‘And you?—­Come to live in London?’

’No; I am at Bristol, but only waiting.  There’s a chance of an analyst’s place in Lancashire; but I may give the preference to an opening I have heard of in Belgium.  Better to go abroad, I think.’

‘Perhaps so.’

’I have a question to ask you.  I suppose you talked about that Critical article of mine before you received my request for silence?’

‘That’s how it was,’ Earwaker replied, calmly.

‘Yes; I understood.  It doesn’t matter.’

The other puffed at his pipe, and moved uneasily.

‘I am taking for granted,’ Peak continued, ’that you know how I have spent my time down in Devonshire.’

‘In outline.  Need we trouble about the details?’

’No.  But don’t suppose that I should feel any shame in talking to you about them.  That would be a confession of base motive.  You and I have studied each other, and we can exchange thoughts on most subjects with mutual understanding.  You know that I have only followed my convictions to their logical issue.  An opportunity offered of achieving the supreme end to which my life is directed, and what scruple could stand in my way?  We have nothing to do with names and epithets. Here are the facts of life as I had known it; there is the existence promised as the reward of successful artifice.  To live was to pursue the object of my being.  I could not feel otherwise; therefore, could not act otherwise.  You imagine me defeated, flung back into the gutter.’  His words came more quickly, and the muscles of his face worked under emotion.  ’It isn’t so.  I have a great and reasonable hope.  Perhaps I have gained everything I really desired.  I could tell you the strangest story, but there a scruple does interpose.  If we live another twenty years—­but now I can only talk about myself.’

‘And this hope of which you speak,’ said Earwaker, with a grave smile, ’points you at present to sober work among your retorts and test-tubes?’

‘Yes, it does.’

‘Good.  Then I can put faith in the result.’

‘Yet the hope began in a lie,’ rejoined Peak, bitterly.  ’It will always be pleasant to look back upon that, won’t it?  You see:  by no conceivable honest effort could I have gained this point.  Life utterly denied to me the satisfaction of my strongest instincts, so long as I plodded on without cause of shame; the moment I denied my faith, and put on a visage of brass, great possibilities opened before me.  Of course I understand the moralist’s position.  It behoved me, though I knew that a barren and solitary track would be my only treading to the end, to keep courageously onward.  If I can’t believe that any such duty is imposed upon me, where is the obligation to persevere, the morality of doing so?  That is the worst hypocrisy.  I have been honest, inasmuch as I have acted in accordance with my actual belief.’