'Write: "After four years of slavery, I mean to become a man once more. Our compact is over. You shall no longer put your name to my works; and I will no longer share in the infamy of this fraud. Find, if you can, some other starving painter, and buy him. I have torn up your cheque, and I am now at work on a picture which will be my own. If there is any awkwardness about the subject and the style, in connection with the name upon it, that awkwardness will be yours, not mine." So--will you read it aloud? I think,' said Armorel, 'that it will do. He will probably come here and bluster a little. He may even threaten. He may weep. You will--Roland--are you sure--you will be adamant?' 'I swear, Armorel! I will be true to my promise.' Armorel heaved a sigh. Would he stand steadfast? He might have much to endure. Would he be able to endure hardness? It is only the very young man who can be happy in a garret and live contentedly on a crust. At twenty-six or twenty-seven, the age at which Roland had now arrived, one is no longer quite so young. The garret is dismal: the crust is insipid, unless there are solid grounds for hope. Yet he had the solid grounds of improved work--good work. 'Should you be afraid of him?' she asked. 'Afraid of him?' Roland laughed. 'Why, I never meet him but I curse him aloud. Afraid of him? No. I have never been afraid of anything but of becoming penniless. Poverty--destitution--is an awful spectre. And not only poverty but--I confess, with shame----' 'Oh! man of little faith'--she did not want to hear the end of that confession--'you could not endure a single hour. You did this awful thing for want of money.' 'I did,' said Roland, meekly. 'The Way of Pleasure and the Way of Wealth. I remember--you told me long ago--they draw the young man by ropes. But not the girl. Why not the girl? I have never felt this strange yearning for riot and excess. In all the poetry, the novels, the pictures, and the plays the young men are always being dragged by ropes to the Way of Pleasure. Are men so different from women? What does it mean--this yearning? I cannot understand it. What is your Way of Pleasure that it should attract you so? Your poetry and your novels cannot explain it. I see feasting in the Way of Pleasure, drinking, singing, dancing, gambling, sitting up all night, and love-making. As for work, there is none. Why should the young man want to feast? It is like a City Alderman to be always thinking of banquets. Why should you want to drink wine perpetually? I suppose you do not actually get tipsy. If you can sing and like singing, you can sing over your work, I suppose. As for love-making'--she paused. The subject, where a young man and a maiden discuss it, has to be treated delicately.