ng into account his
remarkable firmness of physique, it struck you that this transparency
must be due to some excessive radiance of soul. A soul (in Jewdwine's
opinion) a trifle too demonstrative in its hospitality to vagrant
impressions. The Junior Journalists may have been a little hard on
him. On the whole, he left you dubious until the moment when, from
pure nervousness, his speech went wild, even suffering that slight
elision of the aspirate observed by some of them. But then, he had a
voice of such singular musical felicity that it charmed you into
forgetfulness of these enormities.

It had charmed Jewdwine from the first, and Jewdwine was hard to
charm. There was no room for speculation as to him. Even to the eye
his type had none of the uncertainty and complexity of Rickman's. He
looked neither more nor less than he was--an Oxford don, developing
into a London Journalist. You divined that the process would be slow.
There was no unseemly haste about Jewdwine; time had not been spared
in the moulding of his body and his soul. He bore the impress of the
ages; the whole man was clean-cut, aristocratic, finished, defined.
You instinctively looked up to him; which was perhaps the reason why
you remembered his conspicuously intellectual forehead and his
pathetically fastidious nose, and forgot the vacillating mouth that
drooped under a scanty, colourless moustache, hiding its weakness out
of sight.

Rickman had always looked up to him. For Jewdwine, as Rankin had
intimated, was the man who had discovered S.K.R. He was always
discovering him. Not, as he was careful to inform you, that this
argued any sort of intimacy; on the contrary, it meant that he was
always losing sight of him in between. These lapses in their
intercourse might be shorter or longer (they were frequently immense),
but they had this advantage, that each fresh encounter presented
Rickman as an entirely new thing, if anything, more curious and
interesting than on the day, three years ago, when he unearthed him
from behind the counter of a dingy second-hand bookshop in the City.
He felt responsible for that, too.

Rickman was instantly aware that he was under criticism. But he
mistook its nature and its grounds.

"Don't suppose," said he, "I'm ashamed of the shop. It isn't that. I
wasn't ashamed of our other place--that little rat 'ole in the City."

Jewdwine shuddered through all his being.

"--But I _am_ ashamed of this gaudy, pink concern. It