Friendships ripen quickly in Chelsea. Within the space of an hour and a
quarter Annette had learned that the young man's name was Alan Beverley
(for which Family Heraldic affliction she pitied rather than despised
him), that he did not depend entirely on his work for a living, having
a little money of his own, and that he considered this a fortunate
thing. From the very beginning of their talk he pleased her. She found
him an absolutely new and original variety of the unsuccessful painter.
Unlike Reginald Sellers, who had a studio in the same building, and
sometimes dropped in to drink her coffee and pour out his troubles, he
did not attribute his non-success to any malice or stupidity on the
part of the public. She was so used to hearing Sellers lash the
Philistine and hold forth on unappreciated merit that she could hardly
believe the miracle when, in answer to a sympathetic bromide on the
popular lack of taste in Art, Beverley replied that, as far as he was
concerned, the public showed strong good sense. If he had been striving
with every nerve to win her esteem, he could not have done it more
surely than with that one remark. Though she invariably listened with a
sweet patience which encouraged them to continue long after the point
at which she had begun in spirit to throw things at them, Annette had
no sympathy with men who whined. She herself was a fighter. She hated
as much as anyone the sickening blows which Fate hands out to the
struggling and ambitious; but she never made them the basis of a
monologue act. Often, after a dreary trip round the offices of the
music-publishers, she would howl bitterly in secret, and even gnaw her
pillow in the watches of the night; but in public her pride kept her
unvaryingly bright and cheerful.

Today, for the first time, she revealed something of her woes. There
was that about the mop-headed young man which invited confidences. She
told him of the stony-heartedness of music-publishers, of the