ade. He had
sacrificed honour and pride, and he had sacrificed them precisely to the
question of money. He would evidently, should he be able to go on, have
to continue to sacrifice them, but it must be all in the way to which
he had now, as he considered, hardened himself. He had spent years in
plotting for favour, and since on favour he must live it could only be
as a bargain and a price.

He got through the early part of the season better than we feared, and I
went down in great elation to spend Christmas on the goose-green.

He told me late on Christmas eve, after our simple domestic revels had
sunk to rest and we sat together by the fire, that he had been visited
the night before in wakeful hours by the finest fancy for a really good
thing that he had ever felt descend in the darkness. "It's just the
vision of a situation that contains, upon my honour, everything," he
said, "and I wonder that I've never thought of it before." He didn't
describe it further, contrary to his common practice, and I only knew
later, by Mrs. Limbert, that he had begun _Derogation_ and that he was
completely full of his subject. It was a subject however that he was
not to live to treat. The work went on for a couple of months in happy
mystery, without revelations even to his wife. He had not invited her to
help him to get up his case--she had not taken the field with him as on
his previous campaigns. We only knew he was at it again but that less
even than ever had been said about the impression to be made on the
market. I saw him in February and thought him sufficiently at ease. The
great thing was that he was immensely interested and was pleased with
the omens. I got a strange, stirring sense that he had not consulted
the usual ones and indeed that he had floated away into a grand
indifference, into a reckless consciousness of art. The voice of the
market had suddenly grown faint and far: he had come back at the last,
as people so often do, to one of the moods, the sincerities of his
prime. Was he really with a blurred sense of the urgent doing something
now only for himself? We wondered and waited--we felt that he was a
little confused. What had happened, I was afterwards satisfied, was that
he had quite forgotten whether he generally sold or not. He had merely
waked up one morning again in the country of the blue and had stayed
there with a good conscience and a great idea. He stayed till death
knocked at the gate, for the pen dropped