"

"To you for one. To every one, I think, who knows him. They'll bear me
out."

"The people who know him? What was the good of that? You should have
said it to the people who don't know him--to the world."

"You mean I should have posed as a prophet?"

"I mean that what you said you might have written."

"Ah, _litera scripta manet_. It isn't safe to prophesy. Remember, I
saw him a very long way off. Nobody had a notion there was anybody
there."

"You could have given them a notion."

"I couldn't. The world, Lucia, is not like you or me. It has no
imagination. It wouldn't have seen, and it wouldn't have believed. I
should have been a voice crying in the wilderness; a voice and nothing
behind it. And as I said prophecy is a dangerous game. In the first
place, there is always a chance that your prediction may be wrong; and
the world, my dear cousin, has a nasty way of stoning its prophets
even when they're right."

"Oh, I thought it provided them with bread and butter, plenty of
butter."

"It does, on the condition that they shall prophesy buttery things.
When it comes to hard things, if they ask for bread the world
retaliates and offers them a stone. And that stone, I need not tell
you, has no butter on it."

"I see. You were afraid. You haven't the courage of your opinion."

"And I haven't much opinion of my courage. I own to being afraid."

"Afraid to do your duty as a critic and as a friend?"

"My first duty is to the public--_my_ public; not to my friends.
Savage Keith Rickman may be a very great poet--I think he is--but if
my public doesn't want to hear about Savage Keith Rickman, I can't
insist on their hearing, can I?"

"No, Horace, after all you've told me, I don't believe you can."

"Mind you, it takes courage, of a sort, to own it."

"I'm to admire your frankness, am I? You say you're afraid. But you
said just now you had such power."

"If I had taken your advice and devoted myself to the role of Vates I
should have lost my power. Nobody would have listened to me. I began
that way, by preaching over people's heads. The _Museion_ was a pulpit
in the air. I stood in that pulpit for five years, spouting literary
transcendentalism. Nobody listened. When I condescended to come down
and talk about what people could understand then everybody listened.
It wouldn't have done Rickman any good if I'd pestered people with
him. But when the time comes I shall speak out."

"I daresay, when the time co