He was only three and twenty, and at three and twenty an infinite measure of life can be pressed into the great three days.  He saw in fancy the procession of the hours, the flight of the dreams, of all the gorgeous intellectual pageants that move through the pages of Saturnalia.  For in ninety-two Savage Keith Rickman was a little poet about town, a cockney poet, the poet not only of neo-classic drama, but of green suburban Saturday noons, and flaming Saturday nights, and of a great many things besides.  He had made his plans long beforehand, and was prepared to consign to instant perdition the person or thing that should interfere with them.  Good Friday morning, an hour’s cycling before breakfast in Regent’s Park, by way of pumping some air into his lungs, then, ten hours at least of high Parnassian leisure, of dalliance in Academic shades; he saw himself wooing some reluctant classic, or, far more likely, flirting with his own capricious and bewildering muse. (In a world of prose it is only by such divine snatches that poets are made) Friday evening, dinner at his club, the Junior Journalists’.  Saturday morning, recovery from dinner at the Junior Journalists’.  Saturday afternoon, to Hampstead or the Hippodrome with Flossie Walker, the little clerk, who lived in his boarding-house and never had any fun to speak of.  Saturday night, supper with—­well, with Miss Poppy Grace of the Jubilee Variety Theatre.  He had a sudden vision of Poppy as he was wont to meet her in delightful intimacy, instantaneously followed by her image that flaunted on the posters out there in the Strand, Poppy as she appeared behind the foot-lights, in red silk skirts and black silk stockings, skimming, whirling, swaying, and deftly shaking her foot at him.  Midnight and morning merging into one.  Sunday, to Richmond, probably, with Poppy and some others.  Monday, up the river with Himself.  Not for worlds, that is to say, not for any amount of Poppies, would he have broken his appointment with that brilliant and yet inscrutable companion who is so eternally fascinating at twenty-three.  Monday was indistinct but luminous, a restless, shimmering background for ideas.  Ideas!  They swarmed like motes in the blue air; they loomed, they floated, vague, and somewhat supernaturally large, all made out of Mr. Rickman’s brain.  And in the midst of the ideas a figure insanely whirled, till it became a mere wheel of flying skirts and tossing limbs.

At this point Mr. Rickman caught the cashier’s eye looking at him over the little mahogany rails of his pew, and he began wondering how on earth the cashier would behave when they loosed him out for the Bank Holiday.  Then he set to and wrote hard at the Quarterly Catalogue.  In all London there was not a more prolific or versatile writer than Savage Keith Rickman.  But if in ninety-two you had asked him for his masterpiece, his magnum opus, his life-work, he would mention nothing that he had written, but refer you, soberly and benignly, to that colossal performance, the Quarterly Catalogue.