. But this is not altogether fair; for intoxication acted rather
on all seven at once, producing in them a gentle fusion with each
other and the universe. They had ceased to struggle. But Mr. Rickman
was not often drunk, or at least not nearly so often as his friends
supposed.

So it was all very well for Jewdwine, who was not so bewilderingly
constructed, to talk about finding your formula and pulling yourself
together. How, Mr. Rickman argued, could you hope to find the formula
of a fellow who could only be expressed in fractions, and vulgar
fractions, too? How on earth could you pull yourself together when
Nature had deliberately cut you into little pieces? Never since poor
Orpheus was torn to tatters by the Maenads was there a poet so horribly
subdivided. Talk of being dissolute, dissipated! Those adjectives were
a poor description of S.K.R. It was more than sowing a mere handful of
wild oats, it was a disintegration, a scattering of Rickmans to all
the winds of the world.

Find himself, indeed!

Still, he was perfectly willing to try; and to that end (after dining
with people who were anything but cultivated, or intellectual, or
refined) he turned himself loose into the streets.

The streets--he was never tired of them. After nine or ten hours of
sitting in a dusty second-hand bookshop, his soul was dry with thirst
for the living world, and the young joy of the world, "the fugitive
actuality." And her ways were in the streets.

Being a young poet about town, he turned to the streets as naturally
as a young poet in the country turns to the woods and fields. For in
the streets, if you know how to listen, you can hear the lyric soul of
things as plainly, more plainly perhaps, than in the woods or fields.
Only it sings another sort of song. And going into the streets was
Rickman's way (the only way open to him as yet) of going into society.
The doors were thrown hospitably wide to him; one day was as good as
another; the world was always at home.

It was a world where he could pick and choose his acquaintance;
where, indeed, out of that multitudinous, never-ending procession of
persons, his power of selection was unlimited. He never had any
difficulty with them; their methods were so charmingly simple and
direct. In the streets the soul is surprised through the lifting of an
eyelid, and the secret of the heart sits lightly on the curl of the
lip. These passers by never wearied him; they flung him the flower of