And how about those confounded profits, represented by his commission?  That was easily settled.  He would have nothing to do with the filthy things.  He wouldn’t touch his commission with the end of the poker.  Unfortunately he would never be able to explain all this to her, and Heaven only knew what she would think of him when it all came out in the long-run, as it was bound to come.  Well, it wouldn’t matter what she thought of him so long as he knew that his hands were clean.  Rickman’s’ hands might not be so presentable, but they were not human hands as his were; they were the iron, irresponsible hands of a machine.

There remained his arrangements for the Bank holiday.  They seemed to have been made so long ago that they hardly counted.  Still, there was that engagement to Poppy Grace, and he had promised to take poor Flossie to the Hippodrome.  Poor Flossie would be disappointed if he did not take her to the Hippodrome.  At the moment Flossie’s disappointment presented itself as considerably more vital than his own.

To-morrow, then, being Saturday, he would go up to town; and on Monday he would return to his ambiguous post.

He had thought it out.

CHAPTER XVII

“There’s a lot of rot,” said Mr. Rickman, “talked about Greek tragedy.  But really, if you come to think of it, it’s only in Sophocles you get the tragedy of Fate.  There isn’t any such thing in AEschylus, you know.”

He had gone up to acquaint Miss Harden with his decision and had been led off into this hopeful track by the seductions that still lurked in the Euripides.

“There’s Nemesis, which is the same thing,” said she.

“Not at all the same thing.  Nemesis is simply the horrid jealousy of the gods; and the responsibility lies with the person who provokes them, whether it’s Prometheus, or Agamemnon, or Agamemnon’s great great grandfather.  It’s the tragedy of human responsibility, the most brutal tragedy of all.  All these people are crumpled up with it, they go about tearing their hair over it, and howling out [Greek:  drasanti pathein].  There isn’t any Fate in that, you know.  Is there?”

He did not wait for an answer.

“In Sophocles now, it’s all the other way about.  His people aren’t responsible in the least.  They’re just a thundering lot of lunatics.  They go knocking their poor heads against the divine law, and trying to see which is the hardest, till they end by breaking both.  There’s no question of paying for the damage.  It’s pure Fate.”

“Well—­and Euripides?”

“Oh, Euripides goes on another tack altogether.  There aren’t any laws to break, yet everybody’s miserable all round, and nobody’s responsible.  It’s [Greek:  to pathonti pathein].  They suffer because they suffer, and there’s an end of it.  And it’s the end of Fate in Greek tragedy.  I know this isn’t the orthodox view of it.”