As for Rickman--
Lucia had taken a great deal of pains with that part of her subject,
for she was determined to do justice to it. She was aware that it was
open to her to take the ordinary practical view of Rickman as a
culpable blunderer, who, by holding his tongue when he should have
spoken, had involved her in the loss of much valuable property. To an
ordinary practical woman the fact that this blunder had entailed such
serious consequences to herself would have made any other theory
impossible. But Lucia was not a woman who could be depended on for any
ordinary practical view. Mere material issues could never confuse her
estimate of spiritual values. To her, Rickman's conduct in that
instance was a flaw in honour, and as such she had already
sufficiently judged it. The significant thing was that he too should
have so judged it; that he should have been capable of such profound
suffering in the thought of it.
And now, somehow, it didn't seem to her to count.
It simply disappeared in her final pure and luminous view of Rickman's
character. What really counted was the alertness of his whole attitude
to honour, his readiness to follow the voice of his own ultimate
vision, to repudiate the unclean thing revealed in its uncleanness;
above all, what counted was his passionate sincerity. With her
unerring instinct of selection Lucia had again seized on the
essential. The triumph of Rickman's greater qualities appealed to her
as a spectacle; it was not spoiled for her by the reflection that she
personally had been more affected by his failure.
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