And nobody understood it better than Jewdwine when his cousin said, “You will be nice to him, Horace, won’t you?  He is suffering for his loyalty to you.”  Lucia herself had adopted a theory which she now set forth (reluctantly, by reason of the horrible light it threw on human nature).  Mr. Maddox (whoever he might be) was of course jealous of Horace.  It was a shocking theory, but it was the only one which made these complications clear to her.

But Jewdwine had no need of theories or explanations.  He understood.  He knew that a certain prejudice, not to say suspicion, attached to him.  Ideas, not very favourable to his character as a journalist, were in the air.  And as his mind (in this respect constitutionally susceptible) had seldom been able to resist ideas in the air there were moments when his own judgment wavered.  He was beginning to suspect himself.

He was not sure, and if he had been he would not have acted on that certainty; for he had never possessed the courage of his opinions.  But it had come to this, that Jewdwine, the pure, the incorruptible, was actually uncertain whether he had or had not taken a bribe.  As he lay awake in bed at four o’clock in the morning his conscience would suggest to him that he had done this thing; but at noon, in the office of Metropolis, his robust common sense, then like the sun, in the ascendant, boldly protested that he had done nothing of the sort.  He had merely made certain not very unusual concessions to the interests of his journal.  In doing so he had of course set aside his artistic conscience, an artistic conscience being a private luxury incompatible with the workings of a large corporate concern.  He was bound to disregard it in loyalty to his employers and his public.  They expected certain things of him and not others.  It was different in the unexciting days of the old Museion; it would be different now if he could afford to run a paper of his own dedicated to the service of the Absolute.  But Jewdwine was no longer the servant of the Absolute.  He was the servant and the mouthpiece of a policy that in his heart he abhorred; irretrievably committed to a programme that was concerned with no absolute beyond the absolute necessity of increasing the circulation of Metropolis.  Such a journal only existed on the assumption that its working expenses were covered by the advertisements of certain publishing houses.  But if this necessity committed him to a more courteous attitude than he might otherwise have adopted towards the works issued by those houses, that was not saying that he was in their pay.  He was, of course, in the pay of his own publishers, but so was every man who drew a salary under the same conditions; and if those gentlemen, finding their editor an even more competent person than they had at first perceived, were in the habit of increasing his salary in proportion to his competence, that was only the very correct and natural expression of their good opinion.