At first he looked on himself as a man irretrievably disgraced.  However proudly he might bear himself in the company of strangers, he approached his colleagues with the air of a man made absurd by unsolicited attentions, persecuted and compromised to the last degree.  The bosses of his ruddy face displayed all the quiverings and tortures and suffusions of a smiling shame.  He was, however, compensated for the loss of personal dignity by a very substantial income.  Not that at first he would admit the compensation.  “Ricky,” he would say in the voice of a man bowed and broken on the wheel of life, “you needn’t envy me my thousands.  They are the measure of my abasement.”  Yet he continued to abase himself.  Nothing was more amazing than his versatility.  The public could hardly keep up with the flight of Rankin’s incarnations.  Drawing-room comedy, pathetic pastoral, fantastic adventure, slum idyll and medieval romance, it was all one to Rankin.  An infallible instinct told him which genre should be chosen at any given moment; a secret tocsin sounded far-off the hour of his success.  And still the spirit of Rankin held itself aloof; and underneath his many disguises he remained a junior journalist.  But latterly (since his marriage with a rich City merchant’s daughter) an insidious seriousness had overtaken him; he began first to tolerate, then to respect, then to revere the sources of his affluence.  The old ironic spirit was there to chastise him whenever he caught himself doing it; but that spirit made discord with the elegant respectability which was now the atmosphere of his home.

Rankin’s drawing-room (where he was now waiting for Rickman) was furnished with the utmost correctness in the purest Chippendale, upholstered in silver and grey and lemon and rose brocade; it had grey curtains, rose-lined, with a design of true lovers’ knots in silver; straight draperies of delicate immaculate white muslin veiled the window-panes; for the feet an interminable stretch of grey velvet carpet whose pattern lay on it like a soft shadow.  Globes of electric light drooped clustering under voluminously fluted shades.  Rankin himself looked grossly out of keeping with the scene.  It was (and they both knew it) simply the correct setting for his wife, who dominated it, a young splendour of rose-pink and rose-white and jewelled laces and gold.

Rickman, after many weeks’ imprisonment between four dirty yellow ochre walls, was bewildered with the space, the colours, the perfumes, the illumination.  He was suffering from a curious and, it seemed to him, insane illusion, the illusion of distance, the magnifying of the spaces he had got to traverse, and as he entered Mrs. Rankin’s drawing-room the way from the threshold to the hearthrug stretched before him as interminably as the way from Howland Street to Sussex Square.  But of any other distance he was blissfully unaware.  Beside his vision of Lucia Harden Mrs. Herbert Rankin was an entirely insignificant person.