fastidious hand. "There are one or two men here I should have liked to
introduce you to, if I'd had time.--Another night, perhaps--" He
piloted him downstairs and so out into the Strand.

"Good night. Good night. Take my advice and leave the fugitive
actuality alone."

Those were Jewdwine's last words, spoken from the depths of the
hansom. It carried him to the classic heights of Hampstead, to the
haunts of the cultivated, the intellectual, the refined.

Rickman remained a moment. His dreamy gaze was fixed on the massive
pile before him, that rose, solidly soaring, flaunting a brutal
challenge to the tender April sky. It stood for the vast material
reality, the whole of that eternal, implacable Power which is at
enmity with dreams; which may be conquered, propitiated, absorbed, but
never annihilated or denied.

_That_ actuality was not fugitive.

CHAPTER VII

Perhaps it was not to be wondered at if Mr. Rickman had not yet found
himself. There were, as he sorrowfully reflected, so many Mr.
Rickmans.

There was Mr. Rickman of the front shop and second-hand department,
known as "our Mr. Rickman." The shop was proud of him; his appearance
was supposed to give it a certain _cachet_. He neither strutted nor
grovelled; he moved about from shelf to shelf in an absent-minded
scholarly manner. He served you, not with obsequiousness, nor yet with
condescension, but with a certain remoteness and abstraction, a noble
apathy. Though a bookseller, his literary conscience remained
incorruptible. He would introduce you to his favourite authors with a
magnificent take-it-or-leave-it air, while an almost imperceptible
lifting of his eyebrows as he handed you _your_ favourite was a subtle
criticism of your taste. This method of conducting business was called
keeping up the tone of the establishment. The appearance and
disappearance of this person was timed and regulated by circumstances
beyond his own control, so that of necessity all the other Mr.
Rickmans were subject to him.

For there was Mr. Rickman the student and recluse, who inhabited the
insides of other men's books. Owing to his habitual converse with
intellects greater--really greater--than his own, he was an
exceedingly humble and reverent person. A high and stainless soul. You
would never have suspected his connection with Mr. Rickman, the Junior
Journalist, the obscure writer of brilliant paragraphs, a fellow
destitute of reverence and decency and everyth