Jewdwine's face expressed, as Rickman had anticipated, an exquisite
disapproval. His own taste in women was refined almost to nullity. How
a poet and a scholar, even if not strictly speaking a gentleman, could
care to spend two minutes in the society of Poppy Grace, was
incomprehensible to Jewdwine.
"I didn't know you cultivated that sort of person."
"Oh--cultivate her--?"--His tone implied that the soil was rather too
light for _that_.
"How long have you known her?"
"About six months, on and off."
"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.
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