erfectly well
that he thought them little men, and they delighted in their great man
all the same, more than ever, in fact, since his new suit of morals
provided them with a subject of eternal jest. For Maddox was but
human, and he had found Rickman's phrase too pregnant with humour to
be lost. They were sometimes very funny, those Junior Journalists,
especially on a Saturday night. But Rickman was not interested in the
unseemly obstacle race they dignified by the name of a career, and he
did not care to mix too freely with young men so little concerned
about removing the dirt and sweat of it. He clung to Maddox and Rankin
as the strongest and the cleanest of them all. But even they had
inspirations that left him cold, and they thought many things large
and important that were too small for him to see. He would have died
rather than let either of them know what he was doing now. He saw with
dismay that they suspected him of doing something, that their
suspicions excited them most horribly, that they were watching him;
and he had told Maddox that what he desired most was peace and
quietness.

He found it in the Secret Chamber of the Muse, where he shut himself
up when his work with them was done. In there, his days and nights
were as the days and nights of God. There he forecast the schemes of
dramas yet to be, dramas no longer neo-classic. And as his genius
foresaw the approach of its maturity, it purified and emptied itself
of the personal passion that obscures the dramatist's vision of the
world. This it did in a sequence of Nine and Twenty sonnets, a golden
chain that bound Lucia's name to his whether she would or no. They
recorded nine and twenty moments in the life of his passion, from the
day of its birth up to the present hour, the hour of its purification.

For it was still young in him; though at this distance of time Lucia's
image was no longer one and indivisible. He had come to think of her
as two persons clothed mysteriously in the same garment of flesh. One
carried that garment a little more conspicuously than the other; it
was by her beauty that she pierced him with the pain of longing; and
not by her beauty only, but by the marks of suffering that in his
memory still obscured it. She came before him, and her tragic eyes
reproached him with the intolerable pathos of her fate, making him
suffer too, through his exceeding pity. And yet his longing had not
been consumed by pity, but had mingled with it as