Jewdwine in the early days of Metropolis wore the hungry look of a man who, having swallowed all his formulas, finds himself unnourished.  “The soul,” Jewdwine used to say (perverting Emerson) “is appeased by a formula”; and it was clear that his soul would never be appeased until it had found a new one.  Those who now conversed intimately with Jewdwine were entertained no longer with the Absolute, but they heard a great deal about the “Return to Nature.”  Mr. Fulcher’s pipings, therefore, were entirely in harmony with Jewdwine’s change of mood.

But Rickman, who had once protested so vigorously against the Absolute, would not hear of the Return to Nature, either.  That cry was only a symptom of the inevitable sickness of the academic spirit, surfeited with its own philosophy.  He shook his head mournfully over Mr. Fulcher.  What looked to Jewdwine like simplicity seemed to him only a more intolerably sophisticated pose than any other.

“I prefer Mr. Fulcher in Downing Street to Mr. Fulcher in Arcadia.  Mr. Fulcher,” he said, “can no more return to Nature than he can enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born.”

He walked up and down the little office excitedly, while he drew for Jewdwine’s benefit an unattractive picture of the poet as babe, drinking from the breasts of the bounteous mother.  “You can’t go for ever hanging on your mother’s breasts; it isn’t decent and it isn’t manly.  Return to Nature!  It’s only too easy to return, and stay.  You’ll do no good at all if you’ve never been there; but if you mean to grow up you must break loose and get away.  The great mother is inclined to bug some of her children rather too tight, I fancy; and by Heaven! it’s pretty tough work for some of them wriggling out of her arms.”

He came to a sudden standstill, and turned on Jewdwine the sudden leaping light of the blue eyes that seemed to see through Jewdwine and beyond him.  No formula could ever frame and hold for him that vision of his calling which had come to him four years ago on Harcombe Hill.  He had conceived and sung of Nature, not as the indomitable parent by turns tyrannous and kind, but as the virgin mystery, the shy and tender bride that waits in golden abysmal secrecy for the embrace of spirit, herself athirst for the passionate immortal hour.  He foresaw the supreme and indestructible union.  He saw one eternal nature and a thousand forms of art, differing according to the virile soul.  And what he saw he endeavoured to describe to Jewdwine.  “That means, mind you, that your poet is a grown-up man and not a slobbering infant.”

“Exactly.  And Nature will be the mother of his art, as I said.”

“As you didn’t say—­The mother only.  There isn’t any immaculate conception of truth.  Don’t you believe it for a moment.”

Jewdwine retired into himself a moment to meditate on that telling word.  He wondered what lay beyond it.