He took up his hat.  I assured him, and let him take it in what sense he liked, that I would do so; and he left me.

Not for one single moment did I intend that they should bounce me like that.  With or without their sanction and countenance, I intended to write and publish that “Life.”  Schofield—­in my own house too—­had had the advantage that a poor and ill-dressed man has over one who is not poor and ill-dressed; but my duty first of all was neither to him nor to Maschka, but to my friend.

The worst of it was, however, that I had begun dimly to suspect that the Lancastrian had hit at least one nail on the head.  “Your artistic soul’s only to be saved by writing poor Michael’s ‘Life,’” he had informed me... and it was truer than I found it pleasant to believe.  Perhaps, after all, my first duty was not to Andriaovsky, but to myself.  I could have kicked myself that the fool had been perspicacious enough to see it, but that did not alter the fact.  I saw that in the sense in which Andriaovsky understood Sin, I had sinned....

My only defence lay in the magnitude of my sin.  I had sinned thoroughly, out-and-out, and with a will.  It had been the only respectable way—­Andriaovsky’s own way when he had cut the company of an Academician to hobnob with a vagabond.  I had at least instituted no comparison, lowered no ideal, was innocent of the accursed attitude of facing-both-ways that degrades all lovely and moving things.  I was, by a paradox, too black a sinner not to hope for redemption....

I fell into a long musing on these things....

Had any of the admirers of Martin Renard entered the library of his author that night he would have seen an interesting thing.  He would have seen the creator of that idol of clerks and messenger-lads and fourth-form boys frankly putting the case before a portrait propped up on a chair.  He would have heard that popular author haranguing, pleading, curiously on his defence, turning the thing this way and that.

“If you’d gone over, Michael,” that author argued, “you’d have done precisely the same thing.  If I’d stuck it out, we were, after all, of a kind; We’ve got to be one thing or the other—­isn’t that so, Andriaovsky?  Since I made up my mind, I’ve faced only one way—­only one way.  I’ve kept your ideal and theirs entirely separate and distinct.  Not one single beautiful phrase will you find in the Martin Renards; I’ve cut ’em out, every one.  I may have ceased to worship, but I’ve profaned no temple....  And think what I might have done—­what they all do!  They deal out the slush, but with an apologetic glance at the Art Shades; you know the style!—­’Oh, Harrison; he does that detective rubbish, but that’s not Harrison; if Harrison liked to drop that he could be a fine artist!’—­I haven’t done that.  I haven’t run with the hare and hunted with the hounds.  I am just Harrison, who does that detective rubbish!...