isure for his own.

For one year he would be free from all sordid demands on his time and
energy. He would be free, for one year, from the shop and the
Quarterly Catalogue. He would enrich his mind, and improve his
manners, with travel, for one year. At the end of that year he would
know if there was anything in him.

In other words she would give the little man his chance.

The plan had the further advantage that it would have given her
grandfather pleasure if he could have known it. It was also to be
presumed that it would give pleasure to Horace Jewdwine, since it was
the very thing he himself had said he wished to do for Rickman. Of all
conceivable ways of spending Sir Joseph's money it was the fittest and
most beautiful. In its lesser way it was in line with the best
traditions of the family; for the Hardens had been known for
generations as the patrons of poor scholars and struggling men of
letters. And as Lucia inherited the intellect of her forefathers in a
more graceful, capricious and spontaneous form, so what in them had
been heavy patronage, appeared in her as the pleasure-giving instinct.
If she had inherited a large fortune along with it she would have been
a lady of lavish and indiscreet munificence.

By way of discretion she slept on her programme before finally
committing herself to it. In the morning discretion suggested that she
had better wait a week. She decided to act on that suggestion; at the
same time she stifled the inner voice which kept telling her that the
thing she was doing "to please Horace" would not really please him at
all.

She had already ignored the advice he had given her on one point; for
Horace had long ago told her plainly that there was no use in editing
their grandfather's posthumous works; that on any subject other than
textual criticism, Sir Joseph was absurd.

Meanwhile, by sympathy perhaps, Rickman also had become discreet. He
entered on his new week a new man. As if he had divined that he was on
his trial, he redoubled his prodigious efforts, he applied himself to
his hideous task with silent and concentrated frenzy. He seemed to
live and move and have his being in the catalogue _raisonne_. Whenever
Lucia had occasion to look up at him he was assiduous, rapid,
absorbed, He never stopped to talk about AEschylus and Euripides. Now
and then they exchanged a necessary word, but not more than once or
twice in the morning. If Lucia by any chance gave him an opening he
i