The chastening and controlling were difficult.  Rickman’s phrases were frequently more powerful than polite.  Like many young writers of violent imagination he was apt to be somewhat vividly erotic in his metaphors.  And he had little ways that were very irritating to Jewdwine.  He was wasteful with the office paper and with string; he would use penny stamps where halfpenny ones would have served his purpose; he had once permitted himself to differ with Jewdwine on a point of scholarship in the presence of the junior clerk.  There were times when Jewdwine longed to turn him out and have done with him; and yet Rickman stayed on.  When all was said and done there was a charm about him.  Jewdwine in fact had proved the truth of Lucia’s saying; he could rely absolutely on his devotion.  He could not afford to let him go.  Though Rickman tampered shamelessly with the traditions of the review, it could not be said that as yet he had injured its circulation.  His contributions were noticed with approval in rival columns; and they had even been quoted by Continental critics with whom The Museion passed as being the only British review that had the true interests of literature at heart.

But though Rickman helped to bring fame to The Museion, The Museion brought none to him.  The identity of its contributors was merged in that of its editor, and those brilliant articles were never signed.

The spring of ninety-three, which found Jewdwine comfortably seated on the summit of his ambition, saw Rickman almost as obscure as in the spring of ninety-two.  His poems had not yet appeared.  Vaughan evidently regarded them as so many sensitive plants, and, fearing for them the boisterous seasons of autumn and spring, had kept them back till the coming May, when, as he expressed it, the market would be less crowded.  This delay gave time to that erratic artist, Mordaunt Crawley, to complete the remarkable illustrations on which Vaughan relied chiefly for success.  Vaughan had spared no expense, but naturally it was the artist and the printer, not the poet, whom he paid.

Rickman, however, had not thought of his Saturnalia as a source of revenue.  It had been such a pleasure to write them that the wonder was he had not been called upon to pay for that.  Happily for him he was by this time independent.  As sub-editor and contributor to The Museion, he was drawing two small but regular incomes.  He could also count on a third (smaller and more uncertain) from The Planet, where from the moment of his capture by Jewdwine he had been reinstated.