"Do you mean to give up Metropolis, then?"
"Well, no. That's asking rather too much."
"I know it is."
"Do you hate it so much, Lucia? I wish you didn't."
"I have hated it so much, Horace, that I once wished I had been a rich woman, that you might be"—she was going to say "an honourable man."
"What's wrong with it? It's a better paper than the old one. There are better men on it, and its editor's a better man."
"Is he?"
"Yes. He's a simpler, humbler person, and—I should have thought—more possible to like."
In her heart Lucia admitted that it was so. There was a charm about this later Horace Jewdwine which was wanting in that high spirit that had essayed to move the earth. He had come down from his chilly altitudes to mix with men; he had shed the superstition of omnipotence, he was aware of his own weakness and humanized by it. The man was soiled but softened by his traffic with the world. There was moreover an indescribable pathos in the contrast presented by the remains of the old self, its loftiness, its lucidity, and the vulgarity with which he had wrapped it round. Jewdwine's intellectual splendour had never been so impressive as now when it showed thus tarnished and obscured.
"At any rate," he went on, "he is infinitely less absurd. He knows his limitations. Also his mistakes. He tried to turn the republic of letters into a limited monarchy. Now he has surrendered to the omnipotence of facts."