They must
continue to think that he had sold or at any rate lent himself at
interest to Jewdwine. Honour debarred him from all explanation and
defence, an honour so private and personal that it must remain
unsuspected by the world. In the beginning he had made himself almost
unpleasantly conspicuous by the purity of his literary morals; his
innocence had been a hair-lifting spectacle even to honest
journalists. And now the fame he would have among them was the fame of
a literary prostitute, without a prostitute's wages.
On the contrary he would have to pay heavily for the spiritual luxury
of that break with the editor of _Metropolis_. When he reached his
comfortable room on the third floor in Torrington Square, he sat down
by his writing-table, not to write but to think. It was war-time,
fatal to letters. Such terrors arose before him as must arise before a
young man severed by his own rash act from the sources of his income.
What a moment he had chosen for the deed, too! When money was of all
things the thing he most passionately desired; when to his fancy the
sum of a hundred and seventy-five pounds was the form that most
nearly, most divinely presented the adored perfection; when, too, that
enchanting figure was almost in his grasp. A few brief spasms of
economy, and ten months of _Metropolis_ would have seen him through.
And yet there was no bitterness in the dismay with which he
contemplated his present forlorn and impecunious state.
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