going through the experience without a shock.  Either he had been mistaken in Rickman, or Rickman had improved.  Shy he still was, but he had lost much of his old ungovernable nervousness, and gave Jewdwine the impression of an immense reserve.  He seemed to have entered into some ennobling possession which raised him above the region of small confusions and excitements.  His eye, when Jewdwine caught it, no longer struggled to escape; but it seemed to be held less by him than by its own controlling inner vision.

Jewdwine watched him narrowly.  It never entered into his head that what he was watching was the effect of three weeks’ intercourse with Lucia Harden.  He attributed it to Rickman’s deliverance from the shop.  To be sure Rickman did not strike him as particularly happy, but this again he accounted for by the depressing state of his finances.

Neither of them made the most distant allusion to Lucia.  Jewdwine was not aware of the extent of Rickman’s acquaintance with his cousin, neither could he well have conceived it.  And for Rickman it was not yet possible either to speak or to hear of Lucia without pain.

It was not until dinner was over, and Rickman was no longer eating Jewdwine’s food, that they ventured on the unpleasant topic that lay before them, conspicuous, though untouched.  Jewdwine felt that, as it was impossible to ignore what had passed between them since they had last met, the only thing was to refer to it as casually as might be.

“By the way, Rickman,” he said when they were alone in his study, “you were quite right about that library.  I only wish you could have let me know a little sooner.”

“I wish I had,” said Rickman, and his tone implied that he appreciated the painfulness of the subject.

There was a pause which Rickman broke by congratulating Jewdwine on his appointment.  This he did with a very pretty diffidence and modesty, which smoothed over the awkwardness of the transition, if indeed it did not convey an adroit suggestion of the insignificance of all other affairs.  The editor, still observing his unconscious candidate, was very favourably impressed.  He laid before him the views and aims of The Museion.

Yes; he thought it had a future before it.  He was going to make it the organ of philosophic criticism, as opposed to the mere personal view.  It would, therefore, be unique.  Yes; certainly it would also be unpopular.  Heaven forbid that anything he was concerned in should be popular.  It was sufficient that it should be impartial and incorruptible.  Its tone was to be sober and scholarly, but militant.  Rickman gathered that its staff were to be so many knights-errant defending the virtue of the English Language.  No loose slip-shod journalistic phrase would be permitted in its columns.  Its articles, besides being well reasoned, would be examples of the purity it preached.  It was to set its face sternly against Democracy, Commercialism and Decadence.