His humility, too, was pathetic and disarmed her indignation.  At the same time he made it appear that this was a lifting of the veil, a glimpse of the true Jewdwine, the soul of him in its naked simplicity and sincerity.  And she was left uncertain whether it were not so.

“Even so,” she said gently; “think of all you will have missed.”

“Missed, Lucia?”

“Yes, missed.  I think, to have believed in any one’s greatness—­the greatness of a great poet—­to have been allowed to hold in your hands the pure, priceless thing, before the world had touched it—­to have seen what nobody else saw—­to feel that through your first glorious sight of him he belonged to you as he never could belong to the world, that he was your own—­that would be something to have lived for.  It would be greatness of a kind.”

He bowed his head as it were in an attitude as humble and reverent as her own.  “And yet,” he said, “the world does sometimes see its poet and believe in him.”

“It does—­when he works miracles.”

“Someday he will work his miracle.”

“And when the world runs after him you will follow.”

“I shall not be very far behind.”

CHAPTER LXXVI

He wondered how it was that Lucia had seen what he could not see.  As far as he understood his own attitude to Rickman, he had begun by being uncertain whether he saw or not; but he had quite honestly desired to see.  Yet he had not seen; not because he was incapable of seeing but because there had come a time when he had no longer desired to see; and from not desiring to see he had gone on till he had ended by not seeing.  Then because he had not seen he had persuaded himself that there was nothing to see.  And now, in that last sudden flaming of Lucia’s ardour, he saw what he had missed.

They parted amicably, with a promise on Lucia’s part that she would stay with Edith in the summer.

By the time he returned to town he was very sure of what he saw.  It had become a platitude to say that Keith Rickman was a great poet after the publication of The Triumph of Life.  The interesting, the burning question was whether he were not, if anything, a greater dramatist.  By the time Lucia came to Hampstead that point also had been settled, when the play had been actually running for three weeks.  Its success was only sufficient to establish his position and no more.  He himself required no more; but his friends still waited anxiously for what they regarded as the crucial test, the introduction of the new dramatist to a picked audience in Paris in the autumn.