saac thought he had estimated pretty
accurately the value of his son's contribution; but it was only in
the actual experiment of separation that he realized the difference it
had made.

The immediate effect of the blow was to paralyse the second-hand
department. As far as new books went Isaac was fairly safe. If the
Public was tricky he was generally up to its tricks. But with
second-hand books you never knew where you were, not unless you had
made a special study of the subject. Owing to his defective education
he had always been helpless in the second-hand shop; liable at any
moment to be over-reached by one of those innocent, lantern-jawed
student fellows who go poking their noses everywhere.

And in buying he was still more at a disadvantage. He had grown
nervous in the auction-room; he never knew what to do there, and when
he did it, it was generally wrong. He would let himself be outbidden
where Keith would have carried all before him by a superb if reckless
persistence.

But if business was at its worst in the second-hand department, in the
front shop there was a sense of a sadder and more personal desolation.
Rickman's was no longer sought after. It had ceased to be the
rendezvous of affable young men from Fleet Street and the Temple. The
customers who came nowadays were of another sort, and the tone of the
business was changing for the worse. The spirit, that something
illuminating, intimate, and immortal, had perished from the place.

At first Isaac had not been able to take its departure seriously. He
had never really grasped the ground of that disagreement with his son;
he had put it all down to "some nonsense about a woman"; and certain
hints dropped by Pilkington supported him in that belief. Keith, he
had said to himself, would come back when his belly pinched him. Every
day he looked to see him crawling through the big swinging doors on
that empty belly. When he did it, Isaac meant to take him back
instantly, unquestioned, unreproved and unreproached. His triumph
would be so complete that he could afford that magnanimity. But Keith
had not come back; he had never put his nose inside the shop from that
day to this. He called to see his father now and again on a Sunday
(for Isaac no longer refused to admit him into his house); and then,
as if in obedience to the holy conventions that ruled in the little
villa at Ilford in Essex, no allusion was made to the business that
had driven them apart. In the s