t Jewdwine had no need of theories or explanations. He understood.
He knew that a certain prejudice, not to say suspicion, attached to
him. Ideas, not very favourable to his character as a journalist, were
in the air. And as his mind (in this respect constitutionally
susceptible) had seldom been able to resist ideas in the air there
were moments when his own judgment wavered. He was beginning to
suspect himself.

He was not sure, and if he had been he would not have acted on that
certainty; for he had never possessed the courage of his opinions. But
it had come to this, that Jewdwine, the pure, the incorruptible, was
actually uncertain whether he had or had not taken a bribe. As he lay
awake in bed at four o'clock in the morning his conscience would
suggest to him that he had done this thing; but at noon, in the office
of _Metropolis_, his robust common sense, then like the sun, in the
ascendant, boldly protested that he had done nothing of the sort. He
had merely made certain not very unusual concessions to the interests
of his journal. In doing so he had of course set aside his artistic
conscience, an artistic conscience being a private luxury incompatible
with the workings of a large corporate concern. He was bound to
disregard it in loyalty to his employers and his public. They expected
certain things of him and not others. It was different in the
unexciting days of the old _Museion_; it would be different now if he
could afford to run a paper of his own dedicated to the service of
the Absolute. But Jewdwine was no longer the servant of the Absolute.
He was the servant and the mouthpiece of a policy that in his heart he
abhorred; irretrievably committed to a programme that was concerned
with no absolute beyond the absolute necessity of increasing the
circulation of _Metropolis_. Such a journal only existed on the
assumption that its working expenses were covered by the
advertisements of certain publishing houses. But if this necessity
committed him to a more courteous attitude than he might otherwise
have adopted towards the works issued by those houses, that was not
saying that he was in their pay. He was, of course, in the pay of his
own publishers, but so was every man who drew a salary under the same
conditions; and if those gentlemen, finding their editor an even more
competent person than they had at first perceived, were in the habit
of increasing his salary in proportion to his competence, that was
only the