He did not feel at all noble. On the contrary, very ignominiously disappointed. His iridescent scheme had vanished like a soap-bubble. Geoffrey Colman had intimated, in his letter, with much deprecatory circumlocution, that, on looking lately into his affairs, he found them by no means as prosperous as he had imagined; there were depreciations in lands, unlucky investments, mortgages; in fine, much as he had desired it, he would be able to do nothing at all for Hugh. And then he was practically moribund. Hugh shrugged off the disappointment. To ask his sisters for a loan out of their comparatively small fortune, upon no security more tangible than the promise of his brotherly efforts to repay them, was absolutely impossible. One comfort remained, for which he thanked the god of chance: the opportune arrival of the letter had effectually precluded his proposal. He returned to London, where a sudden stress of work awaited him. But the briefs of a criminal advocate, chiefly engaged in small cases, are not marked very high. Moreover, ill-luck attended him. After three of his clients were convicted, he made desperate efforts to secure a favourable verdict for a fourth, and his failure roused his exasperation. His book of poems came out just at this time, to be less glowingly received by literary journals than the two previous ones. They complained of tenuity of thought, over-elaboration; advised, finally, a robuster view, a franker acceptance of the emotional facts of life. He threw his press-cuttings angrily into the waste-paper basket. What did the fools know about it? It was the only sphere in which he could divest himself of his accursed emotionality. He turned to Irene. Yet even her tribute fell short of its customary wholeness. She noticed a tendency towards the symbolism of the modern French school in his new volume. She quoted a line, said it suggested Stéphane Mallarmé. Hugh broke out tempestuously. “Why don’t you call me a Decadent at once--an artificer of phrase--an exhausted idealist? That’s what your criticism comes to. You feel that I’m on the down grade, and you don’t like to tell me.” “Oh, no, Hugh!” she expostulated. “Much of it is as exquisite as ever. But I love all your work to be exquisite. It’s only here and there that the meaning is not quite clear and the language appears forced.”