Keith upon the
Lord an immense burden of responsibility was slipped from his
conscience; and by the time Monday morning came round Isaac was again
convinced that he had made the very best arrangements.

For not only was the state of Keith's soul a reproach to Isaac's
conscience, but the brilliance of Keith's intellect was a terror to
it. Any day that same swift illuminating power might be turned on to
the dark places in his own soul, showing up the deplorable
discrepancies between his inner and his outer life. He wanted his son
and everybody else to think well of him, and Keith's lucid sincerity
at times appalled him. He had not yet discovered that his protection
was in the very thing he feared. Keith was so recklessly single-minded
that it never occurred to him that his father could lead a double
life; he never doubted for an instant that, as in his own case, the
Saturday to Monday state revealed the real man. He, Keith, sat so
lightly to the business and with so detached a mind, that he simply
could not imagine how any human being could be so wedded to a thing in
itself uninteresting as to sacrifice to it any immortal chances. The
book trade was not a matter for high spiritual romance; it was simply
the way they got their living, as honest a way as any other, taking it
all round. The shop was one thing, and his father was another. In
fact, so far from identifying them, he was inclined to pity his father
as a fellow-victim of the tyranny and malignity of the shop.

But when in his right mind he had no grudge whatever against the shop.
He had been born over the shop, nursed behind the shop, and the shop
had been his schoolroom ever since he could spell. It was books found
in the shop and studied in the shop that first opened his eyes to the
glory of the world, as he sat on the step-ladder, reading his
Shakespeare or puzzling out his first Greek by the light of a single
gas-flare; and for the sake of these things he had a tender
recollection of Paternoster Row. It was to Rickman's that he owed his
education. Doggedly at first and afterwards mechanically,
abstractedly, he got through the work he had to do. At times he even
appreciated with a certain enjoyment the exquisite irony of his fate.
Perhaps, when it came to the Gin Palace of Art, he had felt that the
thing was getting almost beyond a joke. He had not been prepared for
that lurid departure. He did not realize that he was in it, that his
father had staked, not on