“I know.  You don’t approve of my morals.  I don’t altogether blame you, considering that since I knew Miss Harden I very nearly married someone else.  My code is so different from yours that I should have considered marrying that woman a lapse from virtue.  So the intention may count against me, if you like.”

“Look here, Rickman, that is not altogether what I mean.  Neither of us is fit to marry Miss Harden—­and I have given her up.”  He said it with the sublime assurance of Jewdwine, the moral man.

“Does it—­does her illness—­make all that difference?  It makes none to me.”

“Oh, well—­all right—­if you think you can make her happy.”

“My dear Jewdwine, I don’t think, I know.”  He smiled that smile that Jewdwine had seen once or twice before.  “It may be arrogant to suppose that I’ll succeed where better men might fail; still—­” He rose and drew himself up to all his slender height—­“in some impossible things I have succeeded.”

“They are not the same things.”

“No; but in both, you see, it all depends upon the man.”  With that he left him.

As Rickman’s back turned on him, Jewdwine perceived his own final error.  As once before in judging the genius he had reckoned without the man, so now, in judging the man he had reckoned without his genius.

This horrid truth came home to him in his solitude.  In the interminable watches of the night Jewdwine acknowledged himself a failure; and a failure for which there was no possible excuse.  He had had every conceivable advantage that a man could have.  He had been born free; free from all social disabilities; free from pecuniary embarrassment; free from the passions that beset ordinary men.  And he had sold himself into slavery.  He had opinions; he was packed full of opinions, valuable opinions; but he had never had the courage of them.  He had always been a slave to other people’s opinions.  Rickman had been born in slavery, and he had freed himself.  When Rickman stood before him, superb in his self-mastery, he had felt himself conquered by this man, whom, as a man, he had despised.  Rickman’s errors had been the errors of one who risks everything, who never deliberates or counts the cost.  And in their repeated rivalries he had won because he had risked everything, when he, Jewdwine, had lost because he would risk nothing.

He had lost ever since the beginning.  He had meant to discover this great genius; to befriend him; to protect him with his praise; eventually to climb on his shoulders into fame.  And he had not discovered him; and as for climbing on his shoulders, he had been shaken off with one shrug of them.  There had been risk in passing judgement on young Rickman, and he had not taken the risk.  Therefore he had failed as a critic.  He had waited to found an incorruptible review.  It had been a risky proceeding, and he had not taken the risk.  His paper was a venal paper, sold like himself to the public he despised.  Of all that had ever appeared in it, nothing would live, nothing but a few immortal trifles, signed S.K.R.  He had failed pretty extensively as an editor.  Last of all he had wanted to marry his cousin Lucia; but there was risk in marrying her, and he would not take the risk, and Rickman would marry her.  He had failed most miserably as a man.