"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."