ell 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