For six months Rickman luxuriated in power and increase of leisure and of pay.  If the pay was insufficient to cover all his losses the leisure was invaluable; it enabled him to get on with his tragedy.

Now if Rickman had been prudent he would have finished his tragedy then and there and got it published in all haste.  For there is no doubt that if any work of his had been given to the world any time within those six months, Jewdwine would have declared the faith that was in him.  Whatever the merits of the work he would have celebrated its appearance by a sounding Feast of Trumpets in Metropolis.  He would have done anything to strengthen the tie that attached him to the sources of his spiritual content.  But Rickman was not prudent.  He let the golden hours slip by while he sat polishing up his blank verse as if he had all eternity before him.

Meanwhile he did all he could for Jewdwine.  Jewdwine indeed could not have done a better thing for himself than in giving Rickman that free hand.  In six months there was a marked improvement in the tone of Metropolis and the reputation of its editor, and, but for the unexpected which is always happening, Jewdwine might in the long run have emerged without a stain.

Nothing in fact could have been more utterly unforeseen, and yet, in reviewing all the steps which led to the ultimate catastrophe, Rickman said to himself that nothing would have been more consistent and inevitable.  It came about first of all through a freak, a wanton freak of Fate in the form of a beardless poet, a discovery, not of Jewdwine’s nor of Rickman’s but of Miss Roots’.  That Miss Roots could make a discovery clearly indicated the finger of fate.  Miss Roots promptly asked Rickman to dinner and presented to him the discovery, beardless, breathless also and hectic, wearing an unclean shirt and a suit of frayed shoddy.

He came away from that dinner, that embarrassing, palpitating encounter, with a slender sheaf of verses in his pocket.  It did not take him long to read them, nor to see (the unforeseen again!) that the verses would live longer than their maker.  They were beardless, breathless, and hectic like the boy, but nobody could have been keener than Rickman to recognize the immortal adolescence, the swift panting of the pursuing god, the burning of the inextinguishable flame.  He wrote a letter to him, several letters, out of the fulness of his heart.  Then Maddox, to whom he had not spoken since the day of their falling out, came up to him at the Junior Journalists, shook his hand as if nothing had happened, and thanked him for his appreciation of young Paterson.  He said that it had put new life into the boy.  They made it up over young Paterson.  And that was another step towards the inevitable conclusion.