compromised to the last degree.
The bosses of his ruddy face displayed all the quiverings and tortures
and suffusions of a smiling shame. He was, however, compensated for
the loss of personal dignity by a very substantial income. Not that at
first he would admit the compensation. "Ricky," he would say in the
voice of a man bowed and broken on the wheel of life, "you needn't
envy me my thousands. They are the measure of my abasement." Yet he
continued to abase himself. Nothing was more amazing than his
versatility. The public could hardly keep up with the flight of
Rankin's incarnations. Drawing-room comedy, pathetic pastoral,
fantastic adventure, slum idyll and medieval romance, it was all one
to Rankin. An infallible instinct told him which _genre_ should be
chosen at any given moment; a secret tocsin sounded far-off the hour
of his success. And still the spirit of Rankin held itself aloof; and
underneath his many disguises he remained a junior journalist. But
latterly (since his marriage with a rich City merchant's daughter) an
insidious seriousness had overtaken him; he began first to tolerate,
then to respect, then to revere the sources of his affluence. The old
ironic spirit was there to chastise him whenever he caught himself
doing it; but that spirit made discord with the elegant respectability
which was now the atmosphere of his home.

Rankin's drawing-room (where he was now waiting for Rickman) was
furnished with the utmost correctness in the purest Chippendale,
upholstered in silver and grey and lemon and rose brocade; it had grey
curtains, rose-lined, with a design of true lovers' knots in silver;
straight draperies of delicate immaculate white muslin veiled the
window-panes; for the feet an interminable stretch of grey velvet
carpet whose pattern lay on it like a soft shadow. Globes of electric
light drooped clustering under voluminously fluted shades. Rankin
himself looked grossly out of keeping with the scene. It was (and they
both knew it) simply the correct setting for his wife, who dominated
it, a young splendour of rose-pink and rose-white and jewelled laces
and gold.

Rickman, after many weeks' imprisonment between four dirty yellow
ochre walls, was bewildered with the space, the colours, the perfumes,
the illumination. He was suffering from a curious and, it seemed to
him, insane illusion, the illusion of distance, the magnifying of the
spaces he had got to traverse, and as he entered Mrs. Rankin's