"Afraid to do your duty as a critic and as a friend?"
"My first duty is to the public—my public; not to my friends. Savage Keith Rickman may be a very great poet—I think he is—but if my public doesn't want to hear about Savage Keith Rickman, I can't insist on their hearing, can I?"
"No, Horace, after all you've told me, I don't believe you can."
"Mind you, it takes courage, of a sort, to own it."
"I'm to admire your frankness, am I? You say you're afraid. But you said just now you had such power."
"If I had taken your advice and devoted myself to the rôle of Vates I should have lost my power. Nobody would have listened to me. I began that way, by preaching over people's heads. The Museion was a pulpit in the air. I stood in that pulpit for five years, spouting literary transcendentalism. Nobody listened. When I condescended to come down and talk about what people could understand then everybody listened. It wouldn't have done Rickman any good if I'd pestered people with him. But when the time comes I shall speak out."
"I daresay, when the time comes—it will come too—when he has made his name with no thanks to you, then you'll be the first to say 'I told you so.' It would have been a greater thing to have helped him when he needed it."
"I did help him. He wouldn't be writing now if it wasn't for me."
"Do you see much of him?"
"Not much. It isn't my fault," he added in answer to her reproachful eyes. "He's shut himself up with Maddox in a stuffy little house at Ealing."