hen you asked me if I was a poet. _I_
was serious enough when I said I didn't know."

Something passed over Lucia's face, a ripple of shadow and flame, some
moving of the under currents of the soul that told him that he was
understood, that something had happened there, something that for the
moment permitted him to be personal.

"What made you say so?"

"I can't tell you. Not natural modesty. I'm modest about some things,
but not about that."

"Yet surely you must know?"

"I did yesterday."

"Yesterday?"

"Yesterday--last night; in fact up to eleven o'clock this morning I
firmly believed that I had genius, or something uncommonly like it. I
still believe that I _had_ it."

He seemed to himself to have become almost grossly personal; but to
Lucia he had ceased to be personal at all; he had passed into the
region of realities; and in so passing had become intensely
interesting. To Lucia, with the blood of ten generations of scholars
in her veins, the question of a man's talent was supremely important;
the man himself might not matter, but his talent mattered very much;
to discuss it with him was entirely natural and proper. So she never
once stopped to ask herself why she was standing on Harcombe Hill,
holding this really very intimate conversation with Mr. Rickman.

"The things," he continued, "the things I've written prove it. I can
say so without the smallest conceit, because I haven't it now, and
never shall have it again. I feel as if it had belonged to somebody
else."

Mr. Rickman was losing all likeness to his former self. He spoke no
longer impulsively, but in the steady deliberate tones of unalterable
conviction. And Lucia no longer heard the Cockney accent in this voice
that came to her out of a suffering so lucid and so profound. She
forgot that it came from the other side of the social gulf. If at any
point in that conversation she had thought of dismissing him, she
could not have dismissed him now. There was very little use in having
saved his neck if she abandoned him to his misery.

Instead of abandoning him she sat down on a rough seat by the roadside
to consider Mr. Rickman's case in all its bearings. In doing so she
found herself for the first time contemplating his personal appearance
as such; and that not altogether with disapproval. Though it was not
in the least what she would have expected, he showed to advantage in
the open air. She began to perceive the secret of his extravagant an