illed only if possible. But meanwhile he had got
to make it possible, for Flossie (in spite of _her_ promise) kept the
terror of her wine-merchant perpetually dangling above his head. He
had visited Messrs. Vassell & Hawkins' detestable establishment; and
it made him shudder to think of his pretty Beaver shut up in a little
mahogany cage, with her bright eyes peeping sad and shy through the
brass netting, and her dear little nostrils sniffing the villainous
alcoholic air.

But as the time approached and their marriage grew every day more
certain and more near, the joy and excitement of the bridegroom were
mingled with an inexplicable terror and misgiving. He had been
disagreeably impressed by the manner of Flossie's insistence on his
poverty. He had not missed the fine contempt conveyed by all her
references to his profession, which she not unjustly regarded as the
cause of the poverty. He was well aware that his genius was a heavy
burden for so small a thing to bear; and his chivalry had determined
that it should lie lightly on her lest it should crush or injure her.
It was part of her engaging innocence that she knew nothing of the
world in which his supremacy began and hers ended, that she had not
even suspected its existence. If he had any illusions about her it was
his own mind that created and controlled them. He delighted in them
deliberately, as in a thing of his creating; seeing through them with
that extraordinary lucidity of his, yet abandoning himself all the
more. Flossie's weakness made him tender, her very faults amused him.
As for his future, he could not conceive of his marriage as in any way
affecting him as a poet and a man of letters. While the little
suburban Eros lit his low flame upon the hearth, his genius would
still stand apart, guarding with holy hands the immortal fire. For
those two flames could never mingle. In that dream he saw himself
travelling with ease and rapidity along two infinite lines that never
touched and never diverged; a feat only possible given two Rickmans,
not one Rickman. There used to be many more of him; it was something
that he had reduced the quantity to two. And in dreams nothing is
absurd, nothing impossible.

Pity that the conditions of waking life are so singularly limited. At
first it had been only a simple question of time and space. Not that
Flossie took up so very much space; and he owned that she left him
plenty of time for the everyday work that paid. But w