"I must tell you exactly how I came to make imitation oil-paintings," said Alice candidly, as she sat on the three-legged stool in her garret that first evening, with Doris in the Windsor chair beside her. "I was forced into it by necessity. I am an orphan, you must know, and I live with my dear elder brother Norman. He is an artist--a real gifted, talented artist: he can paint such glorious pictures! But they don’t sell yet. The fact is, the British public is so foolish!" She tossed her curly head as she spoke. "It--it prefers these," waving her hand towards the artificial oil paintings. "And meantime," she continued, "meantime, Norman and I have come to the end of our resources. He doesn’t know. He is such a dear old muddle-head about business matters that he thinks the ten pounds he gave me last Christmas is still unfinished!" She laughed--it was characteristic of her, Doris found, to laugh when others would cry. "And I had been so puzzled," Alice continued, "as to how I should be able to find the means of subsistence for us both. For I had long known Norman hadn’t another five-pound-note that he could put his hands upon. I looked in his purse often, when he was asleep, and in the secret drawer of his writing-table, which he uses as a cash-box, and which he fondly imagines no one can open except himself. Don’t look so shocked! Motive is everything, and I don’t pry about from curiosity, but simply to keep the dear old fellow alive and myself incidentally. Oh, where was I?" she paused for a moment in order to recover breath, for she talked with great rapidity. "Oh, I know, I was saying we had come to the end of our resources. I had sold my watch and my hair--oh, yes, I didn’t mind that. It is much less trouble now it is short, though I have to put it up in curlers at night, which makes it rather spiky to sleep upon. However, I am always so tired that I can sleep on anything. And, to cut a long story short, I sold everything I could lay my hands upon that Norman would not be likely to miss. Then I saw in a magazine, in the Answers to Correspondents, that very striking imitation oil paintings could be made in a certain way, which would sell well amongst ignorant, uncultured people, and, knowing what numbers of such folk there are, I determined to try to make them." She paused for breath. Doris said nothing. Her blue eyes were fixed upon the other’s face and she was reading it, and reading also between the lines of her story as she listened to her talk.