But he was
still more distantly related to Mr. Rickman the young man about town.
And that made four. Besides these four there was a fifth, the serene
and perfect intelligence, who from some height immeasurably far above
them sat in judgement on them all. But for his abnormal sense of
humour he would have been a Mr. Rickman of the pure reason, no good at
all. As it was, he occasionally offered some reflection which was
enjoyed but seldom acted upon.
And underneath these Mr. Rickmans, though inextricably, damnably one
with them, was a certain apparently commonplace but amiable young man,
who lived in a Bloomsbury boarding-house and dropped his aitches. This
young man was tender and chivalrous, full of little innocent
civilities to the ladies of his boarding-house; he admired, above all
things, modesty in a woman, and somewhere, in the dark and unexplored
corners of his nature, he concealed a prejudice in favour of marriage
and the sanctities of home.
That made six, and no doubt they would have pulled together well
enough; but the bother was that any one of them was liable at any
moment to the visitation of the seventh--Mr. Rickman the genius. There
was no telling whether he would come in the form of a high god or a
demon, a consolation or a torment. Sometimes he would descend upon Mr.
Rickman in the second-hand department, and attempt to seduce him from
his allegiance to the Quarterly Catalogue. Or he would take up the
poor journalist's copy as it lay on a table, and change it so that its
own editor wouldn't know it again.
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