And because he was a poet, and knew himself a poet, because he had sinned chiefly through his imagination, it was through his imagination that he suffered, so that the horror was supreme.

For all the while, though Shame was there, his ideas were there too, somewhere, the divine thoughts and the proud beautiful dreams, and the great pure loves, winged and veiled; they stood a long way off and turned away their faces from him, and that was the worst punishment he had to bear.
Which meant that as Savage Keith Rickman lay in bed the morning after that glorious April night, he knew that he had been making an April fool of himself.

He knew it by the pain in his head and other disagreeable signs; also by the remarkable fact that he still wore the shirt and trousers of the day.
And he knew that in spite of the pain he would have to get up and go down to breakfast as if nothing had happened; he would have to meet Mr.Spinks' eyes twinkling with malign intelligence, and Flossie's wondering looks, and Mrs.Downey's tender womanly concern, as he turned white over the bacon and the butter.

He didn't know which were worse, the knowing eyes or the innocent ones.

He had to be at the shop by nine o'clock, too, to force that poor, dizzy, aching head of his to its eight hours' work.
In this unnerved, attenuated state, this mortal paleness of mind and body, it was terrible to have to face the robust reality of "Rickman's".