s discovery in
the beginning; only he had lost sight of him in between.

He was immensely solemn over it. "I think that is what I should have
said."

"Yes, Horace; it is what you should have said long ago when he needed
it; but not now."

He turned from her and shut himself up in his study with his article,
his eulogy of Rickman. He had had pleasure in writing it, but the
reading was intolerable pain. He knew that Lucia saw both it and him
with the cold eye of the Absolute. There was no softening, no
condonement in her gaze; and none in his bitter judgement of himself.
Up till now there had been moments in which he persuaded himself that
he was justified in his changes of attitude. If his conscience joined
with his enemies in calling him a time-server, what did it mean but
that in every situation he had served his time? He had grown opulent
in experience, espousing all the fascinating forms of truth. And did
not the illuminated, the supremely philosophic mood consist in just
this openness, this receptivity, this infinite adaptability, in short?
Why should he, any more than Rickman, be bound by the laws laid down
in the _Prolegomena to AEsthetics_? The _Prolegomena to AEsthetics_ was
not a work that one could set aside with any levity; still, in
constructing it he had been building a lighthouse for the spirit, not
a prison.

But now he became the prey of a sharper, more agonizing insight, an
insight that oscillated between insufferable forms of doubt. Was it
possible that he, the author of the _Prolegomena_, had ceased to care
about the Truth? Or was it that the philosophy of the Absolute had
never taken any enormous hold on him? He had desired to be consistent
as he was incorruptible. Did his consistency amount to this, that he,
the incorruptible, had been from first to last the slave of whatever
opinion was dominant in his world? Loyal only to whatever theory best
served his own ungovernable egoism? In Oxford he had cut a very
imposing figure by his philosophic attitude. In London he had found
that the same attitude rendered him unusual, not to say ridiculous.
Had the Absolute abandoned him, or had he abandoned the Absolute, when
it no longer ministered to his personal prestige? Jewdwine was aware
that, however it was, his case exemplified the inevitable collapse of
a soul nourished mainly upon formulas. Yet behind that moral wreckage
there remained the far-off source of spiritual illumination, the inner
soul tha