trictly within the limits he had allowed
himself. His nature inclined him to a riotous and absurd expenditure,
and for eighteen months he wrestled with and did violence to his
nature. Each sum he saved stood for some triumph of ingenious
abnegation, some miracle of self-restraint. And for eighteen months
Dicky Pilkington, beholding the spectacle of his heroism, laid ten to
one against his ultimate success. The thing, Dicky said, was
impossible; he could never keep it up. But Rickman once abandoned to a
persistent and passionate economy, there was no more holding him in on
that path than on any other. By the middle of the following year, out
of an income of four hundred he had saved that sum.

He said to himself that the worst was over now. He had paid off more
than half of his debt, and the remainder had still another fourteen
months to run. Only fourteen months' passionate economy and the Harden
library would be redeemed. As he saw himself within measurable
distance of his end, he was seized by an anxiety, an excitement that
he had not been aware of at the start. The sight of the goal perturbed
him; it suggested the failure that up to that moment he had not
allowed himself to contemplate. Like an athlete he gathered himself
together for the final spurt; and ninety-nine was a brilliant year for
_The Planet_ made glorious by the poems, articles and paragraphs
showered on it by S.K.R. Maddox shook his head over some of them; but
he took them all and boasted, as he well might, that _The Planet_
published more Rickman--the real Rickman--in six months than
_Metropolis_ would do in as many years. He distinguished between
Rickman's genius and his talent; provided he got his best work,
anybody else was welcome to his second-best. By anybody else he meant
Jewdwine.

Yet it was a nobler feeling than professional rivalry that made him
abhor the poet's connection with _Metropolis_; for Maddox was if
anything more jealous for Rickman's reputation than for his own. From
the very beginning he had never ceased to wonder at his unaccountable
affection for Horace Jewdwine; the infatuation, for it amounted to
infatuation, would have been comprehensible enough in any other man,
but it was unaccountable in Rickman, who was wholly destitute of
reverence for the sources of his income. Jewdwine of _The Museion_ had
been in Maddox's opinion a harmless philosophic crank; he had done
nothing, absolutely nothing for Rickman's genius; but Jewdwin