lato from
Aristotle by the look of the text. Dicky had begun life as a Junior
Journalist. But before that, long, long before, when he was an
innocent schoolboy, Dicky had a pair of wings, dear little cherubic
wings, that fluttered uneasily under his little jacket. The wings
moulted as Dicky grew older; they shrank (in the course of his
evolution) to mere rudimentary appendages, and poor Dicky flopped
instead of flying. Finally they dropped off and Dicky was much happier
without them. Rickman used to say that if you stripped him you saw the
marks of them still quite plainly; and Dicky was always stripping
himself and showing them. They proved to these writing fellows what he
might have been if he had only chosen. He had begun by being a poet
like the best of them, and in his heart of hearts Dicky believed that
it was as a poet he should end. His maxim upon this head was: "When
I've feathered my nest it will be time enough for me to sing."

Dicky's nest was not long in feathering, and yet Dicky had not begun
to sing. Still, at moments, after supper, or on a Sunday afternoon,
walking in a green lane, Dicky would unbosom himself. He would tell
you touching legends of his boyhood and adolescence. Then he would
talk to you of women. And then he would tell you how it was that he
came to forsake literature for finance.

He had begun in a small way by financing little tradesmen, little
journalists and actresses in temporary difficulties; lending small
sums to distressed clergymen, to governesses and the mistresses of
boarding-houses. By charging a moderate interest he acquired a
character for fairness and straight-forwardness. Now and then he did
what he called a really tip-top generous thing. "Character," said
Dicky Pilkington, "is capital"; and at thirty he had managed to save
enough of it to live on without bothering about earning any more.

Then, by slow degrees, Dicky extended his business. He lent larger
sums at correspondingly higher interest. Then he let himself go. He
was caught by the glory of the thing, the poetry of finance. He soared
to all the heights and sounded all the depths of speculation. He took
risks with rapture. He fancied himself lending vast sums at giddy
interest. "That," said Dicky to his conscience, was to "cover his
risk." He hadn't forgotten that character is capital. And when it
occurred to him, as it sometimes did, that he was making rather a
large hole in it, he would then achieve some colossa