He found it easy enough to work for both. The Planet was poor, and it was out of sheer perversity that it indulged a disinterested passion for literature.  In fact, Maddox and his men were trying to do with gaiety of heart what Jewdwine was doing with superb solemnity.  But whenever Rickman mentioned Maddox to Jewdwine, Jewdwine would shrug his shoulders and say, “Maddox is not important”; and when he mentioned The Museion to Maddox, Maddox would correct him with a laugh, “The Museum, you mean,” and refer to his fellow-contributors as “a respectable collection of meiocene fossils.”  Maddox had conceived a jealous and violent admiration for Savage Keith Rickman.  “Rickman,” he said, “you shall not go over body and soul to The Museion.”  He regarded himself as the keeper and lover of Rickman’s soul, and would not have been sorry to bring about a divorce between it and Jewdwine.  His irregular attentions were to save it from a suicidal devotion to a joyless consort.  So that Rickman was torn between Maddox’s enthusiasm for him and his own enthusiasm for Jewdwine.

That affection endured, being one with his impetuous and generous youth; while his genius, that thing alone and apart, escaped from Jewdwine.  He knew that Jewdwine’s incorruptibility left him nothing to expect in the way of approval and protection, and the knowledge did not greatly affect him.  He preferred that his friend should remain incorruptible.  That Jewdwine should greatly delight in his Saturnalia was more than he at any time expected.  For there his muse, Modernity, had begun to turn her back resolutely on the masters and the models, to fling off the golden fetters of rhyme, gird up her draperies to her naked thighs, and step out with her great swinging stride on perilous paths of her own.  To be sure there were other things which Jewdwine had not seen, on which he himself felt that he might rest a pretty secure claim to immortality.

Of his progress thither his friends had to accept Vaughan’s announcements as the only intimation.  Rickman had not called upon any of the Junior Journalists to smooth the way for him.  He had not, in fact, called on any of them at all, but as April advanced he retreated more and more into a foolish privacy; and with the approaches of May he vanished.  One night, however, some Junior Journalists caught him at the club, belated, eating supper.  They afterwards recalled that he had then seemed to them possessed by a perfect demon of indiscretion; and when his book finally appeared on the first of May, it was felt that it could hardly have been produced under more unfavourable auspices.  This reckless attitude was evidently unaffected (nobody had ever accused Rickman of affectation); and even Maddox pronounced it imprudent in the extreme.  As for Jewdwine, it could not be accounted for by any motives known to him.  His experience compelled him to take a somewhat cynical view of the literary character.  Jewdwine among his authors was like