Courage and capital are great, but brains are greater. It was not only
by shrewdness, energy and an incomparable audacity that Isaac Rickman
had raised himself from those obscure beginnings. Isaac was an artist
in his own enormous way, and he had made an exhaustive study of the
Public. With incredible versatility he followed every twist and turn
of the great mind; the slow colossal movements which make capital, the
fitful balancing, the sudden start and mad rush forward by which, if
you can but foresee and keep pace with it, you reap the golden harvest
of the hour. He never took his eye off the Public. He laid his finger,
as it were, on that mighty pulse and recorded its fluctuations in his
ledger.

But there was a region beyond those fluctuations. With new books there
was always a pound's worth of risk to a pennyworth of profit; but
there was no end of money to be got out of old ones, if only you knew
how to set about it. And Isaac did not quite know how. In his front
shop it was the Public, in his side shop it was the books that
mattered, and knowledge of the one, however exhaustive, was no guide
to the other. Isaac by himself cut a somewhat unfortunate figure; he
stood fully equipped in the field where there was much danger and but
little gain; he was helpless where the price of knowledge ruled
immeasurably high. In the second-hand department audacity without
education can do nothing. What he still wanted, then, was brains and
yet more brains; not the raw material, mind you, he had plenty of
that, but the finished product, the trained, cultured intellect. Isaac
was a self-made man, a man ignorant of many things, religious, but
uneducated.

But he had a son, and the son had a head on his shoulders a
magnificent head that boy had. Mr. Horace Jewdwine had noticed it the