Weak himself, he carried with him a very pestilence of weakness; painted the world in grey and feeble colours for other people. Moira, seeing him apparently striving against dreadful odds, pitied him, and called the world hard for his sake; those who succeeded had been but lucky, she thought, and good-natured, laughing Charlie had been bruised by the world, and had not deserved his bruises. In a sense, setting the one man against the other, she wavered a little in her favour of Charlie; seemed to see in him one of those failures that yet are half-successes, because the failure is taken with a shrug, good-humouredly, and because he who fails is not strong enough to fight against it. Jimmy was all right; Jimmy had seemed to succeed from the very first, and his moments of poverty had been mere light accidents, to be set aside and forgotten. She knew but little of Jimmy's fight; she had only touched his life, as it were, when first that life blossomed, however humbly, into print. The starved heart of the girl longed and hoped always for love; hoped unconsciously, just as it had done in the old days, when she had struggled so fiercely to be first with Old Paul. Above all, it has to be remembered that Charlie had come into her life--full of gaiety and light-heartedness--at a moment when that life was dull and grey and commonplace; and he bore upon him always, either in failure or success, the stamp of youth, and hope and cheeriness. On the darkest mornings, when the streets outside were hideous, and the young spirit of the girl was fighting fiercely against the restraint of those few sombre rooms, it was Charlie who could always come up the stairs two at a time; Charlie who could burst into the room with a laugh and a joke; Charlie who could drag her out into the streets for a walk; Charlie whose cheery tongue was never still. It was what she needed; it was more than food and drink to her then. Jimmy, in a sense, stood aloof; Jimmy was on quite another plane. Once or twice, when she had mustered courage to go round to his rooms, he had been either very busy or else not there at all; she had had the long tramp back to Locker Street, Chelsea, with the thought uppermost in her mind that Jimmy was slipping away from her. She had hoped so much at the first; she was to draw Jimmy into that magic circle again; to open up afresh the half-worked gold mines of their childhood. But Jimmy was in a sense inaccessible.