his genius was a heavy burden for so small a thing to bear; and his chivalry had determined that it should lie lightly on her lest it should crush or injure her.  It was part of her engaging innocence that she knew nothing of the world in which his supremacy began and hers ended, that she had not even suspected its existence.  If he had any illusions about her it was his own mind that created and controlled them.  He delighted in them deliberately, as in a thing of his creating; seeing through them with that extraordinary lucidity of his, yet abandoning himself all the more.  Flossie’s weakness made him tender, her very faults amused him.  As for his future, he could not conceive of his marriage as in any way affecting him as a poet and a man of letters.  While the little suburban Eros lit his low flame upon the hearth, his genius would still stand apart, guarding with holy hands the immortal fire.  For those two flames could never mingle.  In that dream he saw himself travelling with ease and rapidity along two infinite lines that never touched and never diverged; a feat only possible given two Rickmans, not one Rickman.  There used to be many more of him; it was something that he had reduced the quantity to two.  And in dreams nothing is absurd, nothing impossible.

Pity that the conditions of waking life are so singularly limited.  At first it had been only a simple question of time and space.  Not that Flossie took up so very much space; and he owned that she left him plenty of time for the everyday work that paid.  But where was that divine solitude?  Where were those long days of nebulous conception?  Where the days when he removed himself, as it were, and watched his full-orbed creations careering in the intellectual void?  The days when Keith Rickman was as a god?  He was hardly aware how fast they were vanishing already; and where would they be in two months’ time?  It was on his tragedy that he based his hopes for his future; the future, in which Flossie had no part.  He knew that the plea of art sounded weak before the inexorable claims of nature; he felt that something ought to be sacrificed to the supreme passion; but he couldn’t give up his tragedy.  He was consumed by two indomitable passions; and who was to say which of them was supreme?  Still, tragedies in blank verse were a luxury; and Flossie had more than once pointed out to him he couldn’t afford luxuries.  He would sit up working on the tragedy till long past midnight; and when he woke in the morning his sense of guilt could not have been greater if he had been indulging in the most hateful orgies.  But you can’t burn even genius at both ends; and his paying work began to suffer.  Jewdwine complained that it was not up to his usual level.  Maddox had returned several articles.  So at last he stuffed his tragedy into a drawer to wait there for a diviner hour.  “That would have been a big expensive job,” he said to himself.  “I suppose it’s possible to put as good work into the little things that pay; but I shall