“You mean it’s the sort of opinion I’m paid to give.”

“Well, broadly speaking—­of course there are exceptions, and Paterson in other circumstances might have been one of them—­that’s very much what I do mean.”

“Then—­I’m awfully sorry, Jewdwine—­but if that’s so I can’t go on working for Metropolis.  I must give it up.  In fact, that’s really what I came to say.”

Jewdwine too had risen with an air of relief, being anxious to end an interview which was becoming more uncomfortable than he cared for.  He had stood, gazing under drooping eyelids at his disciple’s feet.  Nobody would have been more surprised than Jewdwine if you had suggested to him that he could have any feeling about looking anybody in the face.  But at that last incredible, impossible speech of his he raised his eyes and fixed them on Rickman’s for a moment.

In that moment many things were revealed to him.

He turned and stood with his back to Rickman, staring through the open window.  All that he saw there, the quiet walled garden, the rows of elms on the terrace beside it, the dim green of the Heath, and the steep unscaleable grey blue barrier of the sky, had taken on an unfamiliar aspect, as it were a tragic simplicity and vastness.  For these things, once so restfully indifferent, had in a moment become the background of his spiritual agony, a scene where his soul appeared to him, standing out suddenly shelterless, naked and alone.  No—­if it had only been alone; but that was the peculiar horror of it.  He could have borne it but for the presence of the other man who had called forth the appalling vision, and remained a spectator of it.

There was at least this much comfort for him in his pangs—­he knew that a man of coarser fibre would neither have felt nor understood them.  But it was impossible for Jewdwine to do an ignoble thing and not to suffer; it was the innermost delicacy of his soul that made it writhe under the destiny he had thrust upon it.

And in the same instant he recognized and acknowledged the greatness of the man with whom he had to do; acknowledged, not grudgingly, not in spite of himself, but because of himself, because of that finer soul within his soul which spoke the truth in secret, being born to recognize great things and admire them.  He wondered now how he could ever have mistaken Rickman.  He perceived the origin and significance of his attitude of disparagement, of doubt.  It dated from a certain hot July afternoon eight years ago when he lay under a beech-tree in the garden of Court House and Lucia had insisted on talking about the poet, displaying an enthusiasm too ardent to be borne.  He had meant well by Rickman, but Lucia’s ardour had somehow put him off.  Maddox’s had had the same effect, though for a totally different reason, and so it had gone on.  He had said to himself that if other people were going to take Rickman that way he could no longer feel the same peculiar interest.