Something of this feeling was apparent in the manner of her refusal; and Jewdwine caught the note of disaffection.  He was not sure whether he still loved his cousin, but he could not bear that his self-love should thus perish through her bad opinion.  It was in something of his old imperial mood that he approached her the next morning with the proofs of his great article on “Keith Rickman and the Modern Drama.”  There the author of the Prolegomena to AEsthetics, the apostle of the Absolute, the opponent of Individualism, had made his recantation.  He touched with melancholy irony on the rise and fall of schools; and declared, as Rickman had declared before him, that “in modern art what we have to reckon with is the Man Himself.”  That utterance, he flattered himself, was not unbecoming in the critic who could call himself Keith Rickman’s friend.  For Rickman had been his discovery in the beginning; only he had lost sight of him in between.

He was immensely solemn over it.  “I think that is what I should have said.”

“Yes, Horace; it is what you should have said long ago when he needed it; but not now.”

He turned from her and shut himself up in his study with his article, his eulogy of Rickman.  He had had pleasure in writing it, but the reading was intolerable pain.  He knew that Lucia saw both it and him with the cold eye of the Absolute.  There was no softening, no condonement in her gaze; and none in his bitter judgement of himself.  Up till now there had been moments in which he persuaded himself that he was justified in his changes of attitude.  If his conscience joined with his enemies in calling him a time-server, what did it mean but that in every situation he had served his time?  He had grown opulent in experience, espousing all the fascinating forms of truth.  And did not the illuminated, the supremely philosophic mood consist in just this openness, this receptivity, this infinite adaptability, in short?  Why should he, any more than Rickman, be bound by the laws laid down in the Prolegomena to AEsthetics?  The Prolegomena to AEsthetics was not a work that one could set aside with any levity; still, in constructing it he had been building a lighthouse for the spirit, not a prison.

But now he became the prey of a sharper, more agonizing insight, an insight that oscillated between insufferable forms of doubt.  Was it possible that he, the author of the Prolegomena, had ceased to care about the Truth?  Or was it that the philosophy of the Absolute had never taken any enormous hold on him?  He had desired to be consistent as he was incorruptible.  Did his consistency amount to this, that he, the incorruptible, had been from first to last the slave of whatever opinion was dominant in his world?  Loyal only to whatever theory best served his own ungovernable egoism?  In Oxford he had cut a very imposing figure by his philosophic attitude.  In London he had found that the same