“How long have you known her?”

“About six months, on and off.”

“Oh, only on and off.”

“On and off the stage, I mean.  And that’s knowledge,” said Rickman.  “Anybody can know them on; but it’s not one man in a thousand knows them off—­really knows them.”

“I’m very glad to hear it.”

He changed the subject.  In Rickman the poet he was deeply interested; but at the moment Rickman the man inspired him with disgust.

Jewdwine had a weak digestion.  When he sat at the high table, peering at his sole and chicken, with critical and pathetic twitchings of his fastidious nose, he shuddered at the vigorous animal appetites of undergraduates in Hall.

Even so he shrank now from the coarse exuberance of Rickman’s youth.  When it came to women, Rickman was impossible.

Now Jewdwine, while pursuing an inner train of thought that had Rickman for its subject, was also keeping his eye on a hansom, and wondering whether he would hail it and so reach Hampstead in time for dinner, or whether he would dine at the Club.  Edith would be annoyed if he failed to keep his appointment, and the Club dinners were not good.  But neither were Edith’s; moreover, by dining at the Club for one-and-six, and taking a twopenny tram instead of a three-and-sixpenny cab, he would save one and tenpence.

“And yet,” he continued thoughtfully, “the man who wrote Helen in Leuce was a poet.  Or at least,” he added, “one seventh part a poet.”

Though Jewdwine’s lower nature was preoccupied, the supreme critical faculty performed its functions with precision.  The arithmetical method was perhaps suggested by the other calculation.  He could not be quite sure, but he believed he had summed up Savage Rickman pretty accurately.

“Thanks,” said Rickman, “you’ve got the fraction all right, anyhow.  A poet one day out of seven; the other six days a potman in an infernal, stinking, flaring Gin-Palace-of-Art.”

As he looked up at Rickman’s, blazing with all its lights, he felt that he had hit on the satisfying, the defining phrase.

His face expressed a wistful desire to confer further with Jewdwine on this matter; but a certain delicacy restrained him.

Something fine in Jewdwine’s nature, something half-human, half-tutorial, responded to the mute appeal that said so plainly, “Won’t you hear me?  I’ve so much to ask, so much to say.  So many ideas, and you’re the only man that can understand them.”  Jewdwine impressed everybody, himself included, as a person of prodigious understanding.

The question was, having understood Rickman, having discovered in him a neglected genius, having introduced him to the Club and asked him to dinner on the strength of it, how much further was he prepared to go?  Why—­provided he was sure of the genius, almost any length, short of introducing him to the ladies of his family.  But was he sure?  Savage Rickman was young, and youth is deceptive.  Supposing he—­Jewdwine—­was deceived?  Supposing the genius were to elude him, leaving him saddled with the man?  What on earth should he do with him?