Kate Duveen was an old friend, and Eve had hunted her out in her Bloomsbury lodgings on the third day of her coming to London. They had been at school together before the Carfaxes had taken a cottage in Surrey. Kate Duveen was a brown, lean, straight-backed young woman, with rather marked eyebrows, firm lips, and shrewd eyes. She was a worker, had always been a worker, and though more than one man had wanted to marry her, she had no desire either for marriage or for children. She was a comrade rather than a woman. There was no colour either in her face or in her dress, and her one beauty was her hair. She had a decisive, unsentimental way with her, read a great deal, attended, when possible, every lecture given by Bernard Shaw, and managed to earn about two hundred pounds a year. It was Kate Duveen who had introduced Eve into Miss Champion’s establishment. Miss Champion’s profession was somewhat peculiar, though not unique. Her offices were in a turning off Oxford Street, and were situated on the first floor. She was a kind of universal provider, in the sense that she supplied by means of her female staff, the various needs of a cultured and busy public. She equipped men of affairs and politicians with secretaries and expert typists. There were young women who could undertake mechanical drawing or architects’ plans, illustrate books, copy old maps and drawings, undertake research work in the British Museum, design fashion plates, supervise entertainments, act as mistress of the revels at hydros and hotels. Miss Champion had made a success of the venture, partly because she was an excellent business woman, and partly because of her personality. Snow-white hair, a fresh face, a fine figure. These points had helped. She was very debonair, yet very British, and mingled an aristocratic scent of lavender with a suggestion of lawn sleeves. Her offices had no commercial smell. Her patrons were mostly dilettanti people with good incomes, and a particular hobby, authorship, public affairs, china, charities. Miss Champion had some imagination, and the wisdom of a “Foresight.” Good form was held sacred. She was very particular as to that old-fashioned word “deportment.” Her gentlewomen had to be gentlewomen, calm, discreet, unemotional, neat looking lay figures, with good brains and clever hands. Kate Duveen had introduced Eve to Miss Champion, and Miss Champion happened to have a vacancy that Eve could fill. A patron was writing a book on mediæval hunting, and wanted old pictures and woodcuts copied. Another patron was busy with a colour-book called “Ideal Gardens,” and was asking for fancy plates with plenty of atmosphere. There was some hack research work going begging, and designs for magazine covers to be submitted to one or two art editors, and Eve was lucky enough to find herself earning her living before she had been two weeks in town.