attitude rendered him unusual, not to say ridiculous.  Had the Absolute abandoned him, or had he abandoned the Absolute, when it no longer ministered to his personal prestige?  Jewdwine was aware that, however it was, his case exemplified the inevitable collapse of a soul nourished mainly upon formulas.  Yet behind that moral wreckage there remained the far-off source of spiritual illumination, the inner soul that judged him, as it judged all things, holding the pellucid immaterial view.  Its vision had never been bound, even by the Prolegomena.  If he had trusted it he might have been numbered among those incorruptible spirits that preserve the immortal purity of letters.  As it was, that supreme intelligence was only a light by which he saw clearly his own damnation.

CHAPTER LXXVII

Meanwhile the Junior Journalists found amusement in discussing whether the great dramatist were Maddox’s discovery or Jewdwine’s.  With the readers of Metropolis he passed as Jewdwine’s—­which was all that Jewdwine wanted.  With the earnest aspiring public, striving to admire Keith Rickman because they had been told they ought to, he passed as their own.  The few who had known him from the first knew also that poets like Rickman are never discovered until they discover themselves.  Maddox, whom much worship had made humble, gave up the absurd pretension.  Enough that he lived, and was known to live, with Rickman as his friend.

They shared that little house at Ealing, which Rickman, in the ardour of his self-immolation, had once destined for the young Delilah, his bride.  It had now become a temple in which Maddox served with all the religious passion of his half-Celtic soul.

The poet had trusted the honour and the judgement of his friend so far as to appoint him his literary executor.  Thus Maddox became possessed of the secret of the Sonnets.  And here a heavy strain was put upon his judgement and his honour.  Maddox had guessed that there was a power in Rickman’s life more terrible than Jewdwine, who after all had never really touched him.  There was, Maddox had always known, a woman somewhere.  A thousand terrors beset the devotee when he noticed that since fame had lighted upon Rickman the divinity had again begun to furnish his part (the holy part) of the temple in a manner unmistakably suggestive of mortality.  Maddox shuddered as he thought of the probable destination of that upper chamber which was the holiest of all.  And now this terror had become a certainty.  The woman existed; he knew her name; she was a cousin of the detestable Jewdwine; the Sonnets could never be given to the world as long as she withheld her consent, and apparently she did withhold it.  More than this had not been revealed to Maddox, and it was in vain that he tried to penetrate the mystery.

His efforts were not the most delicate imaginable.  One evening, sitting with Rickman in that upper chamber, he entered on the subject thus—­