And as he looked round and surveyed his possessions, his new stock on the shelves, his plate-glass and his mahogany fittings, his assistants, from the boy in shirt sleeves now washing down the great front window to the gentlemanly cashier, high collared and frock-coated, in his pew, he rubbed his hands softly, and his heart swelled with thankfulness and pride.  For Isaac Rickman was a dreamer, too, in his way.  There are dreams and dreams, and the incontestable merit and glory of Isaac’s dreams was that they had all, or very nearly all, come true.  They were of the sort that can be handed over the counter, locked up in a cash-box and lodged in the Bank.  His latest dream had been carried out in plate-glass and mahogany; it towered into space and was finished off with a beautiful pink cupola at the top.

There was not much of the father in the son.  Keith, presumably, took after his mother, a hectic, pale-haired, woman who had died in the supreme effort of his birth.  On her own birth there had been something in the nature of a slur.  She had taken it to heart, and exhausted herself in the endeavour to conceal from her very respectable husband the shameful fact that she had once served as barmaid in a City restaurant, and that she was the illegitimate daughter of a village sempstress and a village squire.  Isaac, before he dreamed of greatness, had met her at a Band of Hope meeting, and had married her because of her sweetness and pathetic beauty.  She left to her boy her fairness, her expressive face, her own nerves and her mother’s passion.  Isaac and he were alike only in a certain slenderness, a fleshless refinement of physique.  Coarseness in grain, usually revealed by the lower half of a man’s countenance, had with the elder Rickman taken up its abode in the superior, the intellectual region.  Isaac’s eyes and forehead trafficked grossly with the world, while the rest of his face preserved the stern reticences and sanctities of the spirit.  Isaac was a Wesleyan; and his dress (soft black felt hat, smooth black frock-coat, narrow tie, black but clerical) almost suggested that he was a minister of that persuasion.  His lips were hidden under an iron grey moustache, the short grizzled beard was smoothed forward and fined to a point by the perpetual caress of a meditative hand.  Such was Isaac.

Impossible to deny a certain genius to the man who had raised that mighty pile, the Gin Palace of Art.  Those stately premises, with their clustering lights, their carpeted floors, their polished fittings, were very different from the dark little house in Paternoster Row where Keith first saw what light there was to be seen.  When Isaac grew great and moved further west, the little shop was kept on and devoted to the sale of Bibles, hymn-books and Nonconformist literature.  For Isaac, life was a compromise between the pious Wesleyan he was and the successful tradesman he aspired to be.  There were, in fact, two Rickman’s:  Rickman’s in the City and Rickman’s in the Strand.  Rickman’s in the Strand bore on its fore-front most unmistakeably the seal of the world; Rickman’s in the City was sealed with the Lord’s seal.