Rickman was instantly aware that he was under criticism.  But he mistook its nature and its grounds.

“Don’t suppose,” said he, “I’m ashamed of the shop.  It isn’t that.  I wasn’t ashamed of our other place—­that little rat ’ole in the City.”

Jewdwine shuddered through all his being.

“—­But I am ashamed of this gaudy, pink concern.  It’s so brutally big.  It can’t live, you know, without sucking the life out of the little booksellers.  They mayn’t have made a great thing out of it, but they were happy enough before we came here.”

“I never thought of it in that light.”

“Haven’t you?  I have.”

It was evident that little Rickman was deeply moved.  His sentiments did him credit, and he deserved to be asked to dinner.  At Hampstead?  No—­no, not at Hampstead; here, at the Club.  The Club was the proper thing; a public recognition of him was the amende honorable.  Besides, after all, it was the Club, not Jewdwine, that had offended, and it was right that the Club should expiate its offence.

“What are you doing at Easter?” he asked.

Rickman stroked his upper lip and smiled as if cherishing a joy as secret and unborn as his moustache.  He recited a selection from the tale of his engagements.

“Can you dine with me here on Saturday?  You’re free, then, didn’t you say?”

Rickman hesitated.  That was not what he had said.  He was anything but free, for was he not engaged for that evening to Miss Poppy Grace?  He was pulled two ways, a hard pull.  He admired Jewdwine with simple, hero-worshipping fervour; but he also admired Miss Poppy Grace.  Again, he shrank from mentioning an engagement of that sort to Jewdwine, while, on the other hand concealment was equally painful, being foreign to his nature.

So he flushed a little as he replied, “Thanks awfully, I’m afraid I can’t.  I’m booked that night to Poppy Grace.”

The flush deepened.  Besides his natural sensitiveness on the subject of Miss Poppy Grace, he suffered tortures not wholly sentimental whenever he had occasion to mention her by her name.  Poppy Grace—­he felt that somehow it did not give you a very high idea of the lady, and that in this it did her an injustice.  He could have avoided it by referring to her loftily as Miss Grace; but this course, besides being unfamiliar would have savoured somewhat of subterfuge.  So he blurted it all out with an air of defiance, as much as to say that when you had called her Poppy Grace you had said the worst of her.

Jewdwine’s face expressed, as Rickman had anticipated, an exquisite disapproval.  His own taste in women was refined almost to nullity.  How a poet and a scholar, even if not strictly speaking a gentleman, could care to spend two minutes in the society of Poppy Grace, was incomprehensible to Jewdwine.

“I didn’t know you cultivated that sort of person.”

“Oh—­cultivate her—?”—­His tone implied that the soil was rather too light for that.