 1896.