only got a picture.  And wot’s a picture, if it’s ever so lifelike?  You ’aven’t got a bit nearer to the real thing.  I tell you, you aren’t in it with me.  I’d have been a writer myself if I’d thought it was good enough.  I began that way; but as to going back to it, you might just as well expect me to go back to kissing a woman’s photo when I can put my arm round her waist.”

And Dicky, gracefully descending on the wings of his metaphor, alighted on Miss Poppy Grace.  But to Rickman the figure of Poppy, once an obsession, was now as indistinct as the figure of Dicky seen through a cloud of tobacco smoke.  He was roused by a more direct appeal, and what seemed to him a violent change of theme.

“Did you notice what rum eyes Miss Harden’s got?  They haven’t taught her how to use ’em, though.  Hi, Ricky!  Aren’t you going to join us in a drink?”

“No, I’m not.”  His tone implied that he was not going to join Pilkington in anything.

“You seem a bit cut up on Miss Harden’s account.”

“If you mean that I think she’s been most infernally treated, I do.”

“H’m.  Well, I will say the wind is not exactly tempered to that shorn lamb.  But it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.  Queer how things are mixed up in this world.  You wouldn’t think there was much connexion between Miss Harden and Miss Poppy Grace, would you?  Well, wot’s Loocher’s loss is Popsie’s gain; if that’s any consolation.”

“I certainly don’t see the connexion.”

“No?  I say, can’t you shut the window?  That d——­d sea makes such a noise I can’t hear myself speak.  I was going to say I’d some notion of running Poppy on her own before long.  And I think—­I think I can do it out of this haul, before she signs another contract.  Of course, we expect you and your friends to back us.”

Dicky’s voice came slightly muffled from the depths of his long tumbler.

Rickman turned round.  “What did you say about Bacchus?” He had turned in anger, but at the spectacle presented by Pilkington he laughed aloud in the insolence of his youth.

“Shut that window, can’t you?  I say, if you can get at any of the papers and give them the tip—­”

“Well?” Rickman’s hand closed fiercely over the top of a soda-water syphon.  Pilkington followed the movement with an innocent, but by no means unobservant eye.

Only the other day they had been rivals for the favour of Miss Poppy Grace, which seemed to be very evenly divided between them.  If Rickman had her heart, he—­Pilkington—­held her by the power of the purse.  Jealous he might be, but jealousy counted for little in the great mind of Pilkington.  Human passions were the stuff he worked in.  Where they raged highest it was his to ride on the whirlwind and direct the storm.  If in Poppy’s case they raged too high, his position as creditor gave him a tight grip of young Rickman.  On the other hand, Rickman was now a full-fledged Junior Journalist, and Pilkington, amid the wreck of morals and the crash of creeds, had preserved a simple childlike faith in the omnipotence of the press.  So, if it was madness for Rickman to irritate Pilkington, it was not altogether expedient for Pilkington to irritate him.