Up till now it had never occurred to Rickman that his connection with Metropolis could directly damage him, still less that Jewdwine could personally inflict a blow.  But the injury now done to him was monstrous and intolerable; Jewdwine had hurt him in a peculiarly delicate and shrinking place.  Because his nature was not originally magnificent in virtue of another sort, it was before all things necessary that he should perserve his intellectual chastity.  That quality went deeper than the intellect; it was one with a sense of honour so fine that a touch, impalpable to ordinary men, was felt by it as a laceration and a stain.  He walked up to Hampstead that Sunday evening, taking the hill at a round swinging pace.  Not all the ardour and enthusiasm of his youth had ever carried him there with such an impetus as did his burning indignation against Jewdwine.  And as he went the spirit of youth, the spirit of young Paterson, went beside him and breathed upon the flame.

And yet he was the same man who only an hour ago had been defending Jewdwine’s honour at the expense of his own; without a thought that in so defending it he was doing anything in the least quixotic or remarkable.  He had done nothing.  He had simply refrained at a critical moment from giving him away.  Maddox was Jewdwine’s enemy; and to have given Jewdwine away at that moment would have meant delivering him over to Maddox to destroy.

No; when he thought of it he could hardly say he had defended his friend’s honour at the expense of his own; for Jewdwine’s honour was Lucia’s, and Lucia’s was not Jewdwine’s but his, indistinguishably, inseparably his.

But though he was not going to give Jewdwine up to Maddox, he was going to give him up.  It might come to the same thing.  He could imagine that, to anybody who chose to put two and two together, an open rupture would give him away as completely as if he had accused him in so many words.  That, of course he could not help.  There was a point beyond which his honour refused to identify itself with Jewdwine’s.  He had never felt a moment’s hesitation upon that point.  For in his heart he condemned his friend far more severely than Maddox could have condemned anybody.  He had a greater capacity for disgust than Maddox.  He would draw up, writhing at trifles over which Maddox would merely shrug his shoulders and pass on.  In this instance Maddox, whose Celtic soul grew wanton at the prospect of a fight, would have fallen upon Jewdwine with an infernal joy, but he would have been the first to deprecate Rickman’s decision as absurd.  As for Rankin of Stables, instead of flying into a passion they would, in similar circumstances, have sat still and smiled.

If it had not been for young Paterson, Rickman would have smiled too, even if he had been unable to sit still; for his vision of Fulcher pocketing the carefully selected praise intended for Paterson was purely and supremely comic; so delightful in fact, that he could have embraced Jewdwine for providing it.  But Paterson, who had looked to him as to the giver of life or death, Paterson on his death-bed taking Fulcher’s paragraph to himself and wondering whether it were indeed Rickman who had done this thing, the thought of Paterson was too painful to be borne.  Honour or no honour, it would be impossible for him to work for Jewdwine after that.