lmost 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 t