And because he was a poet, and knew himself a poet,
because he had sinned chiefly through his imagination, it was through
his imagination that he suffered, so that the horror was supreme. For
all the while, though Shame was there, his ideas were there too,
somewhere, the divine thoughts and the proud beautiful dreams, and the
great pure loves, winged and veiled; they stood a long way off and
turned away their faces from him, and that was the worst punishment he
had to bear.
Which meant that as Savage Keith Rickman lay in bed the morning after
that glorious April night, he knew that he had been making an April
fool of himself. He knew it by the pain in his head and other
disagreeable signs; also by the remarkable fact that he still wore the
shirt and trousers of the day.
And he knew that in spite of the pain he would have to get up and go
down to breakfast as if nothing had happened; he would have to meet
Mr. Spinks' eyes twinkling with malign intelligence, and Flossie's
wondering looks, and Mrs. Downey's tender womanly concern, as he
turned white over the bacon and the butter. He didn't know which were
worse, the knowing eyes or the innocent ones. He had to be at the shop
by nine o'clock, too, to force that poor, dizzy, aching head of his to
its eight hours' work.
In this unnerved, attenuated state, this mortal paleness of mind and
body, it was terrible to have to face the robust reality of
"Rickman's".
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