."

"Oh--cultivate her--?"--His tone implied that the soil was rather too
light for _that_.

"How long have you known her?"

"About six months, on and off."

"Oh, only on and off."

"On and off the _stage_, I mean. And that's knowledge," said Rickman.
"Anybody can know them on; but it's not one man in a thousand knows
them off--really knows them."

"I'm very glad to hear it."

He changed the subject. In Rickman the poet he was deeply interested;
but at the moment Rickman the man inspired him with disgust.

Jewdwine had a weak digestion. When he sat at the high table, peering
at his sole and chicken, with critical and pathetic twitchings of his
fastidious nose, he shuddered at the vigorous animal appetites of
undergraduates in Hall.

Even so he shrank now from the coarse exuberance of Rickman's youth.
When it came to women, Rickman _was_ impossible.

Now Jewdwine, while pursuing an inner train of thought that had
Rickman for its subject, was also keeping his eye on a hansom, and
wondering whether he would hail it and so reach Hampstead in time for
dinner, or whether he would dine at the Club. Edith would be annoyed
if he failed to keep his appointment, and the Club dinners were not
good. But neither were Edith's; moreover, by dining at the Club for
one-and-six, and taking a twopenny tram instead of a three-and-sixpenny
cab, he would save one and tenpence.

"And yet," he continued thoughtfully, "the man who wrote _Helen in
Leuce_ was a poet. Or at least," he added, "one seventh part a poet."

Though Jewdwine's lower nature was preoccupied, the supreme critical
faculty performed its functions with precision. The arithmetical
method was perhaps suggested by the other calculation. He could not be
quite sure, but he believed he had summed up Savage Rickman pretty
accurately.

"Thanks," said Rickman, "you've got the fraction all right, anyhow. A
poet one day out of seven; the other six days a potman in an infernal,
stinking, flaring Gin-Palace-of-Art."

As he looked up at Rickman's, blazing with all its lights, he felt
that he had hit on the satisfying, the defining phrase.

His face expressed a wistful desire to confer further with Jewdwine on
this matter; but a certain delicacy restrained him.

Something fine in Jewdwine's nature, something half-human,
half-tutorial, responded to the mute appeal that said so plainly,
"Won't you hear me? I've so much to ask, so much to say. So many
ideas, and you're the