The next morning early Wyndham jumped out of bed with a bewildered sense of some change in his life, and it was an instant or two before his faculties cleared and he remembered his adventure of the previous evening. His next thought was one of pleasure that he had at last carried out his resolution of rising early. The autumn had developed with unusual severity, but the morning was intensely clear, and the studio full of a strong light. He pushed aside the hanging, and looked down from the gallery on the familiar scene below. Ordinarily, on rising, the sight had filled him with disgust and apathy, but now a freshness and vigour pervaded him, a new imperious desire, not merely in his mind but in all his limbs and muscles, to enter again on the contest with men. As his thought ran back through the past intolerable year or two, his inaction and sloth seemed almost incredible. He saw himself rising at midday, suffering moral tortures before the work he was powerless to begin, letting the barren hours drift away into the deep, then regretting them passionately. Was it not all a nightmare from which he had been curiously released?

He dressed, and, whilst his little kettle was boiling, took careful stock of his professional materials. Colours, brushes, varnishes—all needed renewing; there seemed nothing but impracticable odds and ends, mere bits of wreckage from his disastrous life's venture. Then, too, the filth and disorder all around him struck him brusquely, stung him to annoyance. On every surface where dust might accumulate it lay in serene possession. Wherever spiders could spin, there the webs hung thick, amazing and complicated citadels, prodigious masses and networks.

He felt he could not endure it a day longer. There must be a thorough physical cleansing at once. And he must return to the luxury of a daily bed-maker. This preoccupation with household things took off the keenest edge of one's first energy and enthusiasm; he must reserve himself jealously for his high calling.

As he sipped his coffee he mused over the little financial difficulties that immediately beset him. Now that at last he had a valid ground for appealing to Mary, he felt reluctant; anxious to bring her only the sense of his success without alloy. He might explain the situation to Mr. Robinson, and ask for money in advance; but that seemed as impolitic as it was repugnant in this new rapture of fine upstanding dignity. Payment of the quarter's rent that was already due could be easily deferred—for the bare humiliation of making the request. But he needed something for equipment, and must face the sacrifice of some of the older pictures to which he had clung so long, accepting any sum in exchange, if only shillings.

He still felt no disposition to invest the accident that had turned the tide for him with any touch of superstition or romance. He regarded the whole matter in the same dry light as at his first acceptance of it the evening before. He had sat waiting for clients, and at last they had turned up. But he did not at all dislike the Robinsons: they were very much better than the great run of their class—they had evidently ideals, and aspired to a higher degree of refinement than they as yet possessed, or, perhaps, were capable of possessing. They were neither smug nor self-satisfied, and, in giving him this work, they had avoided indulging in any semblance of bourgeois patronage, whereas other people of their class, even if well meaning, might easily have been gross and intolerable.

He had studied his sitter pretty closely. The profile, as is not unfrequently the case with "plain" women, had a curious individual interest. He felt it offered scope for "construction," and he could import subtly into the drawing a certain distinguished sentiment that was not really in the original, though somehow it might easily have been there, and, in moments of enthusiasm on the part of the observer, might even be conceived to be there. Yes, the profile was undoubtedly the thing: that way, too, the great coil of hair could be handled the more effectively. Indeed, it seemed to him that, taking into consideration her dark eye with its soft lashes, and the long shapely arms, and the exquisite ivory tones of the old lace dress, the scheme should really turn out, as he had so promptly put it to Miss Robinson herself, "a most distinguished piece of portraiture." He was shrewd enough to understand the essential shyness of her disposition, and he felt he might well invest her expression with some suggestion of this, though it should come out as a sort of gentle spiritual modesty.

And now his imagination returned to the contemplation of his own fortunes, and went soaring skywards. His luck having once changed, who could say what might not turn up next? Another sitter might appear, one of your great heroines, stately and brilliant—a sort of Lady Betty, in fact: he might as well admit he had Lady Betty in mind! Such a portrait, appropriately conceived, would form a remarkable pendant to this one. Then, too, he might make another dash at his masterpiece! Such a display of versatility in the next year's exhibitions must place his name on everybody's lips, must surely pave the way to his reputation not only as a great decorative portrait painter, but also as a modern of the moderns, touched to inspiration by all the stress and striving of his age!

This roseate flight was abruptly disturbed by the advent of the postman. The rat-tat, one of the double sort, imperiously summoned him to the door. Had the "something else" already turned up? He rather prided himself on the coolness with which he rose to meet it. The postman handed him a packet and a letter. But at a glance he saw that the packet was a rejected drawing and the letter Mary's, and he went straight down into the depths again. He, however, affected a cheerful good morning to the postman; then, no sooner alone, tore open the letter, with the bitter taste of yesterday's scene with his sister full in his throat. To his astonishment, he pulled out two five-pound Bank of England notes, and only a few words accompanied them. "Dearest," she wrote,—"Since you left me to-day I have suffered beyond endurance. That you will ever forgive me for my harshness I cannot hope. I am the only soul you have to turn to, and yet I struck at you as with a whip. Your face as you turned away will haunt me for the rest of my life. I have been sobbing and sobbing, feeling my heart must break. I ask you to be good to me now, and take this little money. Darling, don't punish me by sending it back. Better times are coming presently, and, if God is good, this little help now may bring you the best of fortune.—Your loving sister, Mary."

Wyndham was unnerved; realising to the full the torture her gentle, sympathetic nature was inflicting on her. What it must have cost her to gather up her strength for that critical interview he could only remotely surmise. Yet it had failed her after all!

However touched he was by her sweetness, however much he was moved to respond to this prostration and surrender, he yet saw only too clearly that at bottom it was a failure of strength. The idea of using the money was singularly distasteful; even though he told himself he would have his hand cut off rather than doubt her perfect goodness and sincerity in sending it.

This necessity of a difficult decision disturbed the nice cool balance with which he had started out to face the day. There was nothing for it but to put aside the letter for the present in the hope that counsel would come to him later. And in the meanwhile he went on with his programme. He tidied his papers, went to hunt out his old charwoman, and, ultimately leaving her in possession of the studio, he ran into town to get his new materials, and look up the various accessories for the scheme of the picture.

His first visit was to a shop in Oxford Street, where he had dealt ever since his student days, and where he could order what he needed without immediate payment. A burly man in a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers was making purchases at one of the counters, and his back seemed not unfamiliar. Wyndham brought out his list and was going through the various items with one of the assistants when a heavy hand was placed on his shoulder, and, turning, he beheld the big powerful head and pointed beard of one of the old gang of his Latin Quarter days.

"Sadler!" he exclaimed.

The big head was convulsed with laughter, and Wyndham's hand wrung in a mighty grip.

"How jolly! I was coming to look you up! I've just ferreted out your address; you're still fixed out there at Hampstead?"

"Oh, do come—I shall be delighted," said Wyndham genially. "Have you been in London long?"

"Three weeks. After knocking about for five years—what do you think of that, my boy? First went all over Spain—made scores of studies. Gee! First-rate! Cheapest place in Europe—exchange thirty-five to the sovereign—and lots of good eating. Went to see a bit of Velasquez down at Madrid. Gee-rusalem! And the Titans, stuck up in a funny little room! You never see anything so fine in your life."

"Oh, I've been there," smiled Wyndham.

The vigour and enthusiasm of his old friend, the nasalities of the deep voice, had almost a complete freshness for him, after the long interval since their last meeting. He was pleased at the encounter—it brought him whiffs of old days of happy comradeship. He felt the stirring of the war-horse.

"Then I put in a nice couple of years at Munich; saw some Boecklin. Gee! He's great!"

"I once saw some wretched things of his, though," said Wyndham. "I remember—at a modern exhibition at Venice."

"I grant there are one or two rotten ones," conceded Sadler; "but they're interesting, if you take them in the right way—experiments that failed, though they were fine as he had them in him. Well—then I did a bit of a tour all over the shop—came along through Holland—made cart-loads of sketches; and then I came right along here. Been getting lots of fun in London; been round with the boys, and had a rattling good time. Taking the opportunity, too, of getting some nice suits of clothes." And here Sadler turned abruptly from art, and plunged into sartorial details. His interest in such matters was astonishing, almost touching. He revelled in fancy waistcoats and rioted in tweeds and broadcloths. London was the only place in the world where you could get the rakish cut. He, Sadler, had never suspected what a lovely figure he had, till this latest cutter had revealed him to himself!

He paused at last for breath.

"Anything particular on with you?" he was presently impelled to ask, observing that Wyndham was exercising a marked fastidiousness in the choice of his canvas.

"A portrait," said Wyndham. "Not a bad little commission."

"Good!" ejaculated Sadler, his face shining enthusiastically. "A lady?"

"Yes," answered Wyndham, "and I've rather a charming scheme."

"Good!" roared Sadler again. "I heard you hadn't been doing much of late. They were running your work down—some of the boys, and I said they were talking rot. We nearly came to blows about it. I think I fairly shut them up."

Wyndham had at first winced a little. Then he felt like shrugging his shoulders. After all, the past had to be lived down. Besides, Sadler's championship was genuine and influential.

"That was very kind of you. You always did stick up for me."

"Don't you mind 'em a bit, my boy. You just go ahead, and you'll come out at the top of the tree."

"I'll do my best," said Wyndham, smiling. "That'll be good enough, I guess," said Sadler. "Perhaps this portrait will open up other things for you."

"How so?" inquired Wyndham.

"It all depends on the crowd you strike—I heard you came a bit of a cropper, and I daresay you're not too well off now to despise a job or two—you can always put decent work into them. Now there's Jim Harley—he struck a rich middle-class lot ten years ago, rotten out-and-out Philistines, twenty guineas apiece—and they've been keeping him going ever since. Does fifty of 'em a year."

"The prospect hardly tempts me. After all, the main thing is to get back to big work."

Sadler smiled. "I guess I should be the first to drag you back again—after a while. But Jimmy married young. A boy and girl affair. His wife's family weren't satisfied with his financial position, and there was a mighty row at the time. Of course the girl had only her pretty eyes."

"Ah, you don't approve of idealistic love affairs."

"Not of that kind. I'm forty, and I've seen something in my time."

Wyndham had finished his purchases, and was telling the assistant to send the parcel to his studio. As they left the shop presently, Sadler pressed Wyndham very hard to lunch with him at a particular restaurant he mentioned, and Wyndham could not do otherwise than accept the invitation, though he confessed the place was unknown to him. Whereat Sadler expressed great astonishment. It was one of the very few places in London where the food was fit to eat! Why, the cooking was even better than at Lavenue's in the Quarter, and that was saying a great deal. He, Sadler, could not endure any other place during his sojournings in London. Wyndham let the dear fellow gallop on to his heart's content. Sadler was a fine painter, and in the old days Wyndham as the junior had sat at his feet, and in the matter of technique had been greatly indebted to him. But he had observed with covert amusement at a very early stage in the acquaintanceship that Sadler, like so many others in the hard-working, hand-to-mouth world of the arts, had an amiable weakness for "being in the know" anent the good things of life, and affected a lavishness in public that was off-set by a sharp economy in the less visible phases of his existence.

At the restaurant Sadler scrutinised the carte with the confident eye of a man about town, grumbled a little, held a fussy colloquy with the waiter, and finally ordered oysters and chablis to begin upon, the while a chateaubriand was being prepared for them.

Over the meal Sadler talked a great deal of old times. He seemed to have kept himself well in touch with scores of men they had known in common, despite scatterings and vicissitudes. His mind kept leaping across the world, beating them all out of their lairs for Wyndham's enlightenment. Did he remember Pycherley—the biggest duffer of them all? Well, he had married an heiress on the strength of his genius, and was painting awful stuff out in California; and Snyders, who had shared his studio, had built himself a Moorish house high up on a mountain-side overlooking the Gulf of Salerno; a third had settled down to "black-and-white" in a queer little creeper-clad house in St. John's Wood; a fourth was decorating a municipal building at Toronto. Marlowe was still in the avenue du Maine, where the fascinating American actress he had wed had since borne him a sheaf of daughters: and the beautiful Mrs. Smith they had known at Fontainebleau, the summer they had spent there together, had long ago divorced her husband, and married the Italian sculptor, in whose studio she had made such sensational progress. She now exhibited regularly, and had already received a gold medal of the second class.

And so the conversation continued—for the most part about men who were now pretty well getting on into middle life, whose destinies had found definite declaration and were visible to all Wyndham expressed his pleasure that his own future, on the contrary, still lay wrapped in mystery; that, though the curtain was full up, the interest of the drama was by no means played out.

"You can afford to talk like that, Wyndham," shouted Sadler. "What are you? You're only a boy! But I'm forty, and I tell you I'd give up the interest of the drama for a safe income, and think it a damned good bargain. I get along, I sell my stuff, but I tell you I sweat and groan."

"I admit I should like my old income back again," said Wyndham; "not for itself, but for the sake of the splendid freedom to work."

"That's just my point," shouted Sadler. "What the hell do I care about money for itself? And I tell you what, my boy, the right thing for an artist is to marry a woman with money." He struck the table hard with his big fist, making the whole restaurant rattle.

Wyndham almost jumped. "Good gracious! So that's what you were driving at! The idea to me is perfectly loathsome."

"That's just what I used to think," exclaimed Sadler. "But you can't go on for ever with your head in the clouds."

"The thing's so awfully brutal and sordid," insisted Wyndham, shuddering visibly. "It makes my blood run cold."

"You make me tired," snapped Sadler pettishly. "Where's the sordidness? I don't say a man ought to run after a fortune—but enough to steady things. Taking it all round, we artists have less chance of making money for ourselves than other men of the same worth; and since most of us do marry some time or other, we ought to look to marriage to help our work, and not to drag it down."

Wyndham was unconvinced. "If you take away the poetry out of life, the rest of it is too hideous to bother about. If a man marries to make himself comfortable, he's no better than a contented pig wallowing in muck. Rather than surrender the ideal, I'd give up marriage altogether, stand by my guns, and die fighting."

"We artists are a damned sentimental lot," shouted Sadler. He lifted a juicy morsel to his mouth. "This chateau's jolly good, isn't it?"

"Excellent," admitted Wyndham.

"Now you see I wasn't exaggerating when I said it's as good here as at Lavenue's." Sadler swallowed his mouthful. "We all begin with your idyllic ideas—Rossetti, Meredith, and all the rest of it. But I tell you it's hell! You dig the work out of yourself with sweat, with blood!" The veins began to swell in Sadler's mighty forehead. "And when you're not one of the lucky ones, what does the world do to help you to work for it?" He had wrought himself up to a tense excitement, and put the question with a hoarse shout. "Nothing! It prints your name in the papers, it talks about you at dinner parties! Painting is starvation—painting is death! By the time you've worried along till you're forty, you begin to see a bit straight, my boy. Look around you—what do you see on all sides? You see the best of us and the luckiest of us fixing up some pretty little nook here in town or in the country, and then trying to clear a few hundreds or so by tempting somebody to buy it for double what it cost. We begin with ideals, and afterwards we are glad to come down to the level of the common speculator. Let us have no delusions about it—there's nobody keener for necessary money than we artists when we begin to feel the years slipping by. I tell you it's hell!" He gulped down a glass of wine and wiped his lips.

"I see your point of view," said Wyndham; "but I detest it. Better to fight to the end, and stand alone."

"You make me tired," snapped Sadler again. "There are plenty of women of the right sort who'd prefer an artist with a name to some damned bore of a booby who hasn't an idea in his head. They're not fools, those women, I tell you. They know there's no money in the profession; they know you can't get everything in life. Life's a compromise. You've got to give and take. And when women have money, you'll find they understand these things better than when they haven't. A romantic boy runs after a rosy-cheeked, bread-and-butter miss with nothing. The chit gives herself airs, expects what they call 'an establishment'—the rotten Philistines!—and then starts out to please herself in every way, places her whims and caprices first, and the happiness of the household nowhere. The brute exacts every sacrifice, and if she has to make the tiniest concession, it rankles in her all her life."

Wyndham dissented. The same things might happen even if the chit were a millionaire.

Sadler dissented in his turn. He insisted that in woman money and good sense somehow went together. It was a fact. "Look how much happier French marriages are; look how the husband and wife are comrades and stick together. I tell you the French system is the best in the world. Every girl brings her husband a dowry of some kind, and they both work together for the common good. When the time comes it is easier to pass on the money to their own daughter in their turn."

Wyndham contended that these things were all a matter of temperament. "Even at the best you'd have to keep your mind very elastic as to the type of person, whereas, for my own part," he declared, with the Lady Betty type in his mind, "I not only hold on to my poetic standpoint, but there are certain personal ideals I couldn't possibly surrender."

"If you stick out too much for ideals, you'll never get anywhere at all," said Sadler. "There are things one must stick out for," insisted Wyndham. "For instance, I could never marry a woman who wasn't intelligent, and certainly never one who wasn't beautiful."

"Intelligent—yes. But what is beauty?" asked Sadler, shrugging his shoulders. "And if you get a woman too obviously beautiful, you'll have every man a mile round making love to her, like flies round a honey-pot. It's a sort of primitive law of the universe, and it'll hold good for all time, I suppose."

"Oh, I should chance all that," said Wyndham.

"But what is beauty?" insisted Sadler.

"I know when I see it," laughed Wyndham.

"Give me character," said Sadler. "Unselfishness and loyalty are the chief points, and a sort of sweet reasonableness, of course. If a woman's features aren't quite classical, it's wonderful what a good dressmaker can do to set them off. Waiter! Cigarettes!"

When ultimately the waiter brought the bill, Sadler produced a silver sovereign purse, saw with unconcealed horror that it contained only half a sovereign, then felt in his pockets for loose silver. "It's rather awkward," he said, pulling the longest of faces. "I'm afraid I haven't enough left on me after paying for my colours and materials this morning. I shall have to ask you to lend me a little."

A flash of surprise, an imperceptible raising of the eyebrows; then swiftly Wyndham accepted the situation, and threw down one of Mary's banknotes. "Sorry I've nothing smaller," he said, smiling.

"All right, old fellow," said Sadler. "You pay this time, I'll pay next time."

By the time the waiter brought Wyndham his change, the conversation had passed on to the last exhibition of the New English Art Club.

Wyndham arrived home, after completing all his business calls, late in the afternoon, and found that the charwoman had finished her work, and was replacing the furniture. A not unpleasant tinge of turpentine permeated the atmosphere. The oak presses, newly polished with beeswax, shone and glowed even in the shadow of the afternoon. For the first time for months the hearth was clear of ashes and cinders, and the stone scoured and whitened.

When the woman had gone he devoted a few minutes to wandering about his domain, enjoying this new sensation of spotlessness, appreciating the professional hand, the skill of which had never before seemed so legitimate a theme for admiration. Then he sat down and wrote to Mary as follows:—

"My dear little Mary,—Your sweet little letter came this morning, and at a moment to be of the greatest service to me. Fortune has already smiled on me again. For the immediate present I have a portrait commission for a couple of hundred guineas! A great fortune—is it not?—after all these seasons of leanness! You will guess that I am now ambitious of getting to grips again with the big picture. I have taken a deep and engrossing look at it again, and I see how to resolve all its difficulties, I daresay, by the spring. I know this letter will make you happy, so, for Heaven's sake, don't give another thought to yesterday afternoon. I have been a great trial to you for so long, and I want to recognise your goodness and kindness in the only way I can, and that is by—succeeding. My heart is in the work, and your belief in me shall find justification.

"I am keeping your money; it will remove my last anxiety and enable me to work at ease. I want you to come here as soon as I have made some headway with the new work, as I should like you to carry away the impression on your next visit of something real that has been accomplished.