“Vandam:  Amours of Great Men (a little soiled).  Rare. 30s.”  He was in the middle of the Vs now and within measurable distance of the end.  Business being slack in the front shop, he finished earlier than usual, and actually found himself with nearly a whole hour upon his hands before dinner.  He had half a mind to spend it at his club, the Junior Journalists’, in the side street over the way.

Only half a mind; for Mr. Rickman entertained the most innocent beliefs with regard to that club of his.  He was not yet sure whether it belonged to him or he to it; but in going to the Junior Journalists’ he conceived himself to be going into society.  So extreme was his illusion.

Mr. Rickman’s place was in the shop and his home was in a boarding house, and for years he had thought of belonging to that club; but quite hopelessly, as of a thing beyond attainment.  It had never occurred to him that anything could come of those invasions of the friendly young men.  Yet this was what had come of them.  He was friends, under the rose, that is to say, over the counter, with Horace Jewdwine of Lazarus College, Oxford.  Jewdwine had proposed him on his own merits, somebody else had seconded him (he supposed) on Jewdwine’s, and between them they had smuggled him in.  This would be his first appearance as a Junior Journalist.  And he might well feel a little diffident about it; for, though some of the members knew him, he could not honestly say he knew any of them, except Rankin (of The Planet) who possibly mightn’t, and Jewdwine who certainly wouldn’t, be there.  But the plunge had to be made some time; he might as well make it now.

From the threshold of the Junior Journalists’ he looked back across the side street, as across a gulf, at the place he had just left.  His eyes moved from the jutting sign-board at the corner, announcing Gentlemen’s Libraries Purchased, to the legend that ran above the window, blazoned in letters of gold: 

Isaac Rickman:  New & Second-Hand Bookseller.

His connexion with it was by no means casual and temporary.  It was his father’s shop.

CHAPTER V

The little booksellers of the Strand, in their death struggle against Rickman’s, never cursed that house more heartily than did the Junior Journalists, in their friendly, shabby little den, smelling of old leather and tobacco and the town.  They complained that it cut on two-thirds of the light from the front windows of the reading-room.  Not that any of them were ever known to read in it.  They used it chiefly as a place to talk in, for which purpose little illumination was required.

To-night one of the windows in question was occupied by a small group of talkers isolated from the rest.  There was Mackinnon, of The Literary Observer.  There were the three wild young spirits of The Planet, Stables, who had launched it with frightful impetus into space (having borrowed a sum sufficient for the purpose), Maddox, who controlled its course, and Rankin, whose brilliance made it twinkle so brightly in the firmament.  With them, but emphatically not of them, was Horace Jewdwine, of Lazarus, who had come up from Oxford to join the staff of The Museion.