It was impossible for Lucia to do anybody a wrong, however innocently, without making up for it.  On that Sunday evening she conceived a great idea.  She had deprived Mr. Rickman of a small opportunity; she would give him a large one.  Restitution was to be on a noble scale.  Lucia had a small sum left to her by her grandfather, and even when Mr. Rickman was paid for his four weeks’ work on the catalogue that sum would only be reduced to L285.  On the strength of it she now proposed to offer Mr. Rickman the post of secretary to herself, for one year, at a salary of a hundred, the remainder to be devoted to his travelling and household expenses.  As secretary he would assist her in editing Sir Joseph’s unpublished works, while she secured him abundant leisure for his own.

For one year he would be free from all sordid demands on his time and energy.  He would be free, for one year, from the shop and the Quarterly Catalogue.  He would enrich his mind, and improve his manners, with travel, for one year.  At the end of that year he would know if there was anything in him.

In other words she would give the little man his chance.

The plan had the further advantage that it would have given her grandfather pleasure if he could have known it.  It was also to be presumed that it would give pleasure to Horace Jewdwine, since it was the very thing he himself had said he wished to do for Rickman.  Of all conceivable ways of spending Sir Joseph’s money it was the fittest and most beautiful.  In its lesser way it was in line with the best traditions of the family; for the Hardens had been known for generations as the patrons of poor scholars and struggling men of letters.  And as Lucia inherited the intellect of her forefathers in a more graceful, capricious and spontaneous form, so what in them had been heavy patronage, appeared in her as the pleasure-giving instinct.  If she had inherited a large fortune along with it she would have been a lady of lavish and indiscreet munificence.

By way of discretion she slept on her programme before finally committing herself to it.  In the morning discretion suggested that she had better wait a week.  She decided to act on that suggestion; at the same time she stifled the inner voice which kept telling her that the thing she was doing “to please Horace” would not really please him at all.

She had already ignored the advice he had given her on one point; for Horace had long ago told her plainly that there was no use in editing their grandfather’s posthumous works; that on any subject other than textual criticism, Sir Joseph was absurd.

Meanwhile, by sympathy perhaps, Rickman also had become discreet.  He entered on his new week a new man.  As if he had divined that he was on his trial, he redoubled his prodigious efforts, he applied himself to his hideous task with silent and concentrated frenzy.  He seemed to live and move and have his being in the catalogue raisonne.  Whenever Lucia had occasion to look up at him he was assiduous, rapid, absorbed, He never stopped to talk about AEschylus and Euripides.  Now and then they exchanged a necessary word, but not more than once or twice in the morning.  If Lucia by any chance gave him an opening he ignored it.  He maintained a silence that was almost stern.