supreme effort of his birth. On her own birth there had been something
in the nature of a slur. She had taken it to heart, and exhausted
herself in the endeavour to conceal from her very respectable husband
the shameful fact that she had once served as barmaid in a City
restaurant, and that she was the illegitimate daughter of a village
sempstress and a village squire. Isaac, before he dreamed of
greatness, had met her at a Band of Hope meeting, and had married her
because of her sweetness and pathetic beauty. She left to her boy her
fairness, her expressive face, her own nerves and her mother's
passion. Isaac and he were alike only in a certain slenderness, a
fleshless refinement of physique. Coarseness in grain, usually
revealed by the lower half of a man's countenance, had with the elder
Rickman taken up its abode in the superior, the intellectual region.
Isaac's eyes and forehead trafficked grossly with the world, while the
rest of his face preserved the stern reticences and sanctities of the
spirit. Isaac was a Wesleyan; and his dress (soft black felt hat,
smooth black frock-coat, narrow tie, black but clerical) almost
suggested that he was a minister of that persuasion. His lips were
hidden under an iron grey moustache, the short grizzled beard was
smoothed forward and fined to a point by the perpetual caress of a
meditative hand. Such was Isaac.

Impossible to deny a certain genius to the man who had raised that
mighty pile, the Gin Palace of Art. Those stately premises, with their
clustering lights, their carpeted floors, their polished fittings,
were very different from the dark little house in Paternoster Row
where Keith first saw what light there was to be seen. When Isaac grew
great and moved further west, the little shop was kept on and devoted
to the sale of Bibles, hymn-books and Nonconformist literature. For
Isaac, life was a compromise between the pious Wesleyan he was and the