Meanwhile Rickman seemed to be settling down fairly comfortably to the work of The Museion; and Jewdwine, having other things to think of, began to forget his existence.  He was in fact rapidly realizing his dream.  He had won for himself and his paper a position lonely and unique.  The reputation of The Museion was out of all proportion to its circulation, but Jewdwine was making himself heard.  As an editor and critic he was respected for his incorruptibility and for the purity of his passion for literature.  His utterances were considered to carry authority and weight.

Just at first the weight was perhaps the more conspicuous quality of the two.  Jewdwine could not be parted from his “Absolute.”  He had lived with it for years in Oxford, and he brought it up to town with him; it walked beside him on the London pavements and beckoned him incessantly into the vast inane.  It cut a very majestic figure in his columns, till some irritable compositor docked it of its capital and compelled it to march with the rank and file of vulgar adjectives.  Even thus degraded it ruled his paragraphs as it ruled his thoughts.

But lately the review seemed to be making efforts to redeem itself from the charge of heaviness.  In certain of its columns there was a curious radiance and agitation, as of some winged and luminous creature struggling against obscurity; and it was felt that Jewdwine was binding in a pious tradition of dulness a spirit that would otherwise have danced and flown.  Whether it was his own spirit or somebody else’s did not definitely appear; but now and again it broke loose altogether, and then, when people complimented him on the brilliance of his appearance that week, he smiled inscrutably.

It was impossible to say how far Jewdwine’s conscience approved of these outbursts of individuality.  Certainly he did his best to restrain them, his desire being to give to his columns a distinguished unity of form.  He saw himself the founder of a new and higher school of journalism, thus satisfying his undying tutorial instincts.  He had chosen his staff from the most promising among the young band of disciples who thronged his lecture-room at Oxford; men moulded on his methods, inspired by his ideals, drenched in his metaphysics; crude young men of uncontrollable enthusiasm, whose style awaited at his hands the final polishing.

He knew that he had done a risky thing in associating young Rickman with them in this high enterprise.  But under all his doubts there lay a faith in the genius of his sub-editor, a faith the more fascinating because it was so far removed from any certainty.  In giving Rickman his present post he conceived himself not only to be paying a debt of honour, but doing the best possible thing for The Museion.  It was also, he considered, the best possible thing for Rickman.  His work on the review would give him the discipline he most needed, the discipline he had never had.  To be brought into line with an august tradition; to be caught up out of the slough of modern journalism into a rarer atmosphere; to breathe the eternal spirit of great literature (a spirit which according to Jewdwine did not blow altogether where it listed); to have his too exuberant individuality chastened and controlled, would be for Rickman an unspeakable benefit at this critical stage of his career.