Jewdwine, as he had once said, dreaded the divine fire.  He would ultimately have subdued the flame by a persistent demand for brilliance of another kind.  Even Maddox (who adored his Rickman) had not seen that his Rickman, his young divinity, must change and grow.  He admired his immortal adolescence; he would have him young and lyrical for ever.  He had discovered everything in him but the dramatic poet he was yet to be.  Thus, through the very fervour of his superstition, Maddox had proved hostile, too.  But in Mackinnon Rickman found no malign disturbing influence, no influence of any kind at all.  No thought of capturing his genius or exploiting his talent had ever entered into the dome-like head.  Mackinnon, his mortal nature appeased by his victory over Jewdwine and further gratified by the consciousness of having secured a good man cheap, made no exorbitant claims on his contributor.  Let Rickman write what he would, Mackinnon knew he had got his money’s worth.

Rickman squared himself nobly for the next round with fortune.  And Dicky, in his attitude of enthusiastic but not uninterested spectator, cheered him on, secretly exultant.  Dicky was now serenely sure of his odds.  It was war-time; and Rickman could not hold out long after such an injury to his income.

But Rickman, unconquered, made matters even by reducing his expenditure.  It was winter, and the severity of the weather would have ruined him in coal alone had he not abandoned the superstition of a fire.  With an oil-stove there was always some slight danger of asphyxia, but Rickman loved the piquancy of danger.  By many such ingenious substitutions he effected so prodigious a saving that three-fifths or more of his salary went into the tobacco-jar and thence into Dicky Pilkington’s pocket.  He rejoiced to see it go, so completely had he subdued the lust of spending, so ardently embraced the life of poverty; if it were poverty to live on a pound a week.  Was it not rather wanton, iniquitous extravagance to have allowed himself three times that amount?  But for that his position at this moment would have been such that three months on the Literary Observer would have cleared him.  As he stood, the remainder of his debt loomed monstrous under the shadow of next November.

And it was this moment (when he should have been turning his talent into ready-money by unremitting journalism), that he chose for finishing his tragedy.  If he could be said to have chosen it; for it was rather the Tragic Muse that had claimed him for her own.  She knew her hour, the first young hour of his deliverance, when he had ceased from hungering and thirsting after life, and from the violence and stress of living, and was no more tormented by scruple and by passion; when the flaming orgy of his individuality no longer confused the pageant of the world.  He had been judging by himself when he propounded the startling theory that lyric poets must grow into dramatic poets if they grow at all.  It was now, when his youth no longer sang aloud in him, that he heard the living voices of the men and women whom he made.  Their flesh and blood no longer struggled violently for birth, no longer tortured the delicate tissue of the dream.  His dreams themselves were brought forth incarnate, he being no longer at variance with himself as in the days of neo-classic drama.