As for the redemption of the Harden library he realized with a sharp pang that risk there had been none.  He saw that what young Rickman had offered him was a unique and splendid opportunity, the opportunity of doing a beautiful thing for Lucia, and that without the smallest inconvenience to himself.  And this opportunity had been missed.  Just because he could not make up his mind about Rickman, could not see what Lucia had always seen, what he too saw now, that positively luminous sincerity of his.  He saw it even now reluctantly—­though he could never veer round again to his absurd theory of Rickman’s dishonesty.  He would have liked, if he could, to regard him as a culpable bungler; but even this consoling view was closed to him by Lucia.  It was plain from her account that Rickman’s task had been beyond human power.  Jewdwine, therefore, was forced to the painful conclusion that for this loss to himself and Lucia he had nothing to blame but his own vacillation.

As for Rickman—­

Lucia had taken a great deal of pains with that part of her subject, for she was determined to do justice to it.  She was aware that it was open to her to take the ordinary practical view of Rickman as a culpable blunderer, who, by holding his tongue when he should have spoken, had involved her in the loss of much valuable property.  To an ordinary practical woman the fact that this blunder had entailed such serious consequences to herself would have made any other theory impossible.  But Lucia was not a woman who could be depended on for any ordinary practical view.  Mere material issues could never confuse her estimate of spiritual values.  To her, Rickman’s conduct in that instance was a flaw in honour, and as such she had already sufficiently judged it.  The significant thing was that he too should have so judged it; that he should have been capable of such profound suffering in the thought of it.

And now, somehow, it didn’t seem to her to count.

It simply disappeared in her final pure and luminous view of Rickman’s character.  What really counted was the alertness of his whole attitude to honour, his readiness to follow the voice of his own ultimate vision, to repudiate the unclean thing revealed in its uncleanness; above all, what counted was his passionate sincerity.  With her unerring instinct of selection Lucia had again seized on the essential.  The triumph of Rickman’s greater qualities appealed to her as a spectacle; it was not spoiled for her by the reflection that she personally had been more affected by his failure.  If she showed her insight into Rickman’s character by admitting the relative insignificance of that failure, she showed an equal insight into Jewdwine’s by suppressing all mention of it now.  For Horace would have regarded it as essential.  It would have loomed large in his view by reason of its material consequences.  Allowing for Horace’s view she kept her portrait truer by omitting it.