There was little money in the sale of crochet; there was not much more in sitting in costumes hired from the Models' Club. From both these things she quickly turned. Perhaps she turned from them the more quickly because of Kitty Windus--for Kitty was now with her in the flat in the New Kings Road, and the way in which Kitty, without spoken words, paid over her weekly fifteen shillings, was in itself a spur. Not that Kitty always spared her the words either. Two words at least that she did not always spare her were "rise" and "permanency." Often Louie felt all the amazement, and now quite without any leaven of amusement, that she had felt when first she had entered the Business School in Holborn; but she was not keeping Kitty (or Kitty keeping her) either for love of Kitty or her own mere necessity. To keep Kitty was part and parcel of that absence she was already beginning to resent. It was merely safer to keep Kitty than to have anybody else keep her. Besides, as long as she kept Kitty, she had only to write a note, justifying it afterwards as best she could, and two ships (so to speak) would come together again. She delayed to write the note; none the less it was in her power to do so. So (to turn for a moment to that moving background of Life in the offing) the September of 1900 found her answering the advertisement of a Bayswater seedsman and discovering the precise market value of her old Rainham Parva training. But by the end of the same month she was temporarily installed at the clerk's table of an exhibition of French paintings at a Mayfair gallery, and glad of the job. Say (the question is hardly worth going into) that it was the influence of the paintings themselves that once more caused a manager to propose that Louie's wages should be substantially increased, for a consideration; it didn't matter; Louie, who did not now throw away jobs for nothing, merely told the man not to be silly--than which, as it happened, she could have done no better thing, for at the close of the exhibition the manager, now looking upon her almost as a dear daughter, found her another place, this time at a gallery academic both artistically and morally, warned her against dangerous young men, and kissed Louie on both her laughing cheeks. After that her French again served her turn, for she entered the office of an illustrated weekly; or if it was not entirely the French that did it, so much the luckier Louie to possess even yet a frock that was a rest to the proprietor's eyes after a succession of applicants in walking skirts and white muslin blouses. This job Louie actually kept till June 1901; then an amalgamation took place that threw her out of work again. Three weeks later, after a severe trial of her temper by Kitty, she was a "carpet designer"--that is to say, she coloured, in an upper room near St. Paul's Churchyard, pieces of paper so minutely chequered that sometimes for an hour or two she could not get the flicker out of her eyes.