her sort, it was before all things
necessary that he should perserve his intellectual chastity. That
quality went deeper than the intellect; it was one with a sense of
honour so fine that a touch, impalpable to ordinary men, was felt by
it as a laceration and a stain. He walked up to Hampstead that Sunday
evening, taking the hill at a round swinging pace. Not all the ardour
and enthusiasm of his youth had ever carried him there with such an
impetus as did his burning indignation against Jewdwine. And as he
went the spirit of youth, the spirit of young Paterson, went beside
him and breathed upon the flame.

And yet he was the same man who only an hour ago had been defending
Jewdwine's honour at the expense of his own; without a thought that in
so defending it he was doing anything in the least quixotic or
remarkable. He had done nothing. He had simply refrained at a critical
moment from giving him away. Maddox was Jewdwine's enemy; and to have
given Jewdwine away at that moment would have meant delivering him
over to Maddox to destroy.

No; when he thought of it he could hardly say he had defended his
friend's honour at the expense of his own; for Jewdwine's honour was
Lucia's, and Lucia's was not Jewdwine's but his, indistinguishably,
inseparably his.

But though he was not going to give Jewdwine up to Maddox, he was
going to give him up. It might come to the same thing. He could
imagine that, to anybody who chose to put two and two together, an
open rupture would give him away as completely as if he had accused
him in so many words. That, of course he could not help. There was a
point beyond which his honour refused to identify itself with
Jewdwine's. He had never felt a moment's hesitation upon that point.
For in his heart he condemned his friend far more severely than Maddox
could have condemned anybody. He had a greater capacity for disgust
than Maddox. He would draw up, writhing at trifles over which Maddox
would merely shrug his shoulders and pass on. In this instance Maddox,
whose Celtic soul grew wanton at the prospect of a fight, would have
fallen upon Jewdwine with an infernal joy, but he would have been the
first to deprecate Rickman's decision as absurd. As for Rankin of
Stables, instead of flying into a passion they would, in similar
circumstances, have sat still and smiled.

If it had not been for young Paterson, Rickman would have smiled too,
even if he had been unable to sit still; for his vision of