"Oh, only on and off."
"On and off the stage, I mean. And that's knowledge," said Rickman. "Anybody can know them on; but it's not one man in a thousand knows them off—really knows them."
"I'm very glad to hear it."
He changed the subject. In Rickman the poet he was deeply interested; but at the moment Rickman the man inspired him with disgust.
Jewdwine had a weak digestion. When he sat at the high table, peering at his sole and chicken, with critical and pathetic twitchings of his fastidious nose, he shuddered at the vigorous animal appetites of undergraduates in Hall.
Even so he shrank now from the coarse exuberance of Rickman's youth. When it came to women, Rickman was impossible.
Now Jewdwine, while pursuing an inner train of thought that had Rickman for its subject, was also keeping his eye on a hansom, and wondering whether he would hail it and so reach Hampstead in time for dinner, or whether he would dine at the Club. Edith would be annoyed 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."