“Whom have you said it to?”

“To you for one.  To every one, I think, who knows him.  They’ll bear me out.”

“The people who know him?  What was the good of that?  You should have said it to the people who don’t know him—­to the world.”

“You mean I should have posed as a prophet?”

“I mean that what you said you might have written.”

“Ah, litera scripta manet.  It isn’t safe to prophesy.  Remember, I saw him a very long way off.  Nobody had a notion there was anybody there.”

“You could have given them a notion.”

“I couldn’t.  The world, Lucia, is not like you or me.  It has no imagination.  It wouldn’t have seen, and it wouldn’t have believed.  I should have been a voice crying in the wilderness; a voice and nothing behind it.  And as I said prophecy is a dangerous game.  In the first place, there is always a chance that your prediction may be wrong; and the world, my dear cousin, has a nasty way of stoning its prophets even when they’re right.”

“Oh, I thought it provided them with bread and butter, plenty of butter.”

“It does, on the condition that they shall prophesy buttery things.  When it comes to hard things, if they ask for bread the world retaliates and offers them a stone.  And that stone, I need not tell you, has no butter on it.”

“I see.  You were afraid.  You haven’t the courage of your opinion.”

“And I haven’t much opinion of my courage.  I own to being afraid.”

“Afraid to do your duty as a critic and as a friend?”

“My first duty is to the public—­my public; not to my friends.  Savage Keith Rickman may be a very great poet—­I think he is—­but if my public doesn’t want to hear about Savage Keith Rickman, I can’t insist on their hearing, can I?”

“No, Horace, after all you’ve told me, I don’t believe you can.”

“Mind you, it takes courage, of a sort, to own it.”

“I’m to admire your frankness, am I?  You say you’re afraid.  But you said just now you had such power.”

“If I had taken your advice and devoted myself to the role of Vates I should have lost my power.  Nobody would have listened to me.  I began that way, by preaching over people’s heads.  The Museion was a pulpit in the air.  I stood in that pulpit for five years, spouting literary transcendentalism.  Nobody listened.  When I condescended to come down and talk about what people could understand then everybody listened.  It wouldn’t have done Rickman any good if I’d pestered people with him.  But when the time comes I shall speak out.”

“I daresay, when the time comes—­it will come too—­when he has made his name with no thanks to you, then you’ll be the first to say ’I told you so.’  It would have been a greater thing to have helped him when he needed it.”

“I did help him.  He wouldn’t be writing now if it wasn’t for me.”

“Do you see much of him?”