Hanson was genial and complimentary.  He, like Mackinnon, knew his business too well to let Savage Keith Rickman slip through his fingers.  Like Mackinnon he was pleased with the idea of securing a deserter from the insufferable Jewdwine.  But the Courier was full up with war news and entirely contented with its staff.  Hanson was only good for occasional contributions.

Rickman again overhauled his complicated accounts.  By what seemed to him a series of miracles he had saved seventy-five pounds somehow during those six months with Mackinnon; but how he was going to raise a hundred in four months he did not know.  That was what he meant to try for, though.  It was July; and he loved more than ever the green peace of Torrington Square, and the room associated with the first austere delights of poverty and the presence of the Tragic Muse.  But he could forego even peace for four months.  After much search in the secret places of Bloomsbury, he found an empty attic in Howland Street.  The house was clean, decent, and quiet for a wonder.  Thither he removed himself and his belongings.  He had parted with all but the absolutely essential, among which he reckoned all Lucia’s books and a few of his own.  He had stripped himself for this last round with Fortune.  He would come out of it all right if he wrote nothing but articles, lived on ten shillings a week and sold the articles; which, meant that in the weeks when no articles were sold he must live on less.  It meant, too, that he must make his own bed, sweep his own room, and cook his own meals when they were cooked at all; that to have clean linen he must pay the price of many meals, as he counted meals.

The attic was not a nice place in July and August.  Though the house was quiet, there flowed through it, in an incessant, suffocating, sickly stream, the untamed smells and noises of the street.  For the sake of peace he took to working through the night and going to bed in the day-time; an eccentricity which caused him to be regarded with some suspicion by his neighbours.  In spite of their apparent decency he had judged it expedient to keep his door locked, a lack of confidence that wounded them.  The lodger in the garret next to his went so far as to signify by laughter her opinion of his unfriendly secrecy.  Her own door was never shut except when he shut it.  This interference with her liberty she once violently resented, delivering herself of a jet of oratory that bore with far-fetched fancy on his parentage and profession.  For her threshold was her vantage ground.  Upon it she stood and waited, listening for the footsteps of her luck.