have to cut myself in pieces.”  That was what he was doing now; changing his gold into copper as fast as he could, so many pennies for one sovereign.  Nobody was cheated.  He knew that in his talent (his mere journalistic talent) there was a genius that no amount of journalism had as yet subdued.  But he had an awful vision of the future, when he saw himself swallowed up body and soul in journalism.  The gods were dead; but there were still men and columns.

That would be the inevitable surrender to reality.  To have no part in the triumph of the poetic legions; but to march with the rank and file, to a detestable music not his own; a mere mercenary ingloriously fighting in a foreign cause.

To Jewdwine, Jewdwine once incorruptible, it seemed that Rickman was preparing himself very suitably for the new campaign.  But Maddox mourned as he returned those articles; and when he heard of the approaching marriage which explained them he was frantic.  He rushed up on Sunday afternoon, and marched Rickman out into the suburbs and on to a lonely place on Hampstead Heath.  And there, for the space of one hour, with his arm linked in Rickman’s, he wrestled with Rickman for his body and his soul.  Jewdwine’s cry had been, “Beware of the friendship of little men”; the burden of Maddox was, “Beware of the love of little women.”

“That’s all you know about it, Maddy.  The love of great women absorbs you, dominates you.  The little women leave you free.”

Maddox groaned.

“A fat lot of freedom you’ll get, Ricky, when you’re married.”  Rickman looked straight before him to the deep blue hills of the west, as if freedom lay on the other side of them.  “Good God,” he said, “what am I to do?  I must marry.  I can’t go back to Poppy Grace, and her sort.”

“If that’s all,” said Maddox, “I don’t see much difference.  Except that marriage is worse.  It lasts longer.”  Whereupon Rickman blushed, and said that wasn’t all, and that Maddox was a brute.  He would change his opinion when he knew Miss Walker.

Before very long he had an opportunity of changing it.

Rickman had been in error when he told Flossie that if she would consent to marry him he would never again be ill.  For he was ill the first week in September, not two years after he had made that ill-considered statement.  The Fielding episode, when the first fine stimulus was over, had left him miserable and restless.  It was as if he had heard the sound of Lucia Harden’s voice passing through the immeasurable darkness that divided them.  And now he seemed to be suffering from something not unlike the nervous fever that had attacked him once before at Harmouth; complicated, this time, by a severe cold on the chest, caught by walking about through pouring rain in great agony of mind.