"I must tell you exactly how I came to make imitation oil-paintings," said Alice candidly, as she sat on the three-legged stool in her garret that first evening, with Doris in the Windsor chair beside her. "I was forced into it by necessity. I am an orphan, you must know, and I live with my dear elder brother Norman. He is an artist--a real gifted, talented artist: he can paint such glorious pictures! But they don’t sell yet. The fact is, the British public is so foolish!" She tossed her curly head as she spoke. "It--it prefers these," waving her hand towards the artificial oil paintings. "And meantime," she continued, "meantime, Norman and I have come to the end of our resources. He doesn’t know. He is such a dear old muddle-head about business matters that he thinks the ten pounds he gave me last Christmas is still unfinished!"
She laughed--it was characteristic of her, Doris found, to laugh when others would cry. "And I had been so puzzled," Alice continued, "as to how I should be able to find the means of subsistence for us both. For I had long known Norman hadn’t another five-pound-note that he could put his hands upon. I looked in his purse often, when he was asleep, and in the secret drawer of his writing-table, which he uses as a cash-box, and which he fondly imagines no one can open except himself. Don’t look so shocked! Motive is everything, and I don’t pry about from curiosity, but simply to keep the dear old fellow alive and myself incidentally. Oh, where was I?" she paused for a moment in order to recover breath, for she talked with great rapidity. "Oh, I know, I was saying we had come to the end of our resources. I had sold my watch and my hair--oh, yes, I didn’t mind that. It is much less trouble now it is short, though I have to put it up in curlers at night, which makes it rather spiky to sleep upon. However, I am always so tired that I can sleep on anything. And, to cut a long story short, I sold everything I could lay my hands upon that Norman would not be likely to miss. Then I saw in a magazine, in the Answers to Correspondents, that very striking imitation oil paintings could be made in a certain way, which would sell well amongst ignorant, uncultured people, and, knowing what numbers of such folk there are, I determined to try to make them." She paused for breath.