if he failed to keep his appointment, and the Club dinners were not
good. But neither were Edith's; moreover, by dining at the Club for
one-and-six, and taking a twopenny tram instead of a three-and-sixpenny
cab, he would save one and tenpence.

"And yet," he continued thoughtfully, "the man who wrote _Helen in
Leuce_ was a poet. Or at least," he added, "one seventh part a poet."

Though Jewdwine's lower nature was preoccupied, the supreme critical
faculty performed its functions with precision. The arithmetical
method was perhaps suggested by the other calculation. He could not be
quite sure, but he believed he had summed up Savage Rickman pretty
accurately.

"Thanks," said Rickman, "you've got the fraction all right, anyhow. A
poet one day out of seven; the other six days a potman in an infernal,
stinking, flaring Gin-Palace-of-Art."

As he looked up at Rickman's, blazing with all its lights, he felt
that he had hit on the satisfying, the defining phrase.

His face expressed a wistful desire to confer further with Jewdwine on
this matter; but a certain delicacy restrained him.

Something fine in Jewdwine's nature, something half-human,
half-tutorial, responded to the mute appeal that said so plainly,
"Won't you hear me? I've so much to ask, so much to say. So many
ideas, and you're the only man that can understand them." Jewdwine
impressed everybody, himself included, as a person of prodigious
understanding.