Before he went to bed he put ten pounds into a tobacco-jar on an inaccessible shelf, keeping one pound three and eightpence for the expenses of the coming week.  The next morning he looked Mackinnon up.

Now Mackinnon’s head was so far unlike the dome of the Museum that it was by no means impervious to light; and where Mackinnon’s interests were concerned it was positively limpid in its transparency.  So that Mackinnon was not slow to perceive the advantages of an alliance with impecunious brilliance.  The brilliance he was already familiar with, the impecuniosity he inferred from the more than usual offhandedness of Rickman’s manner.  The war had hit Mackinnon also; the affairs of the Literary Observer were not so flourishing as Mackinnon could have wished, and he was meditating some reductions in his staff.  He reflected that young men in Rickman’s mood and Rickman’s circumstances were sometimes willing to do the work of two journalists for a lower salary than he had been paying to one.  And when he further learnt that Rickman had left Metropolis, he felt that besides these solid advantages a subtler satisfaction would be his.  Jewdwine, corruptible or incorruptible, had not endeared himself to other editors, and even the sober Mackinnon was unable to resist the temptation of annexing the great man’s great man.  But the dome-like head, impenetrable in this, betrayed none of the thoughts that were going on inside it, and in the bargaining that followed it was concealed from Rickman that his connection with Metropolis had in any way increased his market value.  He made the best terms he could; and the end of the interview found him retained on Mackinnon’s staff as leader, writer and dramatic critic at a salary of two pounds ten a week.  Mackinnon had offered two pounds, Rickman had held out for three, and they split the difference.  As the poet left the room Mackinnon turned to his desk with a smile of satisfaction that seemed to illuminate the dome.  He had effected a considerable saving by that little transaction.

And for the poet it did not prove so bad a bargain after all.  He had now a more ample leisure; and for the first time in his journalistic career he knew what it was to be left mercifully, beneficently alone.  He had cut himself off from all his friends; and though at times his heart suffered, his genius profited by the isolation.  It was not until he had escaped from Jewdwine that he realized what that special deliverance meant for him.  He could not well have encountered a more subtle and dangerous influence than that of the author of the Prolegomena to AEsthetics.  Jewdwine had been hostile to his genius from the beginning, though he had cared for it, too, in his imperious way.  He would have tamed the young, ungovernably ardent thing and wedded it to his own beautiful and passionless idea; an achievement which would have reflected some glory on Jewdwine as the matchmaker.  But he had left off caring when he found that he had less to gain from Rickman’s genius than from his talent, and had turned his attention to the protection and encouragement of the more profitable power.  As that talent ran riot in the columns of Metropolis Rickman himself was unaware how relentlessly it drew on the vitality that sustained his genius.  It was Jewdwine’s excuse that the vitality seemed inexhaustible.