Mr. Rickman was undergoing a process of regeneration.

He would not have called it by so fine a name.  In fact, in its earlier stages he seemed to himself to be merely pushing to the point of mania a strong predilection for personal cleanliness.  He was first of all possessed, recklessly, ruinously, by a passion for immaculate shirts.  He had telegraphed to Spinks to send down all of his linen that he could lay his hands on; meanwhile he had supplied deficiencies at the local haberdashers.  At Mrs. Downey’s there was a low standard for the more slender particulars of the toilette, and Mr. Rickman had compared favourably with his fellow-boarders.  Now he looked back with incredulity and horror to his former self.  Since his person had been brought into daily contact with Miss Harden he had begun to bestow on it a solemn, almost religious care.  In the matter of the pocket handkerchief he practised an extreme ritual, permitting himself none but the finest lawn, which he changed after the first trivial crumpling.  The pocket-handkerchief being thus glorified and exalted in the hierarchy of dress, one source of painful misgiving was removed.

For the first few days he had been merely formal in this cult of the person.  Piety was appeased with external rites and symbols, with changes of vestment, excessive lustrations, and the like.  Now he had grown earnest, uncompromising, in his religion; and consistency entailed a further step.  Clearly his person, the object of such superstitious veneration, must be guarded from all unbecoming and ridiculous accidents; such an accident, for instance, as getting drunk.  If you came to think of it, few things could be more compromising to the person than that (Heavens! if Miss Harden had seen it last Wednesday night!).  And since any friendship with ladies of doubtful character might be considered equally derogatory from its dignity, he further resolved to eliminate (absolutely) Miss Poppy Grace.  He took no credit for these acts of renunciation.  They seemed to him no more morally meritorious than the removal of dust from his coat sleeves, or of ink-stains from his hands.

But though he exterminated the devil in him with so light a touch, it was gravely, tragically almost, that he turned to the expulsion of the Cockney.  Intoxication was an unlucky casualty; so, if you came to think of it, was a violent infatuation for Miss Poppy Grace; infinitely more disastrous, more humiliating, were the fatal habits of his speech.  Take the occasional but terrific destruction of the aitch.  It was worse than drink; it wrecked a man more certainly, more utterly beyond redemption and excuse.  It was anxiety on this point that partly accounted for his reserve.  He simply dared not talk about AEschylus or Euripides, because such topics were exciting, and excitement was apt to induce this lapse.

But most of all he dreaded the supreme agitation of love.  For he knew now perfectly well what had happened to him; though he had never known it happen to him in this manner before.  It was love as his heart had imagined it in the days before he became the thrall of Miss Poppy Grace.  He had known the feeling, but until now he had not known the woman who could inspire it.  It was as if his heart had renewed its primal virginity in preparation for some divine experience.