It may be that every poet once in his lifetime has to come to this Calvary, to hang through his black hour on the cross, and send out after the faithless deity his Lama Sabachthani.  For Rickman no agony could compare with that isolation and emptiness of soul.  He could see nothing beyond that hour, for he had never felt anything like it before, not even on waking in the morning after getting drunk.  His ideas had always come back again when he was in a fit state to receive them.  But this time, though he had not been drinking, he felt that they had gone for ever, and that all his songs were sung.  And over his head high up in the sky, a lark, a little fiend of a lark, had chosen that moment for bursting into music.  With diabolical ease and maddening ecstasy, he flung out his perfect and incommunicable song.  A song of joy and mockery and triumph.

He did not know how old that skylark was, but here was he, Savage Keith Rickman, played out at three and twenty.  Was it, he wondered, the result, not of ordinary inebriety, but of the finer excesses of the soul?  Was he a precocious genius?  Had he taken to the immortal drink too early and too hard?  Or was it, as Jewdwine had suggested, that there were too many Rickmans, and that this poor seventh part of him had been crushed by the competition of the other six?  The horrible thing was that they would live on for years, eating and getting drunk and falling in love and buying suits of clothes, while the poet in him was dead, like Keats, at three and twenty.

Then suddenly, for no reason whatever, a vision of Lucia Harden rose before him like a light and refused to leave him.

It wrought in him, as he contemplated it, a gradual burning illumination.  He perceived that it was he himself who was responsible for all this.  He perceived the real nature of the things he had pursued so passionately, the thing he called pleasure, the thing he called love, and the thing he called his imagination.  His notion of pleasure was getting drunk and making love to Miss Poppy Grace; the love he made was better described by a stronger and coarser monosyllable, and he had used his imagination to glorify it.  Oh yes, because he had imagination, because he was a poet, he had not gone down into the clay-pits and wallowed in the clay; neither had he been content to dabble in it; he had taken it up in his hands and moulded it into the form of a divinity, and then fallen down and worshipped it.  Fallen down and worshipped at the feet, the gaily twirling feet of Miss Poppy Grace.

Poor Poppy, if he could have thought of her at all, he might have felt a sort of pity for her transience, the transience of the feeling she inspired.  But he did not think of her; he did not even try to think of her.  Her image, once so persistent, had dropped clean out of his mind, which was one reason why it was so empty.  It had not been much to boast of, that infatuation for Poppy, and yet somehow, after