ore
the appearance of the other half. But if you _had_ to publish, why
couldn't you bring out your _Helen in Leuce_? It was far finer than
anything you have here."

"Yes. Helen's all right _now_." His tone implied only too plainly that
she was not all right when Jewdwine had approved of her.

"_Now?_ What on earth have you been doing to her?"

"Only putting a little life into her limbs. But Vaughan wouldn't have
her at any price."

"My dear Rickman, you should have come to _me_. I hope to goodness
Vaughan won't tempt you into any more _Saturnalia_."

"After all--what's wrong with them?"

Jewdwine leaned back, keenly alive to these stirrings of dissent; he
withdrew, as it were, his protecting presence a foot or two farther.
He spoke slowly and with emphasis.

"Excess," said he; "too much of everything. Too much force, too much
fire, and too much smoke with your fire. In other words, too much
temperament, too much Rickman."

"Too much Rickman?"

"Yes; far too much. It's nothing but a flaming orgy of individuality."

"And that's why it's all wrong?" He really wondered whether there
might not be something in that view after all.

"It seems so to me. Look here, my dear fellow. Because a poet happens
to have been drunk once or twice in his life it's no reason why he
should write a poem called _Intoxication_. That sort of exhibition,
you know, is scandalous."

Rickman hung his head. That one poem he would have given anything at
the moment to recall. It _was_ scandalous if you came to think of it.
Only in the joy of writing it he had not thought of it; that was all.

"It's simply astounding in a splendid scholar like you, Rickman. It's
such an awful waste." He looked at him as he spoke, and his soul was
in his eyes. It gave him a curious likeness to his cousin, and in that
moment Rickman worshipped him. "Go back. Go back to your Virgil and
your Homer and your Sophocles, and learn a little more restraint.
There's nothing like them. They'll take you out of this ugly, weary,
modern world where you and I, Rickman, had no business to be born."

"And yet," said Rickman, "there _are_ modern poets."

"There are very few, and those not the greatest. By modern, I mean
inspired by the modern spirit; and the modern spirit does not inspire
great poetry. The greatest have been obliged to go back--back to
primeval nature, back to the Middle Ages, back to Greece and Rome--but
always back."

"I can't go back," said Rickman.