But it was true enough that he knew too many little men; men who were at home in that house of bondage from which he was for ever longing to escape; men whom he had met as he had described, sitting contentedly on the dirty back-stairs of Fleet Street; men who in rubbing shoulders with each other in that crowded thoroughfare had had to allow for a great deal of what Maddox called wear and tear.  Those little men had remained invincibly, imperturbably friendly.  They knew perfectly well that he thought them little men, and they delighted in their great man all the same, more than ever, in fact, since his new suit of morals provided them with a subject of eternal jest.  For Maddox was but human, and he had found Rickman’s phrase too pregnant with humour to be lost.  They were sometimes very funny, those Junior Journalists, especially on a Saturday night.  But Rickman was not interested in the unseemly obstacle race they dignified by the name of a career, and he did not care to mix too freely with young men so little concerned about removing the dirt and sweat of it.  He clung to Maddox and Rankin as the strongest and the cleanest of them all.  But even they had inspirations that left him cold, and they thought many things large and important that were too small for him to see.  He would have died rather than let either of them know what he was doing now.  He saw with dismay that they suspected him of doing something, that their suspicions excited them most horribly, that they were watching him; and he had told Maddox that what he desired most was peace and quietness.

He found it in the Secret Chamber of the Muse, where he shut himself up when his work with them was done.  In there, his days and nights were as the days and nights of God.  There he forecast the schemes of dramas yet to be, dramas no longer neo-classic.  And as his genius foresaw the approach of its maturity, it purified and emptied itself of the personal passion that obscures the dramatist’s vision of the world.  This it did in a sequence of Nine and Twenty sonnets, a golden chain that bound Lucia’s name to his whether she would or no.  They recorded nine and twenty moments in the life of his passion, from the day of its birth up to the present hour, the hour of its purification.

For it was still young in him; though at this distance of time Lucia’s image was no longer one and indivisible.  He had come to think of her as two persons clothed mysteriously in the same garment of flesh.  One carried that garment a little more conspicuously than the other; it was by her beauty that she pierced him with the pain of longing; and not by her beauty only, but by the marks of suffering that in his memory still obscured it.  She came before him, and her tragic eyes reproached him with the intolerable pathos of her fate, making him suffer too, through his exceeding pity.  And yet his longing had not been consumed by pity, but had mingled with it as flame in flame.  Long after he had parted