cycling before breakfast in Regent's Park, by way of pumping some air
into his lungs, then, ten hours at least of high Parnassian leisure,
of dalliance in Academic shades; he saw himself wooing some reluctant
classic, or, far more likely, flirting with his own capricious and
bewildering muse. (In a world of prose it is only by such divine
snatches that poets are made) Friday evening, dinner at his club, the
Junior Journalists'. Saturday morning, recovery from dinner at the
Junior Journalists'. Saturday afternoon, to Hampstead or the
Hippodrome with Flossie Walker, the little clerk, who lived in his
boarding-house and never had any fun to speak of. Saturday night,
supper with--well, with Miss Poppy Grace of the Jubilee Variety
Theatre. He had a sudden vision of Poppy as he was wont to meet her in
delightful intimacy, instantaneously followed by her image that
flaunted on the posters out there in the Strand, Poppy as she appeared
behind the foot-lights, in red silk skirts and black silk stockings,
skimming, whirling, swaying, and deftly shaking her foot at him.
Midnight and morning merging into one. Sunday, to Richmond, probably,
with Poppy and some others. Monday, up the river with Himself. Not for
worlds, that is to say, not for any amount of Poppies, would he have
broken his appointment with that brilliant and yet inscrutable
companion who is so eternally fascinating at twenty-three. Monday was
indistinct but luminous, a restless, shimmering background for ideas.
Ideas! They swarmed like motes in the blue air; they loomed, they
floated, vague, and somewhat supernaturally large, all made out of Mr.
Rickman's brain. And in the midst of the ideas a figure insanely
whirled, till it became a mere wheel of flying skirts and tossing
limbs.

At this point Mr. Rickman caught the cashier's eye looking at him over
the little mahogany rails of his pew, and he began wondering how on