"I am your father’s foreman, and I earn three pounds a week. Lark and Bundy, Tomlin, any of the big dealers would pay me five pounds a week, but I can’t leave Soho Square." Posy said hastily: "I’m sure father couldn’t spare you." "I am useful to him. I’m not such a fool as to underrate my services. He is generous. He will raise my salary, but I shall remain downstairs. I repeat, I know my place. I am fully aware that I ought not to be talking to you like this. Mr. Quinney would be angry." "Really, that is absurd." "Do you know your father as well as I know him?" She evaded his eyes. "Perhaps not, but there’s nothing of the snob about daddy; he never pretends to be better than he is. He rose from the ranks, and he’s proud of it. I’m proud of it. I admire men who rise. I have no use for slackers who owe everything to others. Why shouldn’t you rise higher than father? You are better educated and a greater artist." "What! You have thought of me as an artist?" "I have been told that you are an artist. Father says so, and Mr. Tomlin. It interested me enormously. You love your work for your work’s sake. That is fine. And yet you tell me that you are unhappy, that it gives you a shock to meet me, because I stand for everything you want and can’t get. What do you want?" "Freedom for one thing." "Mustn’t freedom be earned? I have been taught so. You are serving, I suppose, your apprenticeship. The work you love may be a small part of that, and the rest drudgery. I used to loathe playing scales, but I tried to be jolly." "Your position is assured." "If you’re the right sort, yours will be." "I shall be jolly when it is. You ought to know all the truth, Miss Quinney, if my stupid affairs don’t bore you too utterly? "Can’t you see how interested I am?" "You are divinely kind. I can’t express what your sympathy means to me. Well, you spoke of my rising. That’s just where the shoe pinches. I have not risen; I have fallen." "Fallen from—what?" "My people were gentlepeople." "Oh!" She drew in her breath sharply. James could see that his last shaft had transfixed her. He was very clever, and he guessed exactly how she felt about gentlepeople, using the word in its widest sense. Quinney’s money had made her a gentlewoman. "My father was an officer in the Army." (It was true that James’s father had once held a second lieutenant’s commission in the Militia.) "My mother was the daughter of a West Country parson. They died when I was a boy. There was practically nothing for me. I was educated at a charitable institution. Charity apprenticed me to a cabinet-maker at Exeter. Charity nearly buried me—twice. I have known what it is, Miss Quinney, to be without food, and without money, and to wake morning after morning wishing that I had died in the night!" *III*