“Not much.  It isn’t my fault,” he added in answer to her reproachful eyes.  “He’s shut himself up with Maddox in a stuffy little house at Ealing.”

“Does that mean that he’s very badly off?”

“Well, no; I shouldn’t say so.  He’s got an editorship.  But he isn’t the sort that’s made for getting on.  In many things he is a fool.”

“I admire his folly more than some people’s wisdom.”

From the look in Lucia’s eyes Jewdwine was aware that his cousin no longer adored him.  Did she adore Rickman?

“You’re a little hard on me, I think.  After all, I was the first to help him.”

“And the last.  Are you quite sure you helped him?  How do you know you didn’t hinder him?  You kept him for years turning out inferior work for you, when he might have been giving us his best.”

“He might—­if he’d been alive to do it.”

“I’m only thinking of what you might have done.  The sort of thing you’ve done for other people—­Mr. Fulcher, for instance.”

Jewdwine blushed as he had never blushed before.  He was not given to that form of self-betrayal.

“You said just now you could either kill a book in twenty-four hours, or make it—­did you say?—­immortal.”

“I might have said I could keep it alive another twenty-four hours.”

“You know the reputations you have made for people.”

“I do know them.  I’ve made enough of them to know.  The reputations I’ve made will not last.  The only kind that does last is the kind that makes itself.  Do you seriously suppose a man like Rickman needs my help?  I am a journalist, and the world that journalists are compelled to live in is very poor and small.  He’s in another place altogether.  I couldn’t dream of treating him as I treat, say, Rankin or Fulcher.  The best service I could do him was to leave him alone—­to keep off and give him room.”

“Room to stand in?”

“No.  Room to grow in, room to fight in—­”

“Room to measure his length in when he falls?”

“If you like.  Rickman’s length will cover a considerable area.”

Lucia looked at her cousin with genuine admiration.  How clever, how amazingly clever he was!  She knew and he knew that he had failed in generosity to Rickman; that he had been a more than cautious critic and a callous friend.  She had been prepared to be nice to him if they had kept Rickman out of their conversation; but as the subject had arisen she had meant to give Horace a terribly bad quarter of an hour; she had meant to turn him inside out and make him feel very mean and pitiful and small.  And somehow it hadn’t come off.  Instead of diminishing as he should have done, Horace had worked himself gradually up to her height, had caught flame from her flame, and now he was consuming her with her own fire.  It was she who had taken, the view most degrading to the man she admired; she who would have dragged her poet down to earth and put him on a level with Rankin and Fulcher and such people.  Horace would have her believe that his own outlook was the clearer and more heavenly; that he understood Rickman better; that he saw that side of him that faced eternity.