The cover of this book was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. A more extensive [transcriber’s note] can be found at the end of this book.

GRAY YOUTH

OLIVER ONIONS

NOVELS BY OLIVER ONIONS

• In Accordance With the Evidence
• The Debit Account
• The Story of Louie
• Gray Youth

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
NEW YORK

GRAY YOUTH

THE STORY OF A VERY MODERN COURTSHIP
AND A VERY MODERN MARRIAGE

BY
OLIVER ONIONS
Author of “In Accordance with the Evidence,”
“The Debit Account.”

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
NEW YORK
Publishers in America for Hodder & Stoughton

Copyright, 1913,
By George H. Doran Company

Copyright, 1914,
By George H. Doran Company

TO
MARY STEWART

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Gray Youth is published in England in two volumes under the titles: The Two Kisses and A Crooked Mile.

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE
A VERY MODERN COURTSHIP

PART I

ARGUMENT

A girl of seventeen, with a knitted tam-o’-shanter cap and a thick cable of red-bronze hair hanging down her back, walked along a gallery of the Louvre, looking for her aunt. The eyes that turned whenever she heard a footfall or, passing a statue or case, saw a fresh vista before her, were of a light brown, with just such a hint of gold in their irises as you see when some opals are turned and catch a different light; and they were confused and overfilled with the treasures on which they had rested. She was an art-student, and must return to London on the morrow in order to resume her studies at the McGrath.

It was her first visit to Paris, and she had spent the whole of her three weeks at the Cluny and the Luxembourg, at the Louvre and Versailles. Now, drenched and sated with beauty, she still could not bear to leave it all. A few minutes before, passing through the Salon Carré, where an elderly lady had been copying the Entombment, she had wished that she too might be old and white-haired if only age might so enlarge her capacity for loveliness, that even youth would be well lost for it. Already she loved the highest when she saw it, and, being an artist, she needs must attempt it too.

The girl found her aunt near the spot where the Antinöus stands on its pedestal, and walked along by her side, neither speaking nor listening to the elder lady’s remarks on the objects they passed. They did not seem to her to be worth listening to. She knew that for her aunt art had reached its comble on the day when the late Sir Noël Paton had affixed his signature to “The Man with the Muckrake,” and she had got out of the way of trying to explain that much water had flowed under London Bridge and many students flowed through the McGrath since that time. Besides, she did not want to talk. She wanted this last high hour in the Louvre as much as might be to herself. She wanted to taste the full emotion of it, not even analysing it, if only for once analysis would cry a truce. At the end of the gallery they turned and walked back again.

It was as they passed the Antinöus for the second time that the girl felt her young bosom rise almost painfully. She could not have told why, without premeditation, she suddenly lingered, so that her aunt passed a little ahead. She watched her disappear behind some plinth or pedestal or other, and then stopped opposite the marble bust.

There was no knowing when she might find herself in this wonderful place again, and it seemed to her that her farewell of it now required some symbol. She gave a furtive glance round. Neither visitor nor gardien was to be seen, and again something seemed to rise in her throat. Noiselessly she stole to the pedestal. For a moment she wondered whether she dared; the next instant she had risen,—in her low-heeled brown shoes she was hardly more than five feet high,—she had risen on tiptoe.

She crushed her lips against the Antinöus’s marble cheek.

What it was she really kissed she had no idea. They say that male artists have been known to kiss the pallid mask of the Girl said to have been found in the Seine, but probably they have kissed, not the senseless plaster, but some more glowing inner image. But the girl thought of no young man, Greek and dead or modern and alive. Perhaps by her act she set young men expressly aside, adoring the imperishable expression instead. It was the first kiss she had ever given. There was no sex-impulse in it, and yet it was a gesture of sex. She would not have known what other gesture to employ.

With a fluttering heart and a heightened colour she rejoined her aunt, and on the following day returned to London. For days after that a nameless wistfulness still lingered in her shallow brook-brown eyes.

A fortnight after her return they gave a fancy-dress dance at the McGrath, and the girl made one of a supper-party of a dozen or more who, during the interval, in one of the smaller painting-rooms, settled on the floor in a wide ring, with plates of sandwiches and jelly and cakes and blancmange making a rapidly disappearing parterre of food in the middle. The ring was as noisy as a merry-go-round of painted horses on a Bank Holiday, and they played Hunt-the-Slipper, and perhaps in the scuffling there was a little crude hand-holding—though nobody held the girl’s hand. Then they went back again to dance in the Antique Room, where the tall casts, the “Discobolus” and the “Gladiator,” the “Germanicus” and the great writhe of the “Laocoön,” had been wheeled back against the walls, and stood, like so many sightless servitors, holding wraps and shawls and the fans and oddments that had been put down on their plinths. The girl danced again.

She was dressed this time as a porcelain shepherdess, in a hooped skirt of tender pink with tiny sprigs of green sown throughout it. She had borrowed the dress from one of the other girls. At supper, sitting in the ring, she had resembled a rose-peony that had been taken by its stalk and pressed down on the floor. About the slender hyacinth-stalk of her neck was a black velvet ribbon with a locket, and the thick mass of her hair peeped over the shoulders of her partners like an irregular knob of bronze lustre. Her shallow ribboned hat was on “Homer’s” head, between the “Gladiator” and the “Greek Slave.”

Some time during the later part of the evening, she was induced by a young man in evening-dress, with restrained manners but a hardy eye, to descend the stairs, and, passing the hall-porter’s little glass box and pushing at the outer swing-doors, to take a walk in the courtyard of the School. The McGrath is only part of a larger institution. In the forecourt are grass plots enclosed by low swinging chains, and, tall and dim, with many broad steps and Corinthian columns, the pediment of the great main portico towers over the court on the eastern side. The girl and her cavalier crossed the grass plots, ascended the steps, and stood within the gloom of the pillars.

There, without warning, the young man suddenly stooped and kissed her.

She knew that these things happened, and daily; but tears of misery and revulsion and shame started into her eyes. It seemed—she did not know what—a soilure, a coarseness, a bringing down of some lovely and to-be-dreamed-of thing to mere brutal demonstration. The young man was not even one of her companions of the McGrath; he was a medical student, he had told her, and so perhaps naturally insensible to the finer emotions. With a sudden pained “Oh!” she started from him, her hands crushed with horror against her pretty cheeks and mouth. She thought she heard him say, “Why, what’s the matter?” but she was not sure; she was sure of nothing in this moment but of her own sense of miserable outrage. She left the young man calling softly behind her, ran quickly down the steps, and reached the dancing-room again.

Near the door as she entered two men stood, looking on. Both were men of forty-four or forty-five, and one of them was Jowett, the McGrath Professor of Painting. His companion had just asked him a question; he tugged at a ragged and grey-streaked moustache before replying.

“Art students? What becomes of ’em? God knows! You might as well ask what becomes of people who eat their meals in restaurants or little girls who learn to play the piano. They aren’t a class. Perhaps one in a thousand or fifteen hundred comes to something, but the rest—well, what this place really is, if you want to know, is a sort of day nursery for the children of the well-to-do middle class.”

“You mean they marry and then drop it?” the other asked.

Jowett tugged again at the unkempt moustache. He spoke patiently and wearily.

“Oh yes; and co-educate their offspring; and by and by I suppose we shall have evolved a sort of intermediate sex, half women who make a hash of doing men’s work, and half men who put flowers in their hair and talk about music. It always seems to me that these girls ought to be sewing or baking, and the men drinking beer and singing limericks in a canteen.—There’s a girl, now——”

The small creature dressed as a shepherdess had just run past. The eyes of both men followed her. Jowett continued.

“Miss Amory Towers. She’s the pick of ’em; one of the clever ones, I mean; and as far as my experience takes me, that means she’s just a little too clever for a woman and not nearly clever enough to make a really satisfactory man. But, of course, she’s young, and I may be wrong.... I put her straight into the Life when she came here, but what she really needs is somebody to put her into Life in another sense. But I doubt if anybody here’ll do it. These fellows don’t see other men enough; too much squiring these young women about.—Eh? Harm in it? Not a ha’porth; they’re too dashed blameless altogether. Sometimes it’s positively unnatural; it seems to me to raise the very questions it’s supposed to suppress. Probably these youngsters will grow up to be fifty, and then discover all the follies they’ve had the chance to commit and haven’t committed, and then they’ll go about preaching doctrines about it all. Really, they scare me sometimes. I’m not naturally gross, but they do drive a fellow——”

But here the other interrupted him.... “Hallo, your little shepherdess seems to be going early.”

Amory Towers, her tiny figure wrapped in a hood and cloak and her young heart one unhappy ache to know the meaning of these two first kisses of her life, was hurrying away.

I
CHEYNE WALK

In Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, there used to stand, and may stand yet, a tenement of which the ground floor was a small “lock-up” greengrocer’s shop, and the remaining portions either dwelling-rooms or else rooms that, like the shop, were left at night and returned to again the next morning. The narrow entry to the right of the shop had once been white-washed, but was now so discoloured that the street boys had ceased to scribble on its walls the names of horses and other matters. It was full of the smell of apples and oranges and of the more suspect odour of earth and bruised rinds and decaying outer leaves, and there was usually a cat or two about, licking up the last splash left by the milkman’s can. When a new milkman took the round he was lucky if he did not come down all-fours at the bottom of the narrow winding staircase that turned off sharp to the right. The staircase itself was as black as the inside of a pair of bellows, and a piece of paper at the foot of it bore two names:

Miss Dorothy Lennard
Miss Amory Towers

These were followed by the words: “First Floor: if Out, leave Parcels at Shop.”

The landing of the first floor was slightly less black than the staircase itself, but the grey half-light filtered through, not from any window, but from the unhinged side of the door of the room rented by Miss Lennard and Miss Towers. As if the landing had been damp and the room beyond warm (which possibly was the case), this door, which was of thin matchboarding, warped inwards quite two inches at the top, and, indeed, seemed to be held only by the fastening in the middle. When the door happened to be locked the glimpse through this crack was always productive of a slight annoyance. It was as if Miss Dorothy Lennard or Miss Amory Towers was nearly in, or not quite gone away, or in any case must be returning in a few minutes. People often waited for quite a long time before finally giving up hope.

Early on an April afternoon some years ago there walked quickly into the entry and ran confidently up the dark stairs a tall young woman in a large black picture-hat and a long tea-coloured silk raincoat. On the first landing she pushed at the door with her foot. There was a short succession of flapping and shot-like sounds (for if the door skellowed inwards at the top it stuck correspondingly at the bottom), and then the door started open and the young woman entered.

“Amory!” she called loudly. “Where are you?”

The last words were superfluous, since (unless she had climbed out of the long front casement and on to the gutter) it was not possible for Miss Towers to be in hiding in the room. And out of the square aperture at the back, that commanded a view of washing, weeds, discarded bottles, the greengrocer’s “empties” and the back gardens of the west side of Oakley Street, she could not as much as have got her head. Nor did Miss Lennard wait for an answer. Down the chimney opposite the door there came a dense yellow cauliflower of smoke; Miss Lennard hastily closed the door again; and then, first looking for a moment this way and that, she strode to a black-and-white desk near the long casement and began to turn over the litter upon it. This, which was a foot and more high, consisted of magazines and ladies’ journals and tracing-paper and proofs, and it was surmounted, first, by a plate with a couple of bananas and a half-eaten bunch of grapes upon it, and secondly, by a glass of water, clear above, cloudy in the middle, and with a thick reddish sediment at the bottom. As she sought, Miss Lennard popped three or four grapes into her large O of a mouth, throwing the skins towards the fireplace, from which another opaque yellow cauliflower poured, though this time not quite so far out into the room. She had removed her gloves; her hands were large and firm and waxen and without rings; and one or other of them found its way of itself to the grapes while the other continued its search.

The smoking of the chimney had blackened the ceiling, which bellied downwards in the middle like the under side of a giant’s mattress; and it had also dimmed the surfaces of such of the brighter objects of furniture as the cheap working-room contained—the picture-glasses, the gate-legged table, a bowl full of dead daffodils, and some crockery. But Miss Lennard and Miss Towers frequently said that it was not for the inside of the room, but for the sake of the views from the long lattice in front, that they had chosen the place. These were for ever changing and charming. From a standpoint just within the door you looked over the Embankment Gardens and saw, through trees, lighters following the bullying tugs, or barges, their sails reefed to the sprits, resembling tall attenuated figures in the act of grasping punting-poles. Placing yourself in the middle of the worn floor you saw, crossed out as it were by the middle lattice, the Chelsea Jelly Factory and other buildings across the river. And standing quite by the fireplace you saw the lacy lines of the Suspension Bridge and the low grey-green trees of Battersea Park. As the chimney emitted more yellow curds, Miss Lennard, with an “Ugh!” opened the middle section of this window. The papers among which she had been searching were instantly whisked across the floor.

“Bother the thing!” she muttered. “How stupid if it’s at Oxford Street all the time!... I say, Amory, have you seen that Doubleday thing? You know—the Chemisettes. I was sure I’d left it here.”

The door had rattled again, and Miss Amory Towers had entered.

Miss Towers did not answer at once. From a brown pudding-bowl of a hat with a silken cord round it, she drew out two enamel-headed hatpins, and hung the hat on a hook. Its removal showed her rich hair no longer in a plait, but wreathed round and round her head and interplaited until it resembled a vividly painted fir cone. She wore a peacock’s-neck-coloured blouse with several necklaces of iridescent shells at the collar; a roughened leather belt encircled the waist that would have been large had she herself not been so small; and, while the breeze from the open window rippled in Dorothy’s tea-coloured raincoat, it hardly stirred the folds of Amory’s heavier skirt of dusty-looking brown velvet.

She moved to the window. “I haven’t touched your things,” she said.

Then she stood, half leaning against the embrasure, gazing moodily across the river.

Certainly she was fetchingly pretty. As if you had looked at her through one of the very weak reducing-glasses illustrators use in order to see how their work will diminish, so her features had not only a special smallness, but somehow a special brightness of their own as well. The slight neck was white as a bluebell stalk; the faint flower-like stippling that never quite broke through into avowed freckles reminded you of a rubbed old miniature that might have been painted, not on ivory, but on a lamina of pale gold; and her inordinate hair lighted up the whole casement angle. But she was perturbed about something. She watched a string of lighters drift down with the tide, and then, without turning her head, said, “Dorothy——”

Dorothy, who had been once more searching among the scattered papers, rose from her knees. She held a piece of paper in her hand. “Got it!” she cried triumphantly. “I knew I’d left it here.... What?”

“Have you heard about Aunt Jerry?”

“Thank goodness I haven’t trailed all the way from Oxford Street for nothing!... Aunt Jerry? No. What about her?”

“She’s going to be married.”

Ordinarily Dorothy Lennard’s blue eyes were wide, receptive rounds; in moments of surprise they always seemed to open to twice their size. They did so now.

“No!... Oh, my dear, do tell me, quick.”

“Mr. Massey, at the boarding-house.”

“Mr.——? Not the safety-valve?” she cried.

“Yes.”

“My—dear!... But he’s forty if he’s a day,” Dorothy exclaimed.

“He’s forty-three. Aunt Jerry’s thirty-eight.”

“Oh, but she’s such a darling! Have they told people yet? May I write her a note? When are they going to be married?” Miss Lennard came as near to asking the three questions all in one as was physically possible.

“Write if you like. They’re getting married in July. I call it——”

But instead of saying what she called it Amory turned impatiently to the window again. She was biting the corner of her upper lip.

“Why,” said Dorothy, checked in her glee, “what’s the matter?”

But Amory did not speak. She had been about to say, if a thing so obvious needed to be said, that it was ridiculous (to say the least) for people of thirty-eight and forty-three to be thinking about marriage; but that was not all. There were other things, that, since Dorothy could not understand them even if she did say them, were perhaps not worth wasting breath over. Not that Dorothy was actually dull; but for all that Amory had almost ceased to hope that Dorothy would ever grasp her, Amory’s, true position. Their circumstances were so very different. Of course Amory was ready to concede that Dorothy, like herself, did contrive to live on what she earned; she earned from thirty to thirty-five shillings a week as a fashion artist; but it was one thing to make do on that, with people behind you to catch you when you stumbled, and quite another to have (as Amory had under her godmother’s will) a scanty thirteen pounds a quarter, to sell a sketch or a picture once in a blue moon, and to know that that is all the help you need look forward to. Dorothy would quickly have found out the difference had it been she, Amory, who had had the people with houses in town and places up and down the country, and herself, Dorothy, who had been the daughter of a poor and clever Cambridge practitioner who had died before he had managed to get on his feet, and had left his daughter to live with the only relative she had in the world in a hateful boarding-house in Shepherd’s Bush! And it was all very fine for Dorothy to joke about it, and to say that the fewer relatives she had the luckier she was. There was no getting away from it: these things did give a confidence to Dorothy’s stride, and an assurance to her glance, and an expectation of success to her eyes.

Therefore Amory did not answer when her friend asked her what was the matter.

But Dorothy, after a moment’s cogitation, contrived, though probably by accident, to hit on what was the matter for herself.

“I must write to her at once,” she said. “In July—so soon! I am glad! I do hope they’ll be happy!... And what’ll you do? Go on living at the boarding-house?”

Ah! (Amory thought), so Dorothy did see it from somebody’s point of view besides Aunt Jerry’s! She moved one shoulder petulantly.

“Aunt Jerry paid the bills there,” she said.

“Do you mean that you’ll go and live with them when they’re married?” Dorothy asked.

“No, I don’t,” said Amory with marked brevity. Dorothy hadn’t seen her aunt and Mr. Massey together or she wouldn’t have asked that. And one of them was thirty-eight and the other forty-three! Talk about the loves of the valetudinarians!

“Well, what will you do?” Dorothy asked again.

Again Amory turned to the window. She spoke with her back to Dorothy.

“What can I do? What is there left? Come and live here, as far as I can see,” she replied.

“Oh,” cried Dorothy at once, struck with the idea, “that’ll be jolly!”

(Jolly! With that warped door and that chimney! Jolly! Amory almost laughed.)

“Oh yes, very jolly,” she said, tossing the adorable little head.

But Dorothy caught the tone in which she said it.

“Oh, I don’t suppose it will be if you’re determined it shan’t, but don’t I just wish I had your talent and chances!” she replied cheerfully. “My hat, wouldn’t I swap! Why, think of what all the critics—Hamilton Dix at any rate—are saying about you! You’re going to have a show all on your own——”

“H’m! If I ever do! Don’t forget it’s been put off three times already.”

“Well, but each time it couldn’t be helped, and you’re going ahead working all the time, and it’ll be a tremendous leg-up for you when it does come. You ought to have my job, my dear, in the middle of a catalogue rush, or when you’ve drawn the lingerie ladies as like fishes as ever they can be, and you get letters complaining that you’re starting young men on the downward path—you’d come back to your pictures thankfully enough then, I can tell you! The fact is you don’t know what you do want.... Now I’m going to make a cup of tea and then I must fly back; I only came for that Doubleday thing. Have some?”

She crossed to the sink, emptied the leaves from the teapot on to the heap that already choked the trap, and filled the kettle and set it on the fire.

It always annoyed Amory when Dorothy told her that she didn’t know really what she did want, for she always did know—at any rate for the time being. True, she had worked in various styles in the past; to an unintelligent watcher she might even have seemed vacillating and changeable: but after all, what better course could a student follow than that? Youth was the time for bold experiment. Settled convictions too early arrived at were things to be distrusted. And there were indications that she really had “found herself” at last. She had swept aside, quite a long time ago, her earlier efforts of the days of the McGrath; she had outgrown, too, the Meunier-like figures, all muscle and hammers and leather aprons, that had first attracted Mr. Hamilton Dix’s attention; and all round that Cheyne Walk room were stacked the canvases of her latest and (she hoped) her finally settled phase—her Saturday night street-markets, her “character studies” worked up from sketches made in Whitechapel and Shoreditch, her scenes sketched in alleys and courts and during long waits in gallery-queues. Therefore she was a little annoyed with Dorothy now.... Dorothy was clearing the table and cutting bread-and-butter. Amory continued to look out of the window.

Then, while Dorothy still prepared tea, she moved from the window and walked to the little shelf of books that occupied the recess on the farther side of the fireplace. She took down a volume protected by a stout brown paper wrapper and began to read as she stood. Still reading, she sidled slowly back to the window, where the light was better, and mechanically turned the page. She could always pick up a book and lose herself at a moment’s notice like this. If at such times she was spoken to, she usually gave an “Eh?” or a “Yes—no, I mean,” and continued to read. She considered it to be evidence of her powers of mental concentration.

The book she was reading now was the first volume of The Golden Bough. Such a book, of course, was far too expensive for her to buy; therefore, in order that she might read it and its kind, she subscribed to a sort of private Association which was composed of herself and a dozen or so of her old friends of the McGrath. They bought the books as they were published, passed them (protected by the brown paper covers) from one to another, and after a time sold them back to the bookseller again at diminished (but still quite good) prices. None but rather expensive and abstruse books were thus bought; had The Golden Bough been procurable in the Bohn Library the Association would have felt that something of its choiceness had gone; and Amory hoped, when she had got through The Golden Bough, to be the next in rotation for certain of the Tudor Translations, and she did wish Laura Beamish would hurry up with Apuleius and the Golden Ass. These things contributed to breadth of outlook. It had for too long been a justly-founded reproach against artists that they had no general culture. Amory felt that, of all people, an artist certainly could not know too much; and what an artist knows will go, sooner or later, into his or her art.... She was still deep in The Golden Bough when Dorothy called, “Ready—come along, Amory——”

Reluctantly Amory laid aside the book and sat down at the little gate-legged table.

As the two girls took tea they talked of Miss Geraldine Towers’s engagement, of Amory’s own plans after the wedding, of the Exhibition that for various reasons Mr. Hamilton Dix had repeatedly postponed, and of one thing and another. Then Dorothy rose. She must get back to the fashion studio in Oxford Street.

“You’re going to work, I suppose?” she said, as she tucked the Doubleday thing into her belt and adjusted her hat before the little kitchen mirror.

Amory yawned. That was another thing Dorothy never seemed really to grasp—that while she, Dorothy, might sit down to her absurd attenuated fashion figures as it were with the striking of a clock, Amory’s work was rather different. Dorothy, of course, always professed to admire Amory’s painting enormously; in a sense she had no choice but to do so, unless she wished to write herself down an out-and-out fool: but she never really understood, in spite of the pains Amory had taken with her. It was rather pathetic.... Amory yawned again.

“Oh, I don’t suppose I shall do very much. This about Aunt Jerry’s put me quite off. And”—she grimaced slightly—“there’s to-night. They’re having a party, or a celebration, or something at our boarding-house. I expect that’ll be rather ghastly. Want to come and see?”

But Dorothy only laughed.

“To-night? A party? Me? I shall be lucky if I get away by eleven.... And oh, I say, Amory,”—her tone changed suddenly, and all at once she seemed embarrassed,—“I nearly forgot—there’s something—it had almost slipped out of my head—I hope you won’t mind my suggesting it——”

It was part of Amory’s cleverness, helped of course by her wide reading, that she often knew what people were going to say almost before they knew it themselves. She knew what Dorothy was going to say now. And it was not true that Dorothy had nearly forgotten; that was merely false delicacy and a roundabout way of approaching the subject. Amory smiled.

“You see,” Dorothy went on, “there’s a job of sorts going—not a fashion—not exactly a fashion, that is—more like a painting—and I think the price could be screwed up to fifteen pounds for it—Mercier would get twenty-five; but then he’s Mercier. So I wondered——” She paused diffidently.

It was not the first time she had tried to put work into Amory’s way. And Amory knew that she was perfectly right in refusing it; it was Dorothy who did not know that the commercially acceptable thing is separate in kind, and not a dilution of a different excellence. Dorothy, by rising, might in time attain to the heights of the great Mercier, who did “Doubleday Spring Covers,” but Amory, stooping, would only have stooped for nothing. She lifted her golden eyes to her friend. She was half amused at the success of her guess, and half sensible of Dorothy’s well-meaningness and kindness of heart.

“It’s awfully good of you—but you know I simply shouldn’t know how to begin,” she said. “I think perhaps I’d better stick to my own job.”

“Not if I gave you tips?” said Dorothy, almost wistfully.

“I’m afraid not.”

Dorothy openly admired her. The two girls had been at the McGrath together, and Dorothy’s admiration was the homage that artistic vice (fashion-drawing) paid to artistic virtue (street-markets and an impending one-man-show).

“I say, Amory, you are plucky!” she exclaimed.

Amory knew that she was not plucky in the least, but it did not displease her to let it go at that. She murmured something about “Absurd!” and Dorothy, with a wave, was off. Amory heard her step in the entry below; then the sound died away on Cheyne Walk.

Left alone, Amory set on the kettle again for washing-up; then, until it should boil, she looked anew round the room in which, for all she could see to the contrary, she would soon be living. And tea had now put her into a rather better humour. After all, it might not be so bad. Not that it was not all very fine for Dorothy to talk; anybody could talk lightly about living over greengrocers’ shops who had people who rode in cars with tea-baskets and bridge-tables inside them and lived in houses with eight-foot baths and electric lights in the wardrobes so that they could see which frocks they were taking down; nevertheless, it might not be so bad. Cosimo Pratt would help her. Cosimo was so good at arranging things. If anybody could make this single dingy room with the lovely view comfortable, Cosimo could. And Cosimo, unlike Dorothy, really did understand her painting....

She did not pick up The Golden Bough again; instead, she stood in front of a photograph of the Gioconda that was pinned to the plaster wall. It was one of a row—a Rembrandt, a Corot, the Infante, and others—which she had bought in Paris four years before. She had Pater’s description of the Gioconda by heart, as also she had that of Richard Jeffries of the Accroupie underneath it; and she was murmuring the passage, when, with a great burst of steam, the kettle boiled over. She set about her washing-up.

It was a task she loathed. All domestic work she loathed. In pouring the boiling water on to the cups and saucers, with the kettle held out at arm’s length so that she should not splash herself, she got hold of the hot part of the handle; and when she had run cold water on to the utensils she dipped her fingers into a scalding cup in a corner of the tin that had not been cooled. The butter on the plates was horrid, and instead of the proper drying-cloth she got hold of a painting-rag, with turps on it. A knife-handle came off in the boiling water, and, incautiously drawing too near the sink, she splashed the brown velvet skirt after all.

It was as she was washing her greasy hands afterwards that she became conscious of a vague and familiar odour. From what part of the house it came she did not know—perhaps from the greengrocer’s downstairs, perhaps from the rooms overhead. It came up the pipe, and it was the smell of water in which cabbage had been boiled.

Hitherto it had not been worth complaining about, but now, if she really was coming to live in this room, something would have to be done. What it was that would have to be done—well, she would ask Cosimo.

II
THE SURPRISE PARTY

“Glenerne,” the boarding-house between Brook Green and Goldhawk Road in which Amory lived with her aunt, was really two large houses thrown into one; and, besides sheltering its twenty-odd guests, it served as a sort of academy for the teaching of English to foreign waiters. These came—German, Swiss, Danish, Belgian, even Turkish—without a word of our tongue, gave their services for several months in return for their food, and a year or so later were to be found in the restaurants of Frith and Old Compton Streets and the brasseries of Leicester Square, as English as you please. Perhaps in the manner of food they came off better than did the guests themselves, for, while the establishment provided four set meals a day, you had to sit down to all of these unless you would go slightly hungry. Miss one and you never quite caught up again.

But you forgot this slight nearness to the knuckle in the fullness with which Miss Addams’s advertisement in The Shepherd’s Bush Times—the one that began “Young Musical Society”—was redeemed. Every night there was something “on”; if it was not a whist drive or singing it was an impromptu dance in the large double drawing-room on the first floor, or charades, or a semi-private rehearsal by the Glenerne contingent of the Goldhawk Amateur Dramatic Society. The esprit de pension was very strong; it was as if a vow of loyalty to Miss Addams’s cruets had been taken.

The walls of the drawing-room were trophied with the photographs of former guests; these stood, framed or unframed, in groves on the mantelpiece (indeed, when Christmas came round with its cards, it was impossible to open a door without bringing whole castles of photographs and pasteboard greetings down into the fender); and, ranged on one special little whatnot between the Nottingham lace curtains and Millais’s framed and glazed supplement of “Little Miss Muffet,” were Miss Addams’s “grand-children”—the offspring of the three or four gentlemen or ladies who, at one time and another, had left the boarding-house to get married. About these translated ones something of the legendary, even of the grandiose, had grown up; and one particular chair in the dining-room, that on Miss Addams’s right hand, was still known as “Mr. Wellcome’s chair.”

At half-past eight on the evening of the day on which Amory had told Dorothy of her aunt’s engagement a suppressed gaiety pervaded the whole boarding-house. Dinner was over, and in the little greenhouse that prolonged the hall at the expense of the narrow back garden a few of the men were still smoking; but the drawing-room upstairs was filled with a twittering of anticipation of the guests knew not what. Except that it was to be in honour of Miss Towers’s engagement, Miss Addams had refused to tell what the evening’s entertainment was to be. But even those who had missed dinner had been told that that night Mr. Massey had been promoted to Mr. Wellcome’s chair, vice Mr. Edmondson, Glenerne’s youngest gentleman, who hitherto had occupied it in order to settle a disputed point of precedence between Mr. Rainbow and Mr. Massey himself.

So, until Miss Addams should deign to declare herself, it seemed as if whist or dancing might break out at any moment. Mr. Sandys, of the Lille Road Branch of the East Midlands Bank, seemed loaded with song on a hair-trigger, and had already cleared his throat once or twice; little Mrs. Deschamps, who played the accompaniments, needed but a look to remove her rings, set them in a neat row along the piano-top, give the stool a twirl, and ask Mr. Geake, the Estate Agent, to turn over for her; and young Mr. Edmondson, who was a booking-clerk, moved here and there, humorously complaining that it was a bit thick, his being ousted from Mr. Wellcome’s chair like that. He did not cease to pester Miss Addams to tell her little mystery. Miss Addams, huge and pyramidal in her black satin, only smiled over her tatting (she smiled frequently—the expression caused her slight moustache to pass for the shadow of a dimple), and told him to wait and see.

“You know how you can get your place back again—after July,” she said demurely.

Miss Geraldine Towers and Mr. Massey were not in the room, and their absence had already given rise to several of the rallies of wit that were characteristic of Glenerne. For instance, when the little widow, Mrs. Deschamps, had asked Amory with an air of great innocence where her aunt was, and Amory had replied that she thought she was writing letters, a ventriloquial voice, that might or might not have been that of Mr. Sandys, had been heard to ask whether Mr. Massey was licking the stamps; and again, when Mrs. Deschamps had asked Mr. Geake whether he would be so good as to fetch her book for her (it was on the chair by the aquarium), Mr. Geake had given the widow an intelligent look and had replied that he rather thought the corner by the aquarium was No Thoroughfare. Mrs. Deschamps had given a little apologetic cough and had said, How stupid of her! and young Mr. Edmondson, whose conversation was frequently a good deal beyond his years, had raised a laugh by stroking his smooth lip and saying that he supposed it was only Human Nature after all.

Amory was sitting on a painted three-legged stool under a standard lamp, listlessly turning over the pages of a magazine. She hated this place and these people, and only ironically had she asked Dorothy that afternoon whether she would not like to come to this party. And she almost hated her aunt, who was probably still sitting in the little bead-curtained recess on the landing where the cloudy aquarium stood. It seemed to her that if Aunt Jerry must get engaged at thirty-eight, she might at least have done so without giving occasion for this kind of vulgar and familiar comment. But she supposed that that was what the “Young Musical Society” of Miss Addams’s advertisement really meant: gouty flirtations, ping-pong in middle age, having your toes trodden on during scratch dances by stout and breathless partners, and Progressive Whist with twenty-five-years-old stories told between the deals. Amory’s pretty mouth curled: she saw it all with merciless clearness. Glenerne seemed to her to be half ancients trying to be young, and half young people quickly getting old before their time. Oh, that terrible and affable Mr. Edmondson—that awful Mr. Geake—that impossible bank clerk, whatever his name was! And the place itself! These Nottingham lace curtains, with the dreary joke of the artificial spiders crawling upon them, and the macramé-hung mantelpieces, and the Japanese joy-bells tinkling on the chandelier, when, with plain brown or green paper, and a stencilled frieze in two colours, and a Japanese print or two put just in the right places, and a few chosen books here and there, even Glenerne might have been made quite passable!... She was glad she was going to Cheyne Walk. She would at least be among her own people and her own surroundings there!

She wished herself in Cheyne Walk at that moment when Mr. Edmondson walked up to her where she sat. It never seemed to occur to Mr. Edmondson that his company might not be at all times desirable, and she almost shrank from him as she found her great fir-cone of red-gold hair only an inch or two from his green knitted waistcoat. At a greater distance, she sometimes glanced at this waistcoat with interest, as if, in this place where the old became young again at the expense of their juniors, she expected Mr. Edmondson to become visibly stouter from day to day. Mr. Edmondson spoke now with idiotic cheerfulness.

“Looking at pictures, eh?” he said parentally. “Don’t you get a bit fed-up with ’em after a whole day of it?”

“No,” said Amory.

“Don’t you, really! Well, I must say illusterated papers have made great strides this last few years. Who’d ha’ thought of a Daily Spec a few years ago? And we think nothing about it now. I see ’em out o’ my little window once the morning rush slacks off a bit—the bookstall’s just opposight—they chuck their ha’pennies down one after another—‘Spec!’ they say—never think twice about it.”

“Oh?” said Amory. Mr. Edmondson might have been the historian of modern journalism, looking back. He continued.

“’Uge circulation it must have; why, I’ve known ’em get through as many as thirty-eight quires in a single morning at our place alone; somebody must make some money out of it! I forget what their divvy is.—But I wonder you don’t get fed-up with pictures for all that. It’ll be like me dealing out tickets instead of cards for whist.”

“Almost the same,” said Amory.

Mr. Edmondson looked at her for a moment suspiciously, as if he thought she was getting at him. Not very long before, Mr. Edmondson would have resented being got at by girls, especially in his green waistcoat; but he had grown soberer and more tolerant since then. He went avuncularly on.

“What d’you suppose Miss Addams is going to spring on us? I guessed French blind-man’s bluff for a start, with word-making and whist to cool off a bit on: but Mrs. D. says forfeits.... What, are you off?”

“Yes, I’ve a letter to write.”

“That’s the style: business before pleasure. I hope you write in a good light always: nothing worse for the eyes than writing in a bad light. It’s no good wishing you had your eyesight back again when it’s gone: the thing is to take care of it while you’re young. I saw a bit in the paper the other day—it was about reading in bed——”

But Amory fled.

As she dropped the portière of the drawing-room door behind her she encountered her aunt on the landing. She stopped. She was very angry with her aunt; she felt that her aunt was making of her, too, a laughing-stock. She turned her shallow brook-brown eyes, but hardly her head, as she spoke.

“I do think——” she began impetuously, and stopped. She stopped out of the sense that these things ought not to have to be said. In making it necessary for Amory to remark on them at all her aunt was putting her into a false position.

Miss Geraldine Towers had her hand on the knob of the door. She smiled, but did not turn the knob.

“What, dear?” she asked amiably.

“I do think you needn’t set them all talking the way you do. You might think of me a bit. Really, it’s rather much sometimes.”

For a moment Miss Towers turned pink, then she laughed. She was plump and personable; her new way of doing her hair had taken ten years off her age and if her high lace collar was rather tight and did cut her a little under her second chin, well, we all have our troubles, and there are worse ones than plumpness. She straightened her wisteria-coloured satin blouse so that the waist above the tailor-made fawn skirt looked its smallest, and tilted her laughing head back so that it seemed to rock on the two points of her collar-whalebones as if they had been gimballs.

“My dear,” she broke out, “don’t be so absurdly solemn! Try to enjoy yourself; you’ll never be younger than you are now! And I do wish you wouldn’t go about in those sad art-colours always. You look like a sparrow having a dust-bath. They may be all right for pictures, but it isn’t as if you sat in a frame all day. Good gracious, anybody’d think you were eighty to see you sometimes! Laugh and the world laughs with you, my dear. Come inside, and don’t be silly; we’re going to have great fun.”

But again Amory turned away.

More than once she had had a wild wonder whether that trip to Paris had not had something to do with her aunt’s preposterous rejuvenescence; but no, it was hardly possible that while she herself had wandered in the museums Aunt Jerry had given herself to secret and wicked pleasures. No, it was the boarding-house and the young musical society again. That clever advertisement had really made Aunt Jerry think that she was young.... It did not occur to Amory that perhaps these ancient ones, of forty or fifty or more, had earned a rest. It did not occur to her that life might have bruised and scarred them, and that they laughed a little loudly and stridently for fear of worse, and that there was hardly one of them whose eyes had not rested on sadder and more sordid and tragic scenes than her own had ever seen. She saw them, as it were, in the flat, as a mere human pattern, and when she was bored with it, Glenerne was a thing to be shut up like one of its own photograph albums. Their manners offended her, and she inquired no further.... In the meantime, however, flirtatious little Mrs. Deschamps would sit in a corner with anybody, and her aunt entered into an engagement at an age when she really might have been expected to be thinking of serious things, and the whatnot in the corner, with its photographs of Glenerne’s grandchildren, was a source of mirth that seemed never to run dry, and if Amory must be misunderstood, well, it was better to be misunderstood than to be understood by these terrible people.

Amory went to her room and took down a volume of Pater.

But she had hardly opened the book when there came a tap at her door, and, in response to her “Come in,” her aunt’s middle-aged fiancé entered.

Dorothy Lennard had called Mr. Massey the safety-valve because he always seemed to use three times as many “s’s” in his conversation as anybody else. These escaped over a neat little row of very white lower teeth like those of a bulldog. The dark hair that grew up the sides of his head always reminded Amory of the elastics of an old pair of boots, and his cropped dark moustache did not interfere with his perpetual gentle hissing. He wore gold glasses and a closely-buttoned frock-coat; he was an educational bookseller in St. Mark’s Road; and it had now been known for some hours in the boarding-house that he, a man of some substance, had been moved to come to Glenerne first of all by the sight of Miss Geraldine Towers shaking the crumb-tray out of the window to feed the birds.

“My dear Amory,” said Mr. Massey, “Geraldine has asked me to come and see whether you won’t join the rest of us in our little celebration. I need not say that it would be pleasant if you would assist.”

Without (she thought) too open an appearance of resignation, Amory closed her book again. She supposed she must.... “All right, if you like,” she said, without fervour.

“Thank you,” said Mr. Massey gratefully. “I was sure you would not absent yourself.—And since I am here, I wonder whether I might say a word for which occasion has not hitherto presented itself?”

Amory was silent, noting the educational bookseller’s periods. He continued.

“It is perhaps a little too early to speak of it, but it might set your mind at rest. When Geraldine and I are married, in July if all be well, I do not want you to feel that any difference to yourself will be made. Your home, if you wish it, will still be with us.”

Amory broke out a little quickly, as if not to leave it for a moment in doubt that she was properly grateful, “Oh, thank you so very much, Mr. Massey——”

“George—or Uncle George——” said Mr. Massey gently.

“—Uncle George—and I do hope you won’t think me horrid—but I thought of living in my studio——”

Mr. Massey made a little calming gesture with his hands, as if to say that all should be exactly as she pleased. He nodded several times.

“I understand; your art; you know best; don’t think I wish to put the least constraint on you. I only want to assure you that your aunt’s house is always at your disposal,” he said kindly.

“Thank you so much,” said Amory hurriedly; and there was a sudden pause.

“It will probably,” Mr. Massey went on deliberatively, as if he passed a succession of desirable dwellings in mental review, “be on the Mall. Yes, Chiswick Mall. One sees such sweet sketches there, especially of sunsets. But in case you do elect to occupy your studio, there will be a little business we shall have to arrange. It may even include a little money. But we can talk of that later.—Shall we join the others, my dear?”

He was genuinely fond of her. When she touched her hair before the little white-draped glass he discreetly turned his back, almost as if he wished to reassure Amory about any stray jest she might have heard about the aquarium corner; and then after a moment he punctiliously gave Amory his arm. They returned to the drawing-room.

Perhaps Miss Addams herself had become a little anxious about her promised surprise, and had decided to make sure of something else in case it failed her, for they had begun to dance. Every boarder was there, including M. Criqui, the Frenchman; and, ranged inseparably against the wall, were the three Indians whose faces resembled olives with white moving eyes. Mats and rugs had been pushed back to the walls; M. Criqui “turned” for Mrs. Deschamps; Mr. Edmondson was waltzing with pretty Miss Crebbin, the typist; and Mr. Sandys danced with Miss Swan, of the Preparatory School near the tram terminus. The window looking on to the back garden was open; the screen of pock-marked coloured glass had been drawn in front of the fire; and the pictures on the walls moved slightly in the draughts. Mr. Geake had placed himself on point-duty near the folding-doors, and was shepherding couples past the awkward place; and from a group of men who conspired out on the landing came sudden bursts of laughter from time to time. Mr. Massey, the hero of the occasion, left Amory, and moved here and there, patting backs, touching elbows, and ever and anon beaming with mild delight about him and rubbing his hands.

The waltz ended, and another began; and Mr. Edmondson, who seemed to have shaken off his seriousness and to have lapsed into youth again, came up to Amory and asked her whether he might have the pleasure. Amory, resolved to go through it now that she was here, placed her hand on his arm. “Might as well have one of these while there’s any left,” he said genially, snatching a paper fan from the mantelpiece as they passed; “I wonder what those blighters are up to!” He indicated the group that conspired near the door.... “You ain’t interested in football, I s’pose? I’m going to the Final at the Palace on Saturday—special leave, what oh!—Donkins’ll take my place—and it won’t half be a squeeze, I give you my word! Funny place to go for a squeeze, eh, Miss Amory?”

Mr. Edmondson was now quite the Mr. Edmondson of the green waistcoat, not to be got at by girls if he knew it.

And still the inscrutable Miss Addams, with her eye drifting a little more frequently towards the door, gave no sign.

“Here, I say, come orf it!” Mr. Edmondson grinned as he and Amory passed M. Criqui and Mrs. Deschamps for the fourth time. They were talking French. “No taking advantage, Criqui!... I don’t call that playing the game,” he continued to Amory. “But you talk French, of course?”

“A little,” said Amory.

“Hanged if I can make out half what them blighters say,” Mr. Edmondson continued cheerfully. “In English, I mean. One of ’em came up this morning—8.45—right in the thick. ‘To-tnm-co-croad!’ he says, just like that; and if I don’t give him a brief for Tott-n-m C’t Road and the right change before you can say knife I’ve got Aspinall down on me like a cartload o’bricks. It ain’t no tea-party, my job ain’t, not in the thick, you take my word for it! Chap tried to ring a bad two-bob on me this morning; broke in two in the clip—you’ve seen the clips we use, haven’t you? What, you haven’t? Just you notice some time!—Broke in two—like that—and him barging there with twenty people behind shouting ‘Hurry up’ and prodding him with their sticks and brollies. Oh, it’s a pinch, I don’t think!”

But still Miss Addams’s surprise didn’t come. After that waltz Mrs. Deschamps flatly refused to play again until she had had a dance, and so Miss Crebbin, the typist, played, to calls of “New ribbon, Miss C——! Mind the visible writing!” Then Mrs. Deschamps sat, first by the door, where she told M. Criqui that all Frenchmen had such dreadful reputations, and next at the open window at the back, where she asked him what “In the Spring a Young Man’s Fancy” was in French, and then disappeared altogether. Aunt Geraldine, laughing, moved everywhere, with Mr. Massey following her with his hands clasped behind his back, and if she had to show her half-hoop of diamonds once she had to do so a dozen times. Then Mrs. Deschamps came back, crying over her shoulder, “If you tell, M. Criqui, I’ll never speak to you again!” but M. Criqui did tell, of how Mrs. Deschamps, venturing into the greenhouse downstairs that was used as a smoking-room, had been detained almost by force until she had smoked half a cigarette.

Nor was it Miss Addams’s surprise even when one of the group of men who had been conspiring by the door handed an envelope to Mrs. Deschamps. “A note for you, Mrs. D.,” he said, and Mrs. Deschamps turned it backwards and forwards and said she wondered who it could be from. She tore the envelope open and then fell back with a shriek, while the circle of men about her roared and slapped one another on the shoulders. A small object had leapt from the envelope with an angry buzz, and now lay still on the floor.

“The Kissing Bee!” shouted elderly Mr. Rainbow, making a reckless attempt to assume the voice of a Ludgate Hill hawker.

“Causes ’eaps o’ fun and roars o’ laughter!” Mr. Beeton, of the cycle-works, cried.

“Don’t go ’ome wifaht it!——”

“One penny!——”

“Knocks the jam-splosh and the spill of ink silly, eh, what?”

“Here, let’s have a look—where do you get ’em?”

“Oh, you wretches!” pouted Mrs. Deschamps.

And then, in the very midst of the hubbub, Miss Addams’s surprise was upon them. A Belgian waiter stood in one of the doorways. He held himself more erect than usual against the wall; save that the tips of his fingers were turned in to prevent his too loose cuffs from falling too far down, his attitude would have been that of perfect “attention.”

“Mis-tairr——Ooell-come!” he announced.

A shout went up that stirred the dust on the chandeliers. Stout, red-faced, rubbing his hands, and (in flat violation of Miss Addams’s rule) puffing a gigantic cigar, Mr. Wellcome himself stood in the doorway, frowning humorously on the group that twisted with laughter about Mrs. Deschamps.

“Now, now, now, now, now—what’s all this about?” Mr. Wellcome cried with mock severity.

Acclamations broke forth.

“Wellcome, by Jove!” cried Mr. Rainbow, in a sort of glad consternation.

“Bravo!” shouted Mr. Geake. “It’s old Wellcome!”

“Come in out o’ the wet!”

“Welcome, Wellcome!”

“Hooray!”

Mr. Wellcome came in, crossed straight to Miss Addams, kissed her without a moment’s hesitation (only remarking, “When the cat’s away—eh?”), slapped his hands loudly together, and then, turning his head half a dozen times this way and that, cried, “Well, and how are we all, eh?”

They cheered him again.

“And now where’s Massey and the blushing one?” Mr. Wellcome demanded; and when he had found them and shaken hands with them he almost doubled the scholastic stationer in two with the blow he gave him between the shoulder-blades. He gave a “Ha, ha, ha!” of amazing volume.

“Done it now, my boy!” he cried. “Nasty things, actions for Breach! Twopence on the bus from High Street to the Broadway now! Well, well, we all do it, even the flies on the sugar-basin! Congrats, congrats.—Now, Mrs. Deschamps! Damme, I must have a kiss from you too, if it was only for the sake of old times!—Where’s Mrs. W——? Tut-tut, you ought to know better than to ask; ask Massey, he knows—or he will one of these days!... Well, now we’re all here let’s get on with the Prayer Meeting. Phtt!”

Mr. Wellcome whistled and snapped his fingers to the waiter at the door.

For Mr. Wellcome never came empty-handed. The Belgian waiter approached with a tray, and it was now discovered that another tray chock-full of jingling glasses stood outside. Mr. Wellcome travelled for Perclay Barkins & Co., and knew butlers and wine-tasters and cellarmen and head-waiters, and was to be relied on for valuable information about vintages and bottling and tobacco-crops.—“Stand there, Whiskerino, by Miss Addams,” he commanded the waiter; and from the tray he began to toss into Miss Addams’s lap a number of articles.

“Thought you might find a use for these,” he said off-handedly. (They were packs of cards that had been used once in some Club or other.) “And you might as well have the latest multiple corkscrew as anybody else, I suppose, eh? Catch!—Now, friends and gentlemen all, oblige me by joining me in a smoke. The curtains, mother? Dash the curtains; Massey don’t get engaged every day, at least I hope he doesn’t; not that there’s any knowing what some of them does under the rose—ha, ha, ha!... Now, Sandys, help yourself. Here’s a cutter. Smoke half of it, and then throw t’other half away; there’s plenty more in the box.—Now, where’s Rainbow? Here you are; you’re my man; you know a little bit of all right when you taste it; half a minute, and I’ll ask your opinion of this——”

Mr. Wellcome’s face became deeply serious as he stooped for a minute; then, as he stood upright again with a bottle in his right hand and a liqueur glass in his left, it shone once more.

“Steady ... there!” He passed an exquisitely filled glass to Mr. Rainbow. “Warm it in your hands a minute first—this way—smell it—and now roll it slowly round the inside o’ your mouth!——”

Had Mr. Rainbow been Cinquevalli balancing the billiard-balls every eye could not have been more intently on him.

“Mmmmmm!” he murmured ecstatically, lips closed, nostrils gently sniffing, eyes fondling the glass.

“Eh?” said Mr. Wellcome, winking to all and sundry, as much as to say, Hadn’t he told them so? “Eh? What? Spanish, should you say? I should think so! W. W. gives you his word for that, worth something or worth nothing as the case may be!... Now, all! Rainbow’s only the taster, in case it was poison; you hold that tray steady, Antonionio; ladies first, I think, is the law of politeness——”

And the tiny glasses, rich and deep as Amory’s hair, were passed round.

Never such a party had been given at Glenerne. The smell of the cigars and the brandy filled the air like some incense burned before the god of the naughty World; more witty things were said by loosened tongues than their owners could ever hope to remember. Fun? Oh, there was fun when Mr. Wellcome himself took matters in hand!... “Now, who says a flutter?” he said by and by, shuffling one of the packs of cards as only Mr. Wellcome could shuffle cards. “For love, Nellie—and forfeits——” But Nellie (Mrs. Deschamps) had already been fluttered by the Kissing Bee, and was in a mood too softened for cards; and, for fear the brandy should have affected anybody, another tray with strong coffee was passed round by Omar K, the red-fezzed boy from Smyrna with the face of the hue of a chocolate “shape.” They kept it up late; for once the “lights out at eleven” rule was suspended; and even Amory sat up quite a long time after she might without singularity have gone to bed. At last Mr. Wellcome rose. He for one had enjoyed himself just fair-to-middling, he said. The mats and rugs were left where they were, pushed back against the walls. Quite twenty voices downstairs in the hall sang that Mr. Wellcome was a jolly good fellow, and what remained of the Spanish brandy was brought downstairs for the two policemen who (nobody knew how) were presently discovered, smiling and with their helmets in their hands, just within the front door.—“Best respects, sir,” said one of them, and “Many of ’em,” said the other.

And so said all the rest.

III
THE FASHION STUDIO

The Fashion Studio that employed Miss Dorothy Lennard had originally been, and in a sense was still, the enterprise of a small printer; and Dorothy had been what Amory called “lucky” to get there. Had Amory herself wanted a post as an apprentice to fashion-drawing, she would have had to fill her folio with “specimens,” to sit with half a dozen other applicants in a waiting-room until it had pleased some manager or proprietor to touch a bell and to give orders that the prettiest one was to be admitted, and then, on her work or prettiness or both, to take her chance. But Dorothy had been enabled to skip all that. Even more than the wealthy Lennards and Taskers who stood in the background behind her, a certain blindness to higher things had given Dorothy an advantage from the start. She had, for example, quite unprincipled ways with men. Almost any one woman (Dorothy was in the habit of reasoning modestly) could turn any one man round her finger if she went the right way about it; and it seemed to her that the men knew that too. If they didn’t, why were they always trying to dodge the individual issue, and to say such fearfully solemn things about the abstraction of Womanhood itself? Dorothy thought she saw the reason. It was that, in the lump, men could usually manage them. It was in detail that they hadn’t a chance.

Therefore Dorothy, having quite made up her mind who her printer-victim was to be, had not for a moment dreamed of writing him a letter and then waiting on him with a folio. Instead, she had cast about among cousins and so forth until she had found one who knew the sleeping-partner of the firm. Then, after some little consideration of ways and means, she had contrived to meet this sleeping-partner, this maker and unmaker of mere printers, not in the firm’s matchboarded office with the machines growling overhead, but at supper at an hotel. These things make all the difference to the consideration in which you are held.... She had hardly had to ask for her job. Machinating men, with their stories and drinks and cigars, can do a good deal, but Dorothy knew how to make of her guileless blue eyes a spiritualizing of mere drinks and stories and cigars. She had, too, ideas the very naïveté of which was likely to strike a man immersed in mere dull business routine. Meeting the printers’ sleeping-partner again, this time at a lunch that spread over into tea-time, she had been able to drop into his ears her own purely personal conviction (against which he would, no doubt, see any number of reasons: still, there it was)—her conviction that his fashion-business, as it stood, was not capable of very much further development. It was not her affair, she had said; that was merely how it struck her; but—she wondered whether the band could be induced to play the “Chanson Triste!”——

And so the printers’ catalogue-business had been turned topsy-turvy.

The printing-office was in Endell Street, and the printing was still done there; but the fashion-studio was there no longer. It was now in Oxford Street, not far from Manchester Square and the Wallace Collection. The single room on the top floor overlooked the vast interior square where, later, acres of glass roofs and flying bridges of iron were to arise; in a word, they had subrented part of the premises of Hallowell & Smith’s, the huge Ladies’ Emporium—and if you have never heard of Hallowell & Smith’s it is not Hallowell & Smith’s fault. A mutually profitable “dicker” that had something to do with Hallowell & Smith’s minor printing made the place cheap; and, though the firm’s Summer and Winter Catalogues were still drawn and printed elsewhere, nothing (it had seemed to Dorothy) would be lost by allowing Hallowell & Smith’s to discover presently that they had facilities for this kind of work actually on the spot.... This was the kind of hint she had dropped to the power behind the printer who had shown himself so fussy about the ice-pail and the music “by request.” She had no plan, but streams did seem to set in certain directions, and it was not much good going against them. They had not obtained the order for Hallowell’s Catalogues yet, but one thing at a time. Dorothy must learn her own part of the business first. She must practise her Fur-touch, graduating to Feathers, and so on to faces themselves. More might happen by and bye.

In one respect at least the change was not altogether for the better, for, bad as the rumble of the machines at Endell Street had been, Hallowell’s mammoth rebuilding, which included much throwing down of old walls amid eruptions of lime and dust, and the running day and night of a crane the top of which lost itself in the blue air, was worse. These activities shook the whole fabric of the place, playing the very deuce with Torchon and Valenciennes. But in every other respect the change was not only an improvement, but the Fashion Studio now stood in the full stream of general developments. It only needed a time-serving, and, for choice, a feminine mind, and there was no telling what might not happen.

To reach the upper room where the seven or eight girls worked, you had to pass from the lift along a long concrete-floored corridor and then through a large outer room that was one of the sitting-rooms of Hallowell’s “living-in” female employees. Of the fashion-drawing factory Miss Porchester was head. She herself went out in the mornings to shops and warehouses to sketch, sometimes taking as many as a dozen buses and cabs in the course of a single morning; and in the afternoon she returned with, the fruits of her wanderings—or, rather, with the seeds, for they were yet to grow and ripen marvellously. Fat Miss Benson took them in hand first. With a foot-rule by her side for checking, lest there should be too much even of a good thing, she roughed in those elongated and fish-like figures which, if you would see them in normal proportion, you must squint at aslant up the tilted page. Then Miss Hurst or blonde Miss Umpleby took over the drawing, further developing the Tea-gown or the Walking Costume, or the lady in her corsets riding in a motor car, or whatever it might be. From them it passed to Miss Smedley or Miss Cowan, who worked it up with lamp-black or Chinese-white or what not, for Miss Ruffell to put in the faces, large-eyed and soulful. Dorothy measured and squared the production, gave a last look to see that the fish-like ideal had not been lost in its progress from hand to hand and that there was nothing else that might start a young man on the downward path, and put a line round it if a line was needed. Pigtailed little Smithie affixed the protecting piece of tissue-paper. It was finished.

Miss Porchester, gaunt and dark, sat at a little table apart, where she could keep an eye on her staff. She kept the register of work done, and saw that the requisite “points” were properly emphasized—the new skirt “set” with a slight difference, the hat tilted an inch lower over one eyebrow than during the season before. She received the travellers, and taught her girls, if they must talk to one another as they worked, to do so without removing their eyes from their sheets of Bristol-board. Quite animated conversations would go on by the hour together without so much as a head moving; and Dorothy’s own blue eyes, which were never so wide open but that they could always open a little wider, would contract and dilate over her work as she talked as if they had contained a pulse.

Whatever Amory might think about it, the other girls too thought Dorothy lucky to have had a real art-training. They had not been to the McGrath.... And, quite apart from the cachet this gave her, Dorothy herself certainly had a way with her. Miss Smedley, for example, was as old as Dorothy, but Miss Smedley, for no reason that could be described, always seemed to move in an atmosphere of kindlily-bestowed pity; but nobody would have dreamed of pitying Dorothy. It was very much the other way. As if they had known her methods with sleeping-partners (which they did not), they looked up to her. Her sayings were repeated, her mistakes covered up for her; and even Miss Porchester never gave her “one for herself.” She was the only one of the girls so exempted.

One morning at about the time Miss Geraldine Towers became engaged to Mr. Massey, the fashion-studio was able at last to draw a long breath of relief and to tell itself that the worst of the half-yearly rush was about over. The last page of the last Summer Catalogue had been sent off to Endell Street, and for a month or two only the normal trickle of odd jobs would be coming in. Even the rule about not moving your head as you talked had been relaxed, and only one cloud marred the general sense of release—the certainty that some of the girls would be “given a holiday” until the next rush began in the Autumn. The girls were discussing this that afternoon. Miss Porchester had gone to Endell Street; fat Miss Benson, her second in command, had passed through the adjoining sitting-room half an hour before, and was guessed to be talking on the stairs with Mr. Mooney, of Hallowell’s Handkerchief Department; and Dorothy also intended to take the risk of Miss Porchester’s inquiring for her and to fly off presently to Cheyne Walk.

“Oh, you needn’t worry, Smithie,” said Miss Umpleby, her chair tilted back so that her primrose hair and clasped hands rested against the coats and jackets on the wall. “They always want somebody to run about and be useful. Hilda and I’ll be the ladies till August. We shall come back again with the Furs.”

Hilda Jeyes had her elbows on the table; she was munching an apple.

“It all comes of our being kept at the one thing, over and over again,” she declared. “Look at me: what am I? A Camisole Specialist! Why, if I was to be set to do Damask, or Mourning, or Boots, like Benny, I should no more know where to begin than I could fly! If only that girl on the Daily Spec would die! I’d be after her place in two twos, I promise you!”

“They never die when they’re on newspapers,” Miss Umpleby remarked, with the detached air of one who reminds her hearers of a well-known fact in mortality statistics. “Splendid thing for the health. I wonder the doctors don’t prescribe it.”

“And when they get married they stick to their jobs just the same,” another girl commented. (To be on the staff of a newspaper, it may be said, is the prize of the fashion-artist’s profession.)

“No ladies with one foot on a chair for the Daily Spec, like the one you began this morning,” Miss Umpleby remarked.

“Well, what chance have we here, I should like to know, with one roughing out all the time, and another doing nothing but heads, and another the curly-cues! There isn’t one of us except Benny who could do a job right through!” Hilda Jeyes grumbled.

“Just so that we can turn the stuff out quicker!” somebody else joined in. “‘Holiday’s’ a good name for it, I don’t think!”

Miss Umpleby turned her eyes nonchalantly to the coats above her head. “Monte Carlo for me, I think,” she said. “Then I shall be able to put in those petticoat bodices with Casino backgrounds and do somebody else out of a job.”

Hilda Jeyes threw away the core of her apple. “You needn’t growl, anyway, Umpy. You are engaged.”

“So I am,” remarked Miss Umpleby, as if she had just remembered it. “I think I’ll ring my source of trouble up now.” She brought the chair down on to its fore-legs again. “Tell me if Benny comes. You can all listen if you like.—Hallo, Exchange!—One-six-double-one Hop!”

And at the telephone on Miss Porchester’s table she began a conversation in which the words “Carlton ... or the Savoy if you like ... Mentone ... I’ve a little time on my hands now,” recurred from time to time.

Dorothy herself had more than once thought that this sub-division of work was hard on the girls. Umpy lived with her mother near dotting Hill Gate Station, and was engaged to a boy who got thirty shillings a week as a clerk in the Russian Import trade; Benny and Hilda Jeyes shared cheap rooms somewhere in Bloomsbury; the others lunched on buns or brought bread-and-butter or sandwiches in paper, and would have had to spend an hour in looking for a dropped shilling had they been so fortunate as to possess a shilling to drop. All were at the mercy of the half-yearly rush and the intervals of idleness between. Dorothy had sometimes wondered whether she herself ought not to have sponged on her relations rather than keep one of these needy girls out of a place.... But she was a practical young woman, with more plans than theories, and eyes that did not carry over many of the dreams of the night into the working days; and beyond a certain point she refused to shoulder the responsibilities of a world she had had no hand in making. Up to that point—well, if (say, by and by) she were ever to “run” a studio of this kind, she would see that the work was not so sub-divided that her girls had no chance in the open market. And she would offer now and then a little inducement over and above wages, and would arrange for them to get quite good but shop-soiled things at a fair reduction, and would get them to take an interest in their work, and would stop Hilda sucking her brushes, and would have the brick taken out of that ventilation-pipe, and another set of wash-bowls, and would annex that adjoining room, and—and—well, anyway, if Catalogues had to be done like this, she would see that those who did them were no worse off with her than with anybody else, and perhaps a bit better.... And now she must get off to Cheyne Walk. She rose, and went for her hat and raincoat.

“You’re not off, are you, Lennie?” said Miss Umpleby. She had finished talking into the telephone. Her last words had been, “Mean old thing!... Well, will you treat me to eighteen-pennorth at the Finbec, then?... Fried plaice and chips?... All right....”

“Yes. Another stroke in my unfortunate family, tell Porchester. They came in a cab to fetch me. Good-bye....”

She sought the lift, descended, passed along the narrow alley to the side street, and caught an Oxford Street bus.

Her reason for leaving early was to warn Amory that guests might be expected at Cheyne Walk that evening. Going out to lunch that day she had met, coming away from the Wallace, a party of her old fellow-students of the McGrath. She had recognized them fifty yards away up Duke Street—tall Cosimo Pratt, without hat and with a grey flannel turned-down collar about his shapely throat, Walter Wyron in his snuff-coloured corduroys, Laura Beamish, Katie Deedes, and two or three other girls in clothes that (it seemed to Dorothy) looked as if a touch of opaque Chinese-white had somehow found its way into clear greens and russets and browns.—“Why, there’s Dorothy!” Walter Wyron had exclaimed, turning from the Peasant Industries Shop on the west side of the street. “Hi, Dorothy!...” (Half the street had turned to see who shouted so.) “Dorothy!...” (The other half of the street had turned.) “Come here and tell us how’s Fashions!...”

They had borne Dorothy off to a teashop to lunch.

Dorothy sometimes wished that they would find a newer joke than that about her occupation. It seemed to come virgin to them every time they met. It was not as if she had had any illusions about it. Moreover, when you came to think of it, Walter Wyron (much as Dorothy admired his decorative drawings in black and white), only published one of them every three or four months, and lived on his hundred and fifty a year the rest of the time. And handsome Cosimo Pratt had never published a drawing nor exhibited a painting in his life. Of course, even their failures were as much higher than Dorothy’s successes as the heavens are higher than the earth: but Miss Porchester would not have trusted one of them with a Summer or Winter Catalogue cover. In her secret heart Dorothy was rather glad that Amory had not accepted her own offer of a day or two before. Mercier was going to do it. And Mercier didn’t suppose it would be bought for the nation when it was done.

But for all that they had rather rubbed Dorothy’s job in at lunch that day, and, when they had tired of doing so directly, had continued to do so indirectly by asking, in altered tones, questions about Amory and what she was doing. When (they wanted to know) was that show of hers going to be? Why didn’t she hurry Hamilton Dix up? Didn’t Amory know that that Harris girl was painting all her subjects and had one at the Essex Gallery now? A talent like Amory’s!——

“You’d better come and ask her,” Dorothy had replied. “Why not all come round to-night? Cosimo, you’re quite near, and Laura could fetch her guitar——”

“No! Really?” Cosimo had broken out in his glad, rich voice. “I say, shall we all go?”

“I’m on,” Walter Wyron had cried eagerly.

“You could fetch your guitar, couldn’t you, Laura?”

“And Amory hasn’t heard Walter’s new recitation——”

“Good. We’ll come.”

“Rather!”

And now Dorothy was hurrying to Cheyne Walk to help Amory to prepare.

She reached the room over the greengrocer’s shop at half-past four, and found Amory in a long pinafore, painting. “You needn’t knock off,” she said, when she had made her announcement; “I’ll go out and buy in.”

But whether it was that Amory was in difficulties with her work, or whether her pulse had suddenly bounded at the thought of a party really after her own heart, she threw down her palette.

“Oh no, rather not!” she cried. “I’ll come with you. Just half a minute; I’ll wash my brushes when we come back. How ripping!”

Joyously she snatched down from the hook her porringer hat; her eyes shone as she thrust the enamel-headed pins through it. She had not seen Cosimo for several weeks, the others for months and months, and she was pining, simply pining, for a party that a rational person could enjoy. So excited was she, and so full of the preparations for their guests, that she quite forgot their own dinner; it was Dorothy who stopped at the butcher’s for three-quarters of a pound of steak, and, at the confectioner’s remembered the Chelsea buns. At a wine-shop they bought a flask of Chianti, and at a grocer’s nuts, biscuits, and a box of dates. Walter and Cosimo could be relied on to provide cigarettes, and oranges and bananas were to be had at the shop downstairs. As the clock of Chelsea Church struck five they descended Oakley Street again, so laden with parcels that the disturbance of a single package or paper bag would have meant the spilling of the lot. For the oranges and bananas Amory went downstairs again. By the time she returned Dorothy had taken a brush and was making ready to sweep.

“Oh, please,” said Amory, “just a minute till I’ve put my canvas out of the way—and it won’t take me three minutes to clean my palette and wash my brushes——”

She carried her wet canvas out on to the landing beyond the warped door.

If, while Dorothy swept, Amory lingered a little over her brush-washing and palette-cleaning, and then proceeded to make of the wasted paint a paper “butterfly,” she had this justification—that she swept as badly as she washed up. Moreover, she was already running over beforehand the heads of a really elevating talk she wanted to have with Cosimo on the subject of Eugenics. Cosimo was the kind of man you could talk to sanely and sensibly about these things; he could discuss them with her in the proper inquiring spirit, and without either mock modesty or a thought behind. He despised mock modesty and the thought behind as much as Amory herself despised them; he had frequently said so. That, with the knowledge that she herself was by a good deal the cleverer of the two, seemed to Amory the really satisfactory relation. They were “the best of pals.” Amory liked the expression. It was so unlike Glenerne and the leers about the aquarium corner.

Therefore, as Dorothy, sweeping, asked her how her aunt’s engagement-party had gone off, she replied with an almost indulgent laugh. Dorothy wouldn’t believe (she said) how absurd her aunt could be. Dorothy, burrowing with the broom into a corner, laughed too.

“All aunts are, my dear. (Mind your foot.) Don’t talk to me about aunts. I’ve got some, thanks. (Sorry, and I’m afraid I shall sweep all the dust on you if you stand there.) Our latest is a frightful row between Aunt Emmie, that’s the one in Calcutta, and Aunt Eliza, the one in Wales. All about some diamonds everybody’d forgotten all about, but some stupid old busybody of a bank-manager must go and turn them up, and Aunt Emmie says grandfather gave them to her, and Aunt Eliza says he gave them to her, and ... well, there you are. The less said about those diamonds the better in a family like ours, I should have said. (Oh dear, Amory, do stand somewhere else!) Cousin Clara says they’re pretty sure to be the wages of somebody’s sin. Talk about your one aunt! I’ve a dozen, half of ’em not quite right in their heads ... (Amory, if you don’t move I shall hit you with the brush!)...”

Amory moved, finished her “butterfly,” and began to cut it out with a pair of scissors.

“I’ll unpack the bananas,” she said, as Dorothy laid the broom aside.

Deftly she unpacked the bananas; skilfully she took the oranges from their tissue-paper, dropping the tissue-paper on the floor. She arranged them on a large apple-green dish, which she set on the gate-legged table; and then she stood back surveying the colour and grouping while Dorothy peppered and salted and prepared to cook the three-quarters of a pound of steak. She turned the dish this way and that, seeking fresh lights to put it in. Amory’s work was never done. Often she was busiest when she seemed most idle. She could not say to eye and brain, as Dorothy could say to mere hands, “It is finished now ... you may rest....” It was not finished even when Dorothy had set the table, cooked the steak, and made all ready for serving. There were the yellow bananas and the glowing oranges to paint in her mind, on the white cloth now instead of on the oaken board....

They dined and cleared away, and, while Dorothy washed up, Amory replaced the dish of fruit on the table, set out the biscuits and cakes on the Persian Rose plates, and made of all, with the flask of Chianti, another still-life group. Then she disposed the chairs as if by happy accident, and poked the fire. The casement looking over the river became an oblong of dim blue; the fire burnt up, and glowed on the black and sagging old ceiling; and Amory hoped that the people overhead were going to be quiet to-night.

Then, at a little after eight, there came from outside, somewhere beyond the Pier Hotel, the sound of a baritone voice. It was Walter Wyron, singing “The Raggle-taggle Gipsies.” Amory started up.

“Here they come!” she cried, clapping her hands.

And she ran down the stairs to meet them.

IV
THE MCGRATH

Amory liked people to be one thing or the other; that was the real reason why she loathed and abhorred Glenerne. She had had ripping times amid the naphtha-lights of the Saturday night street-markets and at Bank Holiday merry-go-rounds and cocoanut-shies; and, of course, when Van Eeden on Dreams came up for discussion, or Galton on Heredity, or Pater on the Renaissance, or the clear-eyed Weiniger on the Relation of the Sexes, she was again entirely at home. On the heights or in the depths she felt the real throb of Humanity’s heart. But those dreadful middle grades! Those terrible estate-agents and booking-clerks and bank-cashiers and brewers’ travellers of whom the world seemed to be so full! As so many phenomena in the science of vision—solid objects for colour to possess and light to fall upon—she admitted they had their uses; but she was entirely uninterested in them otherwise. Of all the fine things Cosimo had done in the past, she thought he had done nothing finer nor more full of profound meaning than when he had once given a crossing-sweeper a shilling, taken the broom from his hand, and for an hour swept the crossing himself. It took true nobility to do that. Mr. Geake could not have done it, nor Mr. Wellcome, nor the egregious young man in the green knitted waistcoat who had advised her to take care of her eyes, and had then told her that the Crystal Palace was a “funny place to go for a squeeze”—Mr. Edmondson.

All talking at once, Amory and her half-dozen guests trooped back up the narrow stairs.

“Well, here we are——” they announced themselves.

“Donkey’s years since we’ve seen you, Amory——”

“How are you?”

“How’s Life and Work?”

“This is Bielby, Amory ... don’t suppose you know him ... we just brought him along——”

“You should see the view from here in the day-time, Bielby ... stunning!——”

“Chuck your things down ... mind Laura’s guitar——”

They threw their hats and coats and cloaks into the window-seat, and filled the room as they stood talking, laughing and straightening their hair. Amory asked Cosimo for a match, and approached the two candles that stood in the brass sticks on the gate-legged table.

“Oh, don’t light up!” three or four broke out at once; “the firelight’s so jolly!”

“No?”

“Positively sinful to spoil this effect!——”

“Pull the chairs up round the fire—the floor’ll do for me——”

“Me too——”

“I’ll lean against your knees, Dorothy——”