In January, ninety-eight, Metropolis began to pay, and Rickman’s hopes were justified.  He was now a solid man, a man of income.  For eighteen months he kept strictly within the limits he had allowed himself.  His nature inclined him to a riotous and absurd expenditure, and for eighteen months he wrestled with and did violence to his nature.  Each sum he saved stood for some triumph of ingenious abnegation, some miracle of self-restraint.  And for eighteen months Dicky Pilkington, beholding the spectacle of his heroism, laid ten to one against his ultimate success.  The thing, Dicky said, was impossible; he could never keep it up.  But Rickman once abandoned to a persistent and passionate economy, there was no more holding him in on that path than on any other.  By the middle of the following year, out of an income of four hundred he had saved that sum.

He said to himself that the worst was over now.  He had paid off more than half of his debt, and the remainder had still another fourteen months to run.  Only fourteen months’ passionate economy and the Harden library would be redeemed.  As he saw himself within measurable distance of his end, he was seized by an anxiety, an excitement that he had not been aware of at the start.  The sight of the goal perturbed him; it suggested the failure that up to that moment he had not allowed himself to contemplate.  Like an athlete he gathered himself together for the final spurt; and ninety-nine was a brilliant year for The Planet made glorious by the poems, articles and paragraphs showered on it by S.K.R.  Maddox shook his head over some of them; but he took them all and boasted, as he well might, that The Planet published more Rickman—­the real Rickman—­in six months than Metropolis would do in as many years.  He distinguished between Rickman’s genius and his talent; provided he got his best work, anybody else was welcome to his second-best.  By anybody else he meant Jewdwine.

Yet it was a nobler feeling than professional rivalry that made him abhor the poet’s connection with Metropolis; for Maddox was if anything more jealous for Rickman’s reputation than for his own.  From the very beginning he had never ceased to wonder at his unaccountable affection for Horace Jewdwine; the infatuation, for it amounted to infatuation, would have been comprehensible enough in any other man, but it was unaccountable in Rickman, who was wholly destitute of reverence for the sources of his income.  Jewdwine of The Museion had been in Maddox’s opinion a harmless philosophic crank; he had done nothing, absolutely nothing for Rickman’s genius; but Jewdwine of Metropolis was dangerous, for he encouraged Rickman’s talent; and Rickman’s talent would, he was afraid, be ultimately destructive to the higher power.