For not only was the state of Keith’s soul a reproach to Isaac’s conscience, but the brilliance of Keith’s intellect was a terror to it.  Any day that same swift illuminating power might be turned on to the dark places in his own soul, showing up the deplorable discrepancies between his inner and his outer life.  He wanted his son and everybody else to think well of him, and Keith’s lucid sincerity at times appalled him.  He had not yet discovered that his protection was in the very thing he feared.  Keith was so recklessly single-minded that it never occurred to him that his father could lead a double life; he never doubted for an instant that, as in his own case, the Saturday to Monday state revealed the real man.  He, Keith, sat so lightly to the business and with so detached a mind, that he simply could not imagine how any human being could be so wedded to a thing in itself uninteresting as to sacrifice to it any immortal chances.  The book trade was not a matter for high spiritual romance; it was simply the way they got their living, as honest a way as any other, taking it all round.  The shop was one thing, and his father was another.  In fact, so far from identifying them, he was inclined to pity his father as a fellow-victim of the tyranny and malignity of the shop.

But when in his right mind he had no grudge whatever against the shop.  He had been born over the shop, nursed behind the shop, and the shop had been his schoolroom ever since he could spell.  It was books found in the shop and studied in the shop that first opened his eyes to the glory of the world, as he sat on the step-ladder, reading his Shakespeare or puzzling out his first Greek by the light of a single gas-flare; and for the sake of these things he had a tender recollection of Paternoster Row.  It was to Rickman’s that he owed his education.  Doggedly at first and afterwards mechanically, abstractedly, he got through the work he had to do.  At times he even appreciated with a certain enjoyment the exquisite irony of his fate.  Perhaps, when it came to the Gin Palace of Art, he had felt that the thing was getting almost beyond a joke.  He had not been prepared for that lurid departure.  He did not realize that he was in it, that his father had staked, not only his hopes, but his capital on him.  He simply knew that “the guv’nor” was wrapt up in the horrid thing, that he had spent enormous sums on it, and he wasn’t going to throw him over at the start.

But he had not the smallest intention of spending his whole life so.  As always, long ago, in the darkness of the City shop, he had seen a brilliance of his own spreading around Rickman’s and beyond it, shining away into the distance, so he saw it now, flinging out a broad, flaming, unmistakable path that could by no possibility lead back there.  He only suffered a certain limited and unimportant part of him to be made into a machine.

Meanwhile it was perhaps in the divine mercy that the workings of this machine were hidden from Isaac.  He hadn’t even found out that the secret spring was not in the brain but the heart of it.  He would look up a little uneasily as Keith pushed through the big swinging doors and took his seat at the table on the platform, and while he wondered what Keith was thinking of him, ten to one Keith wasn’t thinking of him at all.