all, and she lived on a top-floor in
Albert Street, Camden Town, under desperate restrictions of time and
space. For she had a family, and the peculiarity and the awkwardness of
Laura's family was that it was always there. She spoke of it briefly as
Papa.

It was four years now since Mr. Gunning's sunstroke and his bankruptcy;
for four years his mind had been giving way, very slowly and softly, and
now he was living, without knowing it, on what Laura wrote. Nobody but
Laura knew what heavy odds she fought against, struggling to bring her
diminutive talent to perfection. Poverty was always putting temptation
in her way. She knew that she had chosen the most expensive and the
least remunerative form of her delightful art. She knew that there were
things she could do, concessions she could make, sacrifices, a thousand
facile extensions of the limit, a thousand imponderable infidelities to
the perfection she adored. But they were sins, and though poverty
pinched her for it, she had never committed one of them.

And yet Laura was cruel to her small genius. It was delicate, and she
drove it with all the strength of her hard, indomitable will. She would
turn it on to any rough journalistic work that came to her hand. It had
not yet lost its beauty and its freshness. But it was threatened. They
were beginning, Nina said, to wonder how long Laura would hold out.

It was not Poverty that had wrecked her. She could bear that. Poverty
had been good to her; it had put her woman's talent to the test,
justifying its existence, proving it a marketable thing. She rejoiced in
her benign adversity, and woman-like, she hated herself for rejoicing.
For there was always the thought that if she had not been cursed, as to
her talent, with this perverse instinct for perfection, Papa would not
have had to live, as he did live, miserably, on a top-floor in Camden
Town.

It was May and the keen light raked her room, laying its bareness still
more bare. It was furnished, Laura's room, with an extreme austerity.
There was a little square of blue drugget under the deal table that
stood against the wall, and one green serge curtain at each window.
There was a cupboard and an easy-chair for Mr. Gunning on one side of
the fireplace next the window. On the other, the dark side, was Laura's
writing-table, with a book-shelf above it. Another book-shelf faced the
fireplace. That was all.

Here, for three years, Laura had worked, hardly ever alone, and