avoiding everybody without exception.

It was only on Lady Betty's wedding day, after more than three years of
futile striving, that he had the resolution to remove the great canvas
from the easel and stand it with its face to the wall.

He was tired now, but he must make an effort to emancipate himself from
Mary's exchequer. Till then he could not hold his head up. So he painted
some smaller and pleasanter pictures, but again he could do nothing with
them. The Academy sent them back, the minor galleries sent them back,
the Salon sent them back the following year. The dealers offered less
than the cost of the frames. Meantime he had ceased to count up the
five-pound notes Mary had starved herself to keep for him. He knew he
was a coward and dared not. He had reached that stage of moral
confusion which Nietzsche registers as in the natural history of the
artist-type, and which may not be eyed too harshly from the point of
vantage of ordered and organised existence in this outer universe. One
idea stood clear beyond all others; grew into his mind; grew till it
became his mind. He must cling to his studio, hold desperately to this
atmosphere of paint and canvasses.

He was getting on in years now--past thirty-three. It was like the
striking of a pitiless clock, this adding of swift year after year to
his unsuccessful life. His hand began to fail him. The necessity of now
doing his own house-work; of bothering with coals and cinders, preparing
his makeshift monotonous meals, pouring oil into lamps, and boiling
kettles, and washing plates and teacups, had begun by encroaching on his
time and energies, and ended by absorbing them altogether. The care of
ministering to his own primary needs had at last superseded art as his
profession. Even so, the cobwebs multiplied and the dust lay thick.

Months now slipped by, he scarcely knew how; he was astonished to
realise how time might elude one, how a colourless day might be trifled
away without appearing to hold the possibility of even a morsel of
achievement. Yet he still grasped the hope that something would
"arrive"--an unexpected magazine commission, a request from a dealer.
Ideas for a new start would teem in his head as he lay tossing on the
narrow iron bed up in the gallery at the end of the studio. Why not do
some pretty little things--to fetch ten guineas apiece, say--Cupids
playing amid wreathed flowers with pale Doric structures in the
background? If Mary could manage