Invitation after invitation had to be refused because I could not afford the expense nor the time. A great barrier had arisen between me and my old world. How I regretted I had not done even more than I had done for people less dowered than myself in the past! And yet Alec and I had often sent a bank-note in an envelope to a sick or poor friend. Then, yes then, the reward came. The thoughtless rich, with all their kindly but useless offers of hospitality, left me alone, and the others—those who were really worth knowing—sought me out. Well I remember a first-class return ticket to Scotland being pinned, as if by chance, on the top of the letter which invited me to a shooting-box. Another time some friends asked me to go abroad with them _as their guest_, and treated me as their most honoured friend. Boxes came for the theatres, and the note accompanying them asked at what hour I would like the carriage to fetch me, or motors were lent me to shop or call. It was all to save me expense, I knew; but done so nicely, and showing so keenly the determination to give me a good time and save my slender purse. These were the acts of true gentlefolk—the vaunted offers of visits that meant hundreds of pounds’ worth of clothes and ten pounds’ worth of tickets and tips were mere pretence, merely salves to the soul of the sender of the invitation, that he or she was doing something kind, knowing all the time they were but dangling a fly from the world I had lost, to the woman not yet sure of her new world or of herself. The creative mind is like a sensitive plant. It feels sorrow or joy more acutely than its neighbour or it could not take in or give out impressions. Everyone with initiative in the Arts is receptive. They are like sensitive plates in a camera. They conceive and receive impressions. Genius suffers, or it cannot expand, and poverty to genius is often cruelly crushing. It paralyses output, or is a wild incentive to work at the cost of double brain force. It would be so nice if all really clever people, people whose work benefits mankind, could be saved the gnawing pains of poverty. Genius is often emotional, and there are just as many emotional men as emotional women. I have seen as many tears lurking in men’s eyes as in women’s in my day. God bless them for it—a person who cannot feel is not human. * * * * * I went to all sorts of queer old eating-houses, doss-houses, lunatic asylums, gaols, docks, slums, Jews’ markets, and Billingsgate, in my pursuit of “copy”; always seeking something new. I began to wonder if money was the only thing that counted, and then—a thousand times no. I realised that money was the only thing that counted in the world of snobs—but did the world of snobs count at all?