omething in her face, her dress, her attitude,
that appealed to the authority on AEsthetics. He found himself
wondering how it would be if he got up and kissed her. But just then
Lucia leaned back in her chair, and there was that tired look in her
face which he had come to dread. He thought better of it. If he had
kissed her his sense of propriety would have obliged him to propose to
her and marry her.

He almost wished he had yielded to that temptation, done that
desperate deed. It would have at least settled the question once for
all.

For Jewdwine had found himself a third time at the turning of the
ways. He knew where he was; but not where he was going. It had
happened with Jewdwine as it had with Isaac Rickman; as it happens to
every man bent on serving two masters. He had forbidden his right hand
all knowledge of his left. He lived in two separate worlds. In one,
lit by the high, pure light of the idea, he stood comparatively alone,
cheered in his intellectual solitude by the enthusiasm of his
disciples. For in the minds of a few innocent young men Horace
Jewdwine's reputation remained immortal; and these made a point of
visiting the Master in his house at Hampstead. He allowed the souls of
these innocent young men to appear before him in an undress; for them
he still kept his lamp well trimmed, handing on the sacred
imperishable flame. Some suffered no painful disenchantment for their
pilgrimage; and when the world that knew Jewdwine imparted to them its
wisdom they smiled the mystic smile of the initiated. But many had
become shaken in their faith. One of these, having achieved a little
celebrity, without (as he discovered to his immense astonishment) any
public assistance from the Master, had gone to Rickman and asked him
diffidently for the truth about Jewdwine. Rickman had assured him that
the person in the study, the inspired and inspiring person with the
superhuman insight, who knew your thoughts before you had time to
round your sentence, the person who in that sacred incommunicable
privacy had praised your work, he was the real Jewdwine. "But," he had
added, "everybody can't afford to be himself." And this had been
Jewdwine's own confession and defence.

But now he had gone down into Devonshire, as Rickman had once gone
before him, to find himself. He had returned to Lucia as to his own
purer soul. That night Jewdwine sat up face to face with himself and
all his doubts; his problem being far more comp