She knew the secret of the world; and had no sort of hesitation about telling it; it sounded to him uncommonly like something that he had heard before.  He recognized her as the form and voice of his own desire, the loathsome familiar body of unutterable thoughts, sordid, virulent, accusing, with a tongue that lashed through the flesh to the obscure spirit inside him.  And because he was a poet, and knew himself a poet, because he had sinned chiefly through his imagination, it was through his imagination that he suffered, so that the horror was supreme.  For all the while, though Shame was there, his ideas were there too, somewhere, the divine thoughts and the proud beautiful dreams, and the great pure loves, winged and veiled; they stood a long way off and turned away their faces from him, and that was the worst punishment he had to bear.

Which meant that as Savage Keith Rickman lay in bed the morning after that glorious April night, he knew that he had been making an April fool of himself.  He knew it by the pain in his head and other disagreeable signs; also by the remarkable fact that he still wore the shirt and trousers of the day.

And he knew that in spite of the pain he would have to get up and go down to breakfast as if nothing had happened; he would have to meet Mr. Spinks’ eyes twinkling with malign intelligence, and Flossie’s wondering looks, and Mrs. Downey’s tender womanly concern, as he turned white over the bacon and the butter.  He didn’t know which were worse, the knowing eyes or the innocent ones.  He had to be at the shop by nine o’clock, too, to force that poor, dizzy, aching head of his to its eight hours’ work.

In this unnerved, attenuated state, this mortal paleness of mind and body, it was terrible to have to face the robust reality of “Rickman’s”.  At nine o’clock in the morning it was more real to him than any real thing; it even assumed an abominable personality; it was an all-compelling, all-consuming power that sucked from him his time, his life, his energy, and for six days out of the seven required of him his soul.  That at the same time it provided him with the means of bodily subsistence only added to the horror of the thing.  It was as if “Rickman’s”, destroyer and preserver, renewed his life every quarter day that it might draw in, devour, annihilate it as before.  There was a diabolical precision in the action of the machine that made and unmade him.

And yet, with its rhythm of days and weeks, it was in its turn part of a vaster system, whose revolutions brought round a longer pause—­when for three days his soul would be given back to him.  The only thing that kept him up at this moment was the blessed hope of the Bank holiday.

While young Keith was still lying very sick and miserable in his bed, the elder Rickman, in his villa residence at Ilford in Essex, was up and eager for the day.  By the time Keith had got down to breakfast Isaac had caught the early train that landed him in the City at nine.  Before half-past he was in the front shop, taking a look round.