"I have found myself out," retorted Lucas. "I boasted I could make an income for her--and look at this daub!" "The public likes daubs." "If they know the signature; yes, by all means. But who knows mine?" "Some Jews are great picture-buyers," suggested Hillary. An answering gleam lit Lucas's eye for an instant, and then burned out. "For the artist there are three ways of making a living," he pronounced. "One is painting for the million--children with rosy cheeks and large wheelbarrows; beds with angels hovering over them and kind doctors with stethoscopes sitting beside them--that sort of thing--the obvious road to the heart. The second is hitting the superior kind of idiot in the eye--inventing a cheap new formula--putting a goblin upside down in one corner, an immoral-looking woman in another, and passing the arrangement off as an allegory. Then up jumps an interpreter and booms you. The third is slowly making your name by the sweat of your brow, and selling your pictures when you are fifty-five to people who never recognized their merit till they had been told you were famous." "Well," said Hillary, "that gives you a biggish target." "Does it? I have no popular knack; I lack the conjurer's instincts; and I don't mean to wait for Jean Walkingshaw till I am fifty-five." "Must it be she?" asked Hillary. "It must!" "Her father won't help?" "If he wasn't so infernally respectable he'd shoot me at sight." "Run away with her. Once you've got her, he won't be heathen enough to let her starve." "In the first place," replied Lucas, "she wouldn't run away with me. That's the infernal, charming, irritating, splendid thing about her--she is true to us both." "Won't chuck you and won't chuck the old boy either?" Lucas nodded. "The thing can be done," said Hillary languidly; "it only wants a little energy and enterprise. Great achievements are never accomplished by slackness. Woman was created to yield to the energetic advances of man. Remember that, Luc--" "Besides," interrupted the painter, who had paid singularly little attention to this stirring speech, "I happen to be handicapped by a little pride. Can you imagine me helping her to compose begging letters to her father? 'We are in great distress this winter, and a check for twenty pounds will be gratefully, etc. etc. etc.!' Can you see me stooping to that sort of thing? What?" "I merely threw out the idea as it were tentatively," said Hillary mildly. Lucas gave his mustaches a fierce twist and planted himself firmly with his back to the despised picture.