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——”

“Oh, now I’ve left my handkerchief in my pocket! Lend me yours, Cosimo——”

“Well, Amory——!”

They settled about the hearth, Cosimo Pratt with his shoulder-blades against Dorothy’s knees, Walter Wyron propping up Laura Beamish, Katie Deedes and Mr. Bielby on chairs, Dickie Lemesurier with the firelight shining on her peacock-feather yoke at one end of the fender, Amory curled up against the coal-box at the other.

“I say—Amory’s hair!——” Walter Wyron broke rapturously out, as Amory settled into her place.

“Quite unpaintable, Walter,” said Laura Beamish, peering over the edge of her hand.

“Suppose so—but isn’t it Venetian!——”

“Just put that green plate with the oranges in her lap——”

“Oh ... magnificent!”

It did indeed make an astonishing glow.

“Well,” said Cosimo Pratt presently, when each had applied his or her adjective to Amory’s appearance, “and how’s Jellies and Mrs. ’Ill, Amory?”

You would not now have known Amory for the same girl who had conversed with Mr. Edmondson on the progress of illustrated journalism and statelily inclined her head when the awful Mr. Wellcome had offered her a liqueur-glass of the famous old Spanish brandy. She gave a low rippling laugh. She snuggled contentedly up against the coal-box.

“What! hasn’t Dorothy told you?” she ejaculated. If Dorothy hadn’t told, that was really rather nice of Dorothy.

“No,” said Cosimo, turning his huge black-coffee-coloured eyes on her, all anticipation.

“Jellies is engaged!” Amory announced, with another low laugh.

Cosimo started dramatically. “No!”

Amory nodded. She could always rely on Cosimo.

“You don’t say so! Oh, do tell me! Do you think——” a short pause, “—he’s worthy of her?”

“Just look at Cosimo’s face!” bubbled Laura Beamish. It bore an expression of the deepest mock gravity.

“Do tell me!” Cosimo implored....

Mrs. ’Ill was the woman who came in twice a week to do up the studio; Jellies (so called because she worked at the Jelly Factory across the river) was her daughter. Cosimo spoke again, in tragic tones.

“At least tell me whether he’s ‘in’ or ‘out’!” he begged.

“Bielby’s out of this; tell Bielby, Amory,” several voices said at once; and Amory’s pretty golden eyes sought Mr. Bielby. She explained.

Jellie’s fiancé (she said) was ‘in’—in prison. It had been (said Amory), oh, so killing! He had snatched a jacket from outside a second-hand clothes’ shop, and had run away with it and had put it on: but he had not had time to remove the wooden hanger—Mr. Bielby knew those wooden hangers they hang coats on?—well, he’d not had time to remove the hanger before a policeman had collared him, and there he had been, swearing the coat was his, with the wire hook sticking up at the back of his neck! Fancy—just fancy!—the psychological situation! Really, somebody ought to write to William James about it!—’Orris (’Orris Jackman his name was—after orris-root, Amory supposed) vowing that he’d bought the coat weeks ago, and then the policeman putting his finger through the hook and hauling him away!...

“And Mrs. ’Ill——” Amory rippled on to Mr. Bielby——

“Oh yes—tell him about Mrs. ’Ill and the Creek!” they cried.

“Mrs. ’Ill, you see, Mr. Bielby, keeps what she calls a Creek—that’s a crèche! (We must all go and see it one of these days!) It’s in the World’s End Passage, next door to a fried fish shop, and there are twenty babies, and the woman at the fried fish shop keeps an eye on them when Mrs. ’Ill comes in here on Wednesdays and Saturdays, that is, unless Jellies happens to be out of work——”

“But the hens are the best, Amory—tell him about the hens——” they prompted.

With that Amory was fairly launched. Mrs. ’Ill (she said) not only took charge of other people’s babies; she kept hens also, in a sort of back scullery, and at tea-time they sat in her lap and ate winkles off her plate, and she said she felt towards them just as if they were her own! Hens and babies—Figurez vous!—And there was always a christening party or something at the Creek, to which the hens went too, and—(they must listen to this!)—at one party they’d had, last Christmas, nobody’d been to bed for two nights, and Mrs. ’Ill had explained that they’d had to cut it short because of ’Ill having been dead only a week!——

“Oh, but about ’Ill—he hasn’t heard about ’Ill——”

“Well, her name isn’t ’Ill at all, you see. That didn’t come out till her husband died. His real name was Berry, or Barry, or something, and he signed the register ‘Barry’ when he was married. But it seems he’d been in the Army and deserted, and was afraid of being caught, so he called himself Hill. But (here’s Westermarck for you!) when his first baby was going to be born his conscience seems to have been troubled (it would make a lovely psychological story, Mrs. ’Ill with the child and Mr. ’Ill with the conscience), and so he made a sort of bet with himself, that if it was a boy he’d give himself up, and if it was a girl he’d just go on being Mr. ’Ill and a deserter. And of course it was Jellies, and so Mrs. ’Ill’s Mrs. ’Ill....”

There was nothing of the snob about Amory. These were the people among whom she had moved during her painting of Saturday night scenes and street markets, and she did not pretend that they were not. And she had an undeniable gift for such narrations. Laura Beamish, who tried to cap her with some story of a Charing Cross flower-girl and a black eye, fell by comparison quite flat; and even Katie Deedes’s tale of her mother’s entrée-cook did not gain quite the same applause. And Walter Wyron’s, about the ex-sergeant who had looked after his father’s house-boat, was an old one. Yes, Amory liked people to be one thing or the other.

But she did not tell any stories about Mr. Wellcome and Mr. Geake.

From these and similar stories to the larger issues of Democracy was but a step, and as Dorothy rose and opened the flask of Chianti, the step was taken. The Fabian Nursery and the S.D.F. came all in the stride.... The space within the fender became half full of banana-skins and orange peel; the fire-light shone up on the eager faces; and Amory, in the half-shadow by the coal-box, fed her eyes on effects.

What ripping drawing there was in Dickie Lemesurier’s neck as it issued from its square-cut, peacock’s-feather-embroidered frame! What a perfectly glorious colour Walter’s snuff-coloured corduroys took in the glow (only glaze on glaze of burnt-sienna could ever get it!) And how stunning was the shadow of Cosimo’s hand over his handsome chin as he put the cigarette into his mouth!... Cosimo’s hair clung like tendrils about his temples and over the back of his soft grey collar; Amory had made at one time and another a dozen drawings of his splendid throat; she hoped to make a dozen more. She was very proud of having Cosimo for a friend. He set down appearances at their proper value, no more. He was quite free from those stupid old-fashioned prejudices that, in so arrogantly setting apart certain subjects as undiscussable between young men and young women, had so delayed the real freedom that, for all that, was coming. She laughed as Cosimo, who had just put a lump of coal on the fire with his fingers, asked Dorothy whether he might wipe them on her stockings, and made some remark about Spring Novelties when Dorothy said that he might not. It was only Cosimo. Everybody understood. There was just that touch of gentle womanliness in Cosimo (Amory thought) that perfects and finishes a man.

In watching Cosimo and the others, but especially Cosimo, Amory had a little disregarded the conversation. She was recalled to it by a sudden exclamation from Katie Deedes—

“Oh no—carnations for Dickie, and just green leaves for Amory——”

“Late ones, slightly turning,” Laura Beamish suggested, peering critically over her hand again as she strove to compass a mental image of Amory wearing the leaves.

“Or green grapes,” Walter Wyron suggested, peering also.

“Amory, do take down your hair!” they suddenly implored.

Amory grumbled sweetly. It was such a bother to put it up again, she said. But Cosimo, starting from his seat against Dorothy’s knees, cried, “Oh yes, Amory!” and took a fresh place by her feet. “With the firelight through it it should be just unbelievable!” he cried excitedly.... So Amory’s hands went to the great red-gold fir cone; she shook down the heavy plaits; and Cosimo’s fingers parted and disposed them.

“How’s that? Wait—just a minute—it wants just one touch—there!” he said, drawing back.

Cries of admiration broke out. Amory was as hidden by it as a weeping elm is hidden by its leaves.

“Oh—green leaves, most decidedly!” cried Walter Wyron with conviction. “Amory, you really must paint yourself so—none of us could do it—what a sonnet Rossetti would have written!”

“Or Swinburne——”

“Or Baudelaire——!”

“Or Verlaine!”

Rapt they gazed for some moments longer....

“Green leaves for Amory, then, and carnations for Dickie.... What’s Dorothy?”

“Oh, Dot’s a tea-rose——”

“Periwinkle, to go with her eyes——”

“‘Pervenche’ they always call it in the Catalogues, don’t they, Dot? Must have superior terms for Catalogues!”

“And amethyst earrings——”

“No, pearls——”

“I say amethyst!”

“I say pearls!”

“Pooh! Pearls are obviously Laura’s wear!”

“Laura! My dear chap! Why, what were emeralds made for if they weren’t made for Laura?...”

At this point the party split up into two cliques, Amory turning to Cosimo again, and Walter and the others continuing their semi-symbolistic pastime.

Amory had not yet told Cosimo that she intended presently to make this room her home. Cosimo was leaning against her knees now, and had tied two strands of her hair together in a loose knot on his breast; and when she spoke to him he turned up his fine face so that she saw it upside down. When Cosimo had removed into his studio near the Vestry Hall seven or eight months ago, Amory had spent whole days with him, reading aloud passages from one or other of her Association volumes while he had papered and distempered and hung his curtains, and nothing had ever been so jolly; and so she told him now of her own approaching change. He twisted half round within the loop of hair.

“Give you a hand? Rather! By Jove, with your view you ought to be able to make this place perfectly ripping! How are you thinking of doing your windows?”

Amory had known that he would be enthusiastic. She began to say something about muslin, but Cosimo shook his handsome tendrilled head peremptorily. He loosed himself from the bond of hair and faced round, cross-legged, before her.

“Oh no, you mustn’t dream of having muslin! I know something far better than that! There’s a remnant-sale at Peter Hardy’s, and they have some shop-soiled casement-cloth at one-four-three double width, all colours; that’s your stuff! Oh, decidedly!... Then stencil it—something like Dickie’s yoke there, only a broader treatment, of course—and there you are! They’ll take down and put up again in a couple of jiffs, and you have to put muslin up wet, and it catches every bit of dust, and only washes about twice—oh no: the casement-cloth by all means!... Now, what furniture have you got?...”

He entered wholeheartedly into her plans; he was so handsome and intuitive, so big and tall, yet so almost femininely sympathetic. Amory could have hugged him, there was so little of the mere superior blatant male about him.... They plunged into a discussion—or rather Cosimo plunged into a harangue—on the most satisfactory way of staining floors....

Dorothy had been talking to Mr. Bielby, the young man who had been “just brought along,” and had discovered that he was still at the McGrath. Suddenly she gave a laugh and a call to Laura Beamish.

“I say, Laura! Mr. Jowett’s still just the same as ever, Mr. Bielby says,” she said.

Walter Wyron broke into a laugh. “Jowett? ’Pon my word, I’d almost forgotten poor old Jowett! Immortelle’s his flower, I should say! What’s Jowett’s latest, Bielby?”

Mr. Bielby related the “latest” of the Painting Professor through whose hands so many students had passed, all so different and all so exactly alike, that he had been driven to find what peace of mind he could in a saturnine resignation. Walter Wyron laughed again.

“Dear old Jowett! But he seems to be getting a bit below his game. He used to get off better ones than that. Do you remember him on the womanly woman, Dickie?”

“I remember his looking at my life-drawing and asking me if I couldn’t sew,” Dickie Lemesurier replied, bridling still at the recollection.

“And he told me my drawing was the best in the class, and that didn’t mean it was worth the time I’d spent on it,” Walter chuckled. “The joke is that poor old Jowett can say such funny things and never dream that they’re funny!”

“Why, he didn’t think tremendously of Amory herself!” said Katie Deedes indignantly.

“And still,” Laura remarked with dreamy irony, “I suppose we ought to hide our abashed heads really—but somehow or other we go on painting——”

“—still survive——”

“—bear up——”

“—quite happy in our ignorance——”

“Curiously blind all the world must be except Jowett——”

“Rather dreadful to know you’re the only wise man left——”

“Funny old stick!... But it’s only a pose really——”

“That exactly describes it——”

“Certainly the immortelle for Jowett!”...

But the party proper had not begun yet: Walter had not recited, and Laura Beamish’s guitar still lay in its case in the window-seat. Katie Deedes, who always kept a sort of tally of the good things said and awarded marks (as it were) to the sayers, had not thought of striking her balance yet.

“Give Dickie another cigarette, Cosimo, and then do let’s have a song, Laura!” Amory exclaimed; and Walter Wyron jumped up to get Laura’s instrument. It had long, many-coloured streamers of ribbon, which Walter disposed like serpentins about Laura as she sat, and Laura, turning pegs and tenderly strumming, asked what she should sing.

“Oh, ‘The Trees they do Grow High!’” said Amory quickly; “and then ‘The Sweet Primeroses’ and ‘The Clouded Yellow Butterfly,’ please!—Do stop wriggling against my knees, Cosimo—and oh, how exquisite!—look, the moon’s just coming in at the window!”

And Laura’s voice rose on the tender strumming as if a light and fluty sound planed over the intervals between chord and chord.

“Lovely!” Amory murmured.... “Please, that verse again, about the ribbon, Laura!”

“‘And she tied a piece of ribbon round his bonnie, bonnie waist,
To let the ladies know he was married,’”

Laura sang....

“Oh, lovely!” Amory murmured, her golden eyes closed.

Then Walter, whose father was Herman Wyron the impresario, recited an unpublished poem of Wilde’s, following it with one of Aristide Bruant’s in French; and after that Laura sang again, ‘The Morning Dew.’ Amory wished that she was coming into her new abode on the morrow, and that these delightful companions might come to visit her every night. She had whispered to Cosimo to get up quietly and get her a crayon and a piece of paper; putting her hair from her eyes with the fingers of her left hand, she quietly made notes on a piece of paper on the floor with her right; and “Amory’s going to do it!” the whisper went softly round.... Amory felt that she really must “do” it. It ought to “come” beautifully—Laura with the guitar and the coloured streamers, so—Walter’s thin face at its most pensive, so—Katie Deedes in that adorable curled-up pose at Laura’s feet, with the jewel of fire-light on her shoe-buckle and her face quite lost in the shadow, so—and perhaps when she came to paint it, she would get Cosimo to stand quite behind, where the moonlight on the window-sill was almost of a sulphur-flame blue.... And as she saw Amory busily sketching, Laura did not put down the guitar, but went on softly singing song after song, from her Somersetshire Songs and the Persian Garden, her fingers seeming to cull the sparse and chosen chords from the strings as if each one had been a picked flower. How different from Glenerne, with its brainless vamping and its bawled choruses from The Scottish Students’ Song Book!... Amory, as she worked, now revelled in the thought that she would not be at Glenerne much longer....

The sulphur-blue moonlight crept farther along the lattice, and shimmered on the river as if a piece of silver foil had been crumpled and straightened out again; and on the smoky, sagging ceiling the shadows fluctuated, soft and enormous, whenever a head or a hand was moved. Laura had laid aside her guitar now, and they, had drawn more closely together, and were telling ghost-stories. Dickie Lemesurier told one that had happened to somebody her mother knew as well as they knew one another sitting there; and then, as Amory put aside her hair again and began to speak, she gave a little shriek: “No—not that frrrightful one out of Myers, Amory!”... But Amory told it, and Katie Deedes remembered the dark stairs, and said that she would never dare to go down them.... So by and by Cosimo got up and lighted the two candles, and the terrors receded as the flames crept up, and Laura was persuaded to sing just one more song and then (she said) she really must go—her people would be wondering whatever had become of her. But Walter said that that was all right: he’d see her home. And Mr. Bielby would go along with Katie and Dorothy, who went together, and of course Cosimo would take Amory herself. Laura tucked the guitar with the coloured ribbons into its case, and reluctantly they sought their hats and coats. Amory was putting her hair up again. Cosimo took two blazing cobs of coal from the fire, putting them out of harm’s way on an iron shovel; and as Dorothy saw her friends out and locked the door, the cheerful glow on the ceiling could still be seen where the upper part of the door warped inwards. They groped their way down the dark stairs, and passed in a body up Oakley Street; and at the corner by the King’s Road they said good-night.

“We walk, I suppose?” Cosimo said to Amory.

“Rather!” said Amory.

They turned their faces towards Shepherd’s Bush.

It was as they walked up Redcliffe Gardens that Amory suddenly said, with a little sigh of regret, “Poor Dorothy!”

Cosimo nodded. He always understood so quickly; that was the wonderful thing about Cosimo.—“You mean she was a bit out of it?”

“She only spoke about three times, and that was to Mr. Bielby.”

Cosimo gave a shrug, and that was delicate of him too. He knew that it would be a pleasure to Amory to defend a lightly disparaged friend. Amory did defend Dorothy.

“You really underrate her, Cosimo. Of course there’s that dreadful job of hers, but she does know better really. I do hope she wasn’t bored.”

“Well, you can’t help Dorothy’s shortcomings, Amory,” Cosimo remarked, as if true artists had sorrows enough of their own without taking those of fashion-artists on their shoulders.

“But I’m worried about her, Cosimo——”

“Of course you are,” Cosimo replied promptly. “That’s what I always find so fine about you. The stronger always worries about the weaker. It seems to be a Law——”

“Do you think it is a Law?” Amory asked thoughtfully.

“Well, isn’t it? Just look at it, now....”

Cosimo began to set it forth. Halfway up North End Road Amory had reluctantly to confess that it did seem to be a Law. She had suspected it before, but never, never had it been made quite so clear to her. She resolved that she must be very gentle with Dorothy. At that moment she was very fond of her indeed.

She continued her walk with Cosimo.

V
POUNDS AND SHILLINGS

When Mr. Hamilton Dix, the renowned critic, had first mentioned Amory in print, he had made a perhaps pardonable error about her sex. But the error itself had been a compliment. In speaking of “Mr. Amory Towers” he had been misled by the rugged masculinity of “The Paviors,” her second exhibited picture.

Amory was not sure that she liked Mr. Dix very much. He seemed to her to have a rather remarkable faculty for slightly impairing the value of everything of which he wrote or spoke. His conclusions were undeniable; when Mr. Hamilton Dix had pronounced on a thing Q.E.D. might be written after that thing; there was no more to be said about it. But somehow all the fun had gone out of it. You told yourself, grossly unfairly, that if it interested Mr. Hamilton Dix it had no further interest for you. That was your loss, since Mr. Dix usually fastened on the best things. In appearance he was a big man with an overpowering presence, a promising eye, and brown curls that frothed all over his head like the “top” of a mug of porter; and you wondered whether a person could ever be so glad to see anybody whomsoever as Mr. Hamilton Dix appeared to be to see everybody. He still occasionally called Amory “Mr. Towers” by way of a joke.

Mr. Dix had no official connection with the Crozier Gallery. He frequently wrote of “another admirable Exhibition at the Crozier which no serious student of art must miss,” or “the gift of discovering the best among our younger artists which the proprietors of the Crozier seem to possess,” but that was all. As a professional critic he was not eligible for membership of the artists’ clubs, but he blew like a March gale through their studios, and the smaller and poorer the studio the more he irradiated it with the light of his optimistic eye.

During their earlier interviews he had carried Amory entirely off her feet. Though his tongue had cautioned and disclaimed, there had been no resisting the promise of his eye. Croziers’ were going to take her up, and—well, at the present stage “Mr. Towers” (ha, ha) would quite understand that Mr. Dix did not want to say too much about it.—But his very reticence had seemed a guarantee. It was not to be supposed that Messrs. Crozier took people up without a certain amount of belief in them.... And that had kept Amory’s head in the clouds for quite a long time.... But little by little it had dawned on Amory that time seemed of very little value to Messrs. Crozier. A thousand years in their sight—or two years, to be precise—was but as yesterday. Delay after delay had occurred; Messrs. Crozier had not judged this time to be quite ripe, had considered that market to be a little overstocked; it was necessary, if the success was to be made for which they hoped, that the time should be chosen to the hour; and so on and so forth.—“You’re far from being old yet, if I may say so without offence, Miss Towers,” Mr. Dix had remarked, rolling his eye over Amory’s small, straight little figure, as if the organ had been mounted on an universal joint....

But lately it had looked as if things really were in motion again. Amory had had several letters with the Crozier embossing on the envelope flap, asking her to state at once in what state of advancement her works were, and once she had even had a prepaid telegram.... Then things had slowed up once more, and Amory had fumed.

Then, on a morning in May, a hansom cab drew up at the greengrocer’s in Cheyne Walk, and Mr. Hamilton Dix, seeing Amory look out of the window, had waved his plump hand. He blundered up the stairs, and told Amory that he wished to see the canvases themselves, at once; at once, mind you.... There were between twenty-five and thirty of these canvases; they were stacked round the walls like the slates in a builder’s yard; and Mr. Dix rolled his eye over them as Amory set them, one after another, on her easel. Then he rolled the eye over Amory herself again. Again Amory somehow had the impression of gluten. It was as if the eye had left traces where it had rested.

“Excellent. Admirable. Very choice. Very good indeed,” said Mr. Dix. “And now, Miss Towers, I’m afraid I’ve a disappointment for you.”

If Mr. Dix spoke of a disappointment it was sure not to be so bad as it sounded. Amory watched him a little anxiously, however. Another postponement would be really too bad.

“It’s the old difficulty, the difficulty of fitting in the dates,” Mr. Dix said. “Mr. Hugh Crozier is deeply apologetic about it; he’s quite as much disappointed as you can possibly be; but—well, I see I shall have to tell you a secret that must on no account pass these four walls.”

Mr. Dix told his secret. It was that Herbertson, the brilliant pastelist, was not expected to live through the week.

“Not a word, mind,” Mr. Dix cautioned Amory. “It’s only because the circumstances in your case are special that I have Mr. Hugh’s permission to tell you this at all. But you see the difficulty it places him in. Poor Herbertson’s exhibition will be ten times as valuable if it comes while the papers are still full of his obituary—valuable to poor Mrs. Herbertson, I mean—I’m sure you’ll see that——”

Even the little thrill of being taken into Mr. Dix’s confidence did not altogether compensate for Amory’s disappointment. Another postponement now would mean no exhibition until the autumn. Slowly she took down from the easel the canvas she had last placed there.

“In that case I suppose there’s no hurry,” she said, plunging into dejection once more.

But Mr. Dix’s plump white hand went so far as to pat her reassuringly on the shoulder. The touch of his hand was only slightly more a contact than the resting of his eye.

“But you mustn’t suppose that that is all I came to tell you,” he said. “My dear young lady, Mr. Crozier isn’t that kind of man. He quite appreciates the hardship this is on you, and—don’t look dismayed—it doesn’t at all suit those pretty eyes—he has authorized me to make you a proposal.”

“What?” said Amory. She did not like the remark about her pretty eyes. Cosimo never spoke of her pretty eyes.

“It is this: that I am empowered to ask you if it would be convenient to you that he should pay you a sum of money now, in advance and on account of sales, at our customary rate of interest in such cases, the pictures themselves to be our security, at a valuation to be arrived at in consultation between Mr. Crozier and yourself? In fact, substantially the same terms that were accepted by poor Herbertson.”

Amory’s heart had given a leap. She did not entirely understand, but there was one thing that she did understand, namely, that Mr. Dix was offering her money at once. Money at once would enable her to begin her tenancy at Cheyne Walk at once.... Mr. Dix looked into the pretty eyes again, smiled, and continued.

“Well, what shall we say? If you were to ask my private opinion—but there, I’ve no right to try to influence you. But a considerable sum now—say a hundren pounds—eh——?”

He almost winked at Amory. It was as if he advised her to cry “Done” at once before Mr. Crozier had time to change his mind.

A hundred pounds! Amory thought....

“Mr. Crozier doesn’t mean that he buys the pictures for a hundred pounds, does he?” she asked presently.

Mr. Dix laughed heartily. “My dear Miss Towers!... I can assure you that if Mr. Crozier had meant that he’d have had to find another messenger. No, no. You may regard this, if you like, as a mere solatium for the postponement—to be a first charge, of course, on whatever the pictures may ultimately fetch. That, we trust, will be a far greater sum. We’re watching the market very keenly, and you may trust Mr. Crozier to make the most of it when it comes.... Well, what am I to tell him?”

A hundred pounds, now!——

Almost precipitately Amory accepted.

“Bravo!” cried Mr. Dix, as if Amory had performed a deed of bravery. And he bent gallantly over her hand.

Amory was beside herself with importance and delight. She had not now a mere promise from Croziers’—she was to have a proper contract, and a cheque for a hundred pounds posted to her the very moment the contract was signed. All that day she could not sit still for a minute in one place, and in the afternoon she suddenly started up, crammed her hat on her head, and ran out to the confectioner’s in the King’s Road, where the use of a telephone was to be had for twopence. She must tell Dorothy that she particularly wanted to see her at the studio that afternoon—why, she refused to say. Then, treading on air, she returned to the studio again, humming Laura’s song “The Trees they do Grow High” as she went. Still singing, she began to potter about among the tins in the little cupboard, to see in which one the tea was kept.

Dorothy came running in an hour later, just as Amory sat down before the plate of bread-and-butter and the saucerless cup she had placed on the little gate-legged table. Her eyes were as big as the heads of Amory’s hatpins.

“What is it?” she cried breathlessly. “Not Cosimo——?”

“How Cosimo?” Amory asked, staring a little.

“I mean, I thought—I thought perhaps he’d proposed——”

Only for a moment or so was Amory a little stiff. “I think Cosimo can be trusted not to do anything quite so obvious,” she replied. “You don’t seem to understand, Dorothy.... No, it’s far more exciting than that——”

And she told her.

Somehow it struck Amory that Dorothy received the news in an unexpectedly critical spirit. She had expected her to jump up with delight, or at least to say that she was glad. But instead of that Dorothy stared at Amory until Amory felt quite uncomfortable, and had to say “Well?” If this was the way Dorothy took it, she was rather sorry she had rung her up.

“Tell me what Mr. Dix said again,” said Dorothy, still almost glaring at Amory.

Amory did so.

“And he’s sending for the pictures to-morrow?”

“Yes, but you don’t understand; this isn’t the price of the pictures.”

“And he doesn’t say when the Show will be?”

Amory spoke gently; of course it must be difficult for Dorothy to realize that Picture Exhibitions were not Catalogues.

“It will be as soon as the market is favourable. They wait for a favourable market and then——” She made an upward gesture with her hands. “And you see, Dorothy,” she explained kindly, “pictures aren’t much good to a dealer either just to shut up in a cellar and keep. They buy them in order to sell them again. That’s their business.”

But Dorothy hardly seemed to hear.

“And they’ve got thirty pictures?” she asked presently.

“Twenty-eight.”

“And can you exhibit new ones anywhere else?”

“They’ll take the new ones too, at the same rate.”

“But can you exhibit them anywhere else if you want?”

“Not for two years.”

“Then,” said Dorothy slowly, “I don’t think I’d sign the contract, Amory.”

Amory took a drink of tea; then she leaned back with the air of one who might say, “This is interesting.”—“Oh? Why not?” she asked.

“Well, if it’s as you say, it seems to me that they just muzzle you for two years.”

“Well, I can hardly expect to have dealings with two sets of people at once, can I? I don’t want to exhibit anywhere else. That would be to nobody’s interest. And my Show would have been next except for——” She checked herself; she had almost forgotten that Herbertson’s condition was a secret. “And anyway, Mr. Dix is going to write a number of articles on me at once, and Mr. Dix doesn’t write articles for amusement, I can assure you. There are wheels within wheels, Dorothy. I call it a splendid bargain. I’m perfectly satisfied——”

The last words seemed to say, “So if I am, I don’t see what anybody else has got to complain about.” She was a little disappointed in Dorothy. She thought that friends ought to rejoice at one another’s good fortune. She hoped there was not just a trace of jealousy in Dorothy’s demeanour.

When Dorothy next spoke Amory wondered, too, whether she had come from Oxford Street entirely in obedience to her telephone-summons. For Dorothy, it appeared, also had something to say. For the last ten days Dorothy had been very little in the studio in Cheyne Walk; the reason for this, Amory understood, was that certain of her fellow-artists (she supposed they called themselves that) had been given a holiday; and now Dorothy was telling Amory that Cheyne Walk was about to see even less of her.

“You see,” Dorothy explained, “I’ve known for some time that Miss Porchester was after a job on the Daily Speculum, and now she’s got it. That means that Miss Benson takes her place. And as there are all sorts of things going on, I shall simply have to be there most of my time. There’s this re-building, you see. Mr. Miller—he’s Hallowell’s manager, and we’re doing one or two of their jobs now—he’s making all sorts of new plans. They’re going to launch out in all directions, he says; in fact, they’re going to waken London up. So what I was going to say—I hope you won’t find it inconvenient, and of course there are a few weeks yet——”

There was no need for Dorothy to be more precise. Amory nodded. Dorothy wanted to be released from her share of the Cheyne Walk place. That simplified things. With Amory living there the place certainly would not have been big enough for the pair of them.

“Well, if you hadn’t mentioned it I suppose I should have had to do so,” she said. “I think I shall be able to manage now.”

“You mean you’re accepting that offer?”

“Accepting it? Of course I’m accepting it,” said Amory with a laugh. “I should be a perfect goose not to accept it.”

“Oh, well,” said Dorothy with a shrug. “I only meant that if any other dealer happened to want you you’re tied hand and foot for two years.”

Amory laughed again. “Oh, I’ll risk that,” she assured Dorothy. “And now,” she said unselfishly, “tell me more about the changes at your place.”

For of course she was glad that, in her own peculiar line, Dorothy also stood in advancement’s way.

On the next day but one she signed her contract.

When, on the day following that, there was brought to Glenerne, by an ordinary postman, along with other ordinary letters, an ordinary envelope addressed to Miss Amory Towers with a cheque for ninety-five pounds inside it, Glenerne felt that it was indeed privileged to participate in the making of history. Amory was a little taken aback to find that interest at the rate of five per cent. had already been deducted from the sum; there seemed, not (of course) an indelicacy, but a very great promptitude about this clipping at the round figure. She would have liked the full hundred, if only to call hers for a day; and she had not quite realized that the euphemism “five per cent.” meant five real pounds.—But that was not Glenerne’s way of looking at it. The breakfast-table gaped with astonishment. Ninety-five pounds for Miss Amory’s pictures!... Pictures, of course, were pictures; they had never denied that; very pretty to look at, and hang on walls and all that, especially water-colours: but—ninety-five pounds!... Had ninety-five tongues of fire settled upon Amory’s bright head they could hardly have held her in greater awe. They looked at her anew. They had actually been living in the same house with this prodigious young woman! And Mr. Edmondson had asked her whether she did not get “fed up” with painting towards the end of the day! “Fed up!” They should think so! It would take a lot of feeding up of that sort before the boarders of Glenerne cried “Enough!”... Mr. Edmondson was not there when the cheque arrived; Mr. Edmondson rose at five-thirty, cleaned his boots, made himself a cup of tea over the little spirit-lamp in his bedroom, and was out of the house before half-past six; but Mr. Rainbow missed the nine-two that morning, and Uncle George, who never went to business before ten and (it was reverentially whispered) hardly needed to go before lunch unless he chose, took the whole morning off. He had something to say to Amory.—“He’s going to advise her about investments,” Mr. Geake murmured to Miss Addams as Mr. Massey and Amory left the breakfast-table together.

What Uncle George had really taken Amory apart for was, in the new turn events had taken, a delight crowning a delight. At any other time she would have had quite a number of interior comments to make on Mr. Massey’s bashful communication; her attitude about such as have not the gift of continence was sometimes almost Pauline in its severity: but that morning all was a golden hurly-burly. Mr. Massey, in a corner of the double drawing-room that had been dusted, lisped, blushing, that he and her aunt had been talking matters over—that they had come to the conclusion that there seemed no sufficient reason why their marriage should not take place earlier than July—and so in the circumstances.... Here Mr. Massey had hissed himself to a complete standstill.

“There is really nothing to wait for,” he went on presently, recovering a little. “I have taken the house on the Mall from the June quarter, and—and—I am sure you’ll understand—at any rate I hope you will some day——”

Amory, hardly hearing, said that she hoped so too.

“So,” Mr. Massey continued, “we had come to that decision, and now this happy circumstance has befallen—I think my bed will have been made; if you will come into my bedroom there is a little business we might discuss——”

Mr. Massey’s bed had not been made, but Mr. Massey modestly covered its disarray with the counterpane. Then placing a chair for Amory, he plunged into the little matter of business.

An hour later Amory’s pecuniary circumstances stood as follows:—

From her godmother she had long had her thirteen pounds a quarter, and now she had her ninety-five pounds. This sum Mr. Massey had begged, with many delicate preliminaries, to be allowed to bring up to the round figure again out of his own pocket—“simply as a slight present, Amory—please don’t thank me—it is such a pleasure to be of assistance to those who know how to help themselves.” And in view of the hastened marriage Mr. Massey had further to announce that of her aunt’s tiny fortune a sum was to be earmarked sufficient to allow Amory the continuance of the pound or so a week that had been paid for her at Glenerne. That, Mr. Massey said, made a steady two pounds a week, plus the very nice little nest-egg of a hundred pounds.

“And dear Geraldine and I fully expect to see you a Kauffman or a Butler or a Rosa Bonheur yet,” he beamed in conclusion.

Amory hoped that the event would prove them to be mistaken, but for the first time she kissed Uncle George. The educational bookseller wiped his glasses. Somehow or other Amory had the impression that even his engagement to Aunt Jerry had seemed to him to lack something without this sanction of her own.

All that day Amory did nothing but build palaces of fairy gold, laying them low again only to re-erect them more shining than before. Say her pictures sold at the very lowest figure, ten pounds apiece (but twenty or thirty or more would be nearer the mark—Croziers’ didn’t dabble in mere ten-pound prices). Some of them she had painted in a day, but call it two days, or even two pictures a week. Why, there, at the most ridiculously low estimate, was a thousand pounds a year! Fifteen hundred would really be nearer the mark, and that without counting the moral encouragement that would come by mere force of success. Two thousand would hardly be too much; but call it a thousand in order to be perfectly safe. Her two pounds a week would be mere glove-money. She could spend that on handkerchiefs. Not real lace ones, of course; she would have to do better even than a thousand before she could afford real lace ones, with everything else to match; but this, after all, was only a beginning. Ten pounds a canvas? Why, Morton, who did not paint half as well as she did, had got three hundred for that rubbishy “Fête Galante” only the other day—a thing shockingly out of drawing, and the colour—oh dear! “Aha!” (Amory smiled). Let them wait just a bit! She would show them at the McGrath! She would make the saturnine Mr. Jowett sit up presently! And she would help the less fortunate, too, provided they were deserving. She would publish a book of Walter’s drawings for him; they were really quite good—better, at any rate, than a good deal of the stuff that was published. That was what the country had wanted for a long time; not so much patrons who bought pictures, but patrons who knew what they had got when they had bought them. And even if she only painted a few pictures a year, that, when she had made her name....

Of course she laughed at herself from time to time; she knew she was piling it on, but it was delicious for all that. Like a queen she received their full chorus of congratulations at Glenerne that night—a stately little queen, crowned with the barbaric red gold of her hair. She forbore to ask them whether they had thought that artists painted pictures for the mere sake of killing time; she did not want to rub in their booking-clerkships and estate-agencies too much. It was enough that they saw things now as they really were. Young Mr. Edmondson would no more have dared to speak to her of squeezing at the Crystal Palace now than he would have dared to discuss with her the subjects that made her friendship with Cosimo so wonderful; it was, rather, a quite aged and very much subdued Mr. Edmondson who for a full hour talked of Closing Prices to Mr. Rainbow.... And even when, the felicitations over, Mr. Sandys slapped his hands together in a business-like way and said to Mrs. Deschamps, “Well, what about a tune, Mrs. D.?” that too in its way was a tribute. It meant that even of exalted things poor weak human nature can have more than its fill. Amory knew that she had given Glenerne something to talk about for many, many months to come.

Then, on the morrow, setting her cloud-castle building sternly on one side, she riveted her attention to immediate things. She was going to remove to Cheyne Walk immediately; she had announced the fact to Miss Addams. Not only had no opposition been offered; it had been tacitly accepted that Glenerne was no place for one to whom these stupendous things could happen. Amory would seek Cosimo that morning; without Cosimo nothing could be done. Dorothy, she was afraid, would have to make other arrangements at once; she must telephone to Dorothy that day.

Blithely she tripped down the Glenerne steps and sought the Goldhawk Road tram. It was early; it was not likely that Cosimo would have gone out. She might even have time to call at Katie Deedes’s and get The Golden Ass on the way.

When, two days later, there arrived at Glenerne a blue press-cutting envelope containing an article nearly a column long on “The Art of Miss Amory Towers,” by Hamilton Dix—and when, a day or two later still, there followed half a dozen quotations from that same article from the provincial papers—Glenerne was almost glad of Amory’s translation. The honour was too heavy. It was felt on all hands that the crags of Sinai, and not the boarding-houses of Shepherd’s Bush, were the proper habitation for Miss Towers and her renown.

VI
WOMAN’S WHOLE EXISTENCE

There was nobody like Cosimo for beginning at the beginning. “What,” he asked, extending a magnificent arm, bare (and black) to the very shoulder, “is the use of doing the floor when you’re going to fetch all sorts of cobwebs down from the walls and ceiling, and haven’t as much as got the chimney swept? It’s simply doing work twice over. No; let that plumber chap finish the sink-pipe first, then, when the things we’ve bought come, I’ll have the men give them a thorough sweeping in the cart and Mrs. ’Ill or Jellies can wash them with ammonia and water downstairs, so that everything’ll come in perfectly clean. Jellies, did you get lots of old newspapers? All right, I don’t want ’em yet, they’re to cover the floor when I distemper the walls. Put ’em out on the landing there.—Now give me that brush, Mrs. ’Ill——”

He took a long brush from Mrs. ’Ill and began at the corner of the ceiling beyond the fireplace.

Dorothy had taken away her black-and-white desk and her other belongings some days before; now the table, the chairs, Amory’s easel and a whole clutter of other things filled the landing and staircase outside. The plumber worked crouched half under the sink; but the chimney-sweep who had promised to come that morning at eight had not yet put in an appearance. The floor was an inch deep in dust and cobwebs and débris, and Cosimo’s broom fetched down fresh showers moment by moment. He wore an old deer-stalker cap, to keep them out of his tendrilled hair. Amory, too, wore an old dust-bonnet of Mrs. ’Ill’s and her oldest painting pinafore. Cosimo gave her loud warnings to stand out of the way as each fall came down. Mrs. ’Ill and Jellies grimaced and spat the dust out of their mouths as they swept the walls.

For a whole week Cosimo had been past telling helpful and enthusiastic. He had not gone out when Amory had called on him that morning; he had been still in bed; but, hearing her knock and knowing her step, he had called, “That you, Amory? Oh, do come in!” So Amory had sat on the edge of Cosimo’s bed, and Cosimo had bounded upward into a sitting posture as Amory had told him her great news. “No, by Jove, really, though!” he had shouted joyously. “You’ve got the money? I say, Amory, that’s perfectly glorious! Tell me quickly what you’re going to do!”

And they had taken a header into plans, both talking at once.

Cosimo had done the whole of the shopping; Amory had merely stood by and nodded and admired. “Leave it all to me,” he had said repeatedly; “you have your own special work that nobody but you can do: I can just about manage this.... Now, have you a bed? And a bath? And what about somewhere for your clothes? Tell me everything you’ve got, and then we shall know where we are.”

So Cosimo had chosen Amory’s narrow bed for her, going down into the basement for a slightly out-of-date pattern, much cheaper and probably better made; and since Amory must have a bath, Cosimo had advised her to get one of those oval ones with a lid that served as a travelling trunk as well; they were a little dearer, but much cheaper than buying the bath and the trunk separately. Then he had known where a second-hand chest of drawers was going for next to nothing, also a bowl and basin. And, cleverest of all, he had given orders that these things were to be sent, not at once, but on dates when, he calculated, the place would be just ready for their reception. Amory had ticked off these purchases on a slip of paper, as also she had those of turpentine and paraffin, boiled oil and soap and firewood and tins of distemper. She had read aloud from the list: “Soap, scrubbing-brushes, blacklead, condensed milk——” and Cosimo, laying his hand on each article as she named it, had replied with “Right—right——” It had been great fun.

It was lucky, too, that Jellies was out of work; that gave them somebody to help when Mrs. ’Ill was at the Creek (“or buying winkles for the hens,” Amory laughed). And the pair of them were almost as funny as a pantomime about Amory and Cosimo. They waited quite half a minute between knocking at the door and entering the room where the friends were, and if one of them went out again both of them did. It caused Amory the greatest amusement; they were as funny as Dorothy, when she had run in that afternoon thinking Amory wanted to tell her, not about Croziers’ and the pictures, but about—Cosimo! Really, these one-ideaed people were killing! It never occurred to them that it was just possible that their narrow, illiberal views were not shared by everybody! There was her aunt, for example: Aunt Jerry was the most comical, mid-Victorian survival imaginable. She had stated flatly, not two nights ago, that if she wasn’t married in a church, by two clergymen, with a bouquet and bells and “The Voice that Breathed o’er Eden,” she should not consider herself married at all! Bouquets and bells, at this time of day!... Amory (she thanked goodness) intended never to marry. Hers and Cosimo’s was a much more rational relation. They had argued it out anthropologically from Primitive Culture and The Golden Bough.

The plumber under the sink had a gas-jet and a soldering-iron, and he was raising a smell of warm lead and flux. He, too, seemed to have jumped to the same ludicrous conclusion as Mrs. ’Ill and Jellies. There was an intelligence about his back view, as if that aspect of him said, “I see—I’m minding my business—nearly finished—three’s none—’nuff said.” And when, as Cosimo swept, Amory approached the plumber and asked him whether the smell of cabbage-water would now cease, he turned round almost with a start.

“Beg pardon, Miss?... Oh, that! Don’t you worry your ’ead about that. A S-pipe’ll do it if anything will, and I’ll explain it to the master afore I go.”

The master!... Amory and Cosimo had to go out on to the landing in order to laugh. Otherwise they would have stifled.

Then, at nearly midday, the sweep arrived, and to the smells of dust and hot lead was added that of the soot that rustled down the chimney. Amory and Cosimo, unable to eat in the room itself and too begrimed to lunch at the little restaurant along the Embankment, sat with their glasses of milk and paper bag of sandwiches on the dark stairs.

Amory always devoutly hoped that when Cosimo married he would marry some nice girl whose friend she could be. At present he was as poor as a church mouse, but would not be so when his uncle died; and Cosimo was not the kind of man money would spoil. If he had not known the value of money he would not have been able to do Amory’s shopping for her so admirably; and if anything at all could still further have uplifted their beautiful friendship, it would have been that Cosimo should by and by be buying chests of drawers and washbowls for some girl of whom Amory could really approve. Girl after girl—Katie Deedes, Dickie Lemesurier, and others—Amory had suggested them all at one time and another as more or less eligible partners for her “pal”; but Cosimo had only laughed. He supposed he would marry some time or other, he had said, though why he must (now he came to think of it) he didn’t quite know. Indeed, he thought he probably wouldn’t, after all. “You see,” he explained frankly, “it would have to be somebody so awfully like you, and there isn’t anybody else so wonderful.”—“What rubbish, Cosimo!” Amory usually replied, “there are lots of girls; why, you couldn’t find a worse wife than me! What good should I be about a house or nursing a baby?”—“True,” Cosimo would then reply,—thoughtfully yet equably: “but you’re unique, you see. You have your art.”—And that, it always seemed to Amory, was the whole point. An ordinary young man would not have had the perception to recognize her art as the crux of the whole matter. He would have wanted to hold her hand or to put his arm about her, and so would have ruined all.

And Cosimo sometimes, but of course only as a joke, spoke of her art with a sort of humorous resentment, as a man who is allowed much but is still excluded from one favour might speak of the rival in whose preference he after all concurs. Amory thought that a perfecting touch. Seriousness must be unassailable before such gracious, humorous little liberties can be taken with it.

As they drank their milk and ate their sandwiches that day they laughed together over Aunt Jerry’s old-fashioned courtship. Cosimo asked to be told again what Aunt Jerry proposed to wear at her wedding. He had already been told several times, but he had the power, so rare among men, of visualizing a dress from a verbal description, and could carry the precise shade of a ribbon “in his eye” for matching purposes better than Amory herself....

“Doesn’t it sound like the year of the Great Exhibition!” he chuckled when Amory had told him.

“The dress?” Amory laughed. “The dress is nothing; it’s the whole thing that’s like the year of the Great Exhibition! Why, when I asked auntie an ordinary, simple question—whether she thought there would be any babies—she blushed as if she really believed the storks brought them, and implored me not to dream of saying anything of the sort to George! Who to, I should like to know, if not to George? Such absurd false shame!... And this to-day, my dear, if you please, with Forel’s book to be had at any French bookseller’s, and Altruism and Camaraderie taught at even ordinary schools, and everything thrown open to sensible discussion just as you and I discuss these things! It’s too funny!”

“There’s only one word for it really—‘prurient,’” Cosimo opined.

“Oh, but that’s taking it too seriously; I prefer the funny side of it. Babies! Is she expecting butterflies, I wonder?... I did my best for her; I tried to explain what a chromosome was; but it was no good. You’ve never seen Aunt Jerry; I must have you meet her; she’s so like the lady who went to see Anthony and Cleopatra and said it was very unlike the homelife of the dear late Queen!”

Cosimo was silent for a moment; then his voice came authoritatively out of the darkness. Cosimo was not much of a painter, but he really had views that were often quite well worth hearing.

“You see, Amory, it’s the swing of the pendulum. Action and re-action. Perfectly simple. Take wearing stays, for example. What woman to-day would think of wearing the stays they used to wear? Half the women we know wear none at all, and the other half only these ribbon corsets. And it’s just the same with their views on marriage. They make such mysteries about it, and what’s the result? Why, in trying to make it impossibly beautiful they miss the real beauty that’s there all the time, the beauty of the physical process. We have to rediscover that to-day. And we’ve got a whole lot of abolishing to do before we can begin. Sorry to have to abolish your aunt, but really, as you say, Amory, we haven’t time to-day to waste on people who marry and expect to have butterflies.”

Sometimes Amory wondered whether these daring and illuminating talks with Cosimo were altogether a good thing for her art. They sometimes seemed to enlarge her ideas too much. It was difficult, with a common brush and an ordinary canvas and a paint-box like anybody else’s, to express the true philosophical meaning of the heart of things as Cosimo sometimes set that meaning forth; or rather, she could explain what she meant, but could not always make it explain itself. She expressed this doubt to Cosimo now, and found him quite extraordinarily full of help.

“I know,” he said thoughtfully. “It’s hard, but it’s what you’ve got to do, Amory. It’s your job. Fundamental brainwork, as Rossetti said. The old traditions are epuisées—worn out; in making the new one you must say to yourself, ‘Is this that I am doing merely a repetition, or does it belong to the age that has—well, say, wireless telegraphy?’ I don’t mean that you’ve got to muddle yourself, of course; that’s the other danger: like Scylla and Charybdis; there are always two dangers, underdoing and overdoing; it’s a Law. What I mean is that your art must be the thing. See what I mean? Break fresh ground. Do something new. Say to yourself ‘I’m going to do something new.’ That’s what the Pre-Raphaelites did, and look at Ford Madox Brown! As I say, it’s the swing of the pendulum; action and re——(Hallo, here’s Mrs. ’Ill—listen to her cough).... What a dreadful cold you have, Mrs. ’Ill!”

And they chuckled for a quarter of an hour over Mrs. ’Ill’s comical confusion.

That afternoon they had one of their jolliest chats about Heredity. Amory wished she had Galton by her so that she could show Cosimo what she really meant, but Galton, in that topsy-turvy, was not to be laid hands on. Cosimo rested on his broom from time to time to listen, fastened his coffee-brown eyes earnestly on her face, and said that she ought to paint a picture, not necessarily to be called “Heredity,” but to have something of Galton’s meaning and spirit about it. “Express him in a different medium, if you understand me,” he said.... Then he finished his walls, and they washed their begrimed hands and faces together over a bucket and went out to tea. Mrs. ’Ill and Jellies were left to sweep up and to make all ready for Cosimo to distemper the walls and stain the floor to-morrow. They dined, talking ever the more rapidly and brightly as the hours wore on; and Amory went as reluctantly back to Glenerne that night as if she had been going from a glorious liberty to a prison.

Here, however, a piece of bad news awaited her. After dinner Uncle George drew her aside and handed her a paragraph he had cut from a newspaper. Amory read it, and then looked inquiringly up at Mr. Massey. Except that it contained a name with which she was somehow remotely familiar, it conveyed nothing to her. Not many things in newspapers did convey much to Amory. She thought them dull, and wished they had a Cosimo at the head of them to fill them with the really interesting things about the New Movement and criticism and art.

Nor did the scholastic bookseller himself appear to know the full purport of the paragraph. It announced baldly and briefly that a trustee had absconded with certain funds, and Mr. Massey feared that those funds might include the capital sum that hitherto had yielded the thirteen pounds a quarter Amory had had from her godmother. The man might, of course (Mr. Massey said), be—something or other—“extradited” she thought the word was; but, on the other hand, he might not. Even if he were to be extradited, Mr. Massey feared that such delinquents commonly bolted, not with the money, but after the money was spent. So he would not advise Amory to build too much on the recovery of the money.... And Amory discovered something new and rather unexpected in her prospective uncle, namely, that while it was “a pleasure to assist” (as he had softly hissed) a young woman who had shown herself as capable as Amory had of assisting herself, he did not think it necessary to keep hold of her hand once she was set on her feet. She had a hundred pounds in actual cash, on account of a sum that might be very large indeed; and he himself would have thought himself lucky had he been possessed of half that capital at her age.... This mid-Victorian, heavy-father view of Mr. Massey’s, that young people should be kept a little short in the very years of their capacity for enjoyment, could, of course, have been demolished in a minute by any modern and rational and hard-up young man: it was manifestly absurd that people should have money only when they were past their pleasures: but it would have taken more than Cosimo to knock it out of Mr. Massey’s head for all that.

Amory went to bed moodily that night, first trying to tell herself, and then trying not to tell herself, that her income was in all probability now reduced by a half.

She had begun, too, to be a little alarmed at the rate at which her hundred pounds of actual capital was diminishing. Excellently and cheaply as Cosimo had bought, she simply could not tell herself where nearly thirty pounds had gone. There had been her bed, her bath, her chest of drawers, her washstand, her this, that, and the other; and there had been “sundries.” She had had the conception of sundries that they were quite small things, in paper packets and tins, that cost a few pence; it came rather as a shock to her that kettles and frying-pans and cups and saucers and scrubbing-brushes were sundries too. And tablecloths and blankets and sheets and pillow-cases seemed to be very considerable sundries indeed. Still—thirty pounds! She would have thought that thirty pounds would have furnished the Glenerne kitchens twice over. And at tea that afternoon, Cosimo had spoken of a carved wood frame he had seen in Marylebone High Street that it would be positively criminal not to buy for another three!...

Well, living would be cheaper at Cheyne Walk; that would be one thing. Tea and bread-and-butter and a chop or steak once a day would be quite enough for her; and when all these things were bought they were bought, and would not be to buy again. She had another shrinking as she remembered that, now that all her work had gone to Croziers’, she had hardly a canvas or stretcher in the place, and that half her paint-tubes were mere flat metal ribbons with a screw-cap on the end, and that she badly wanted a complete set of new brushes. She tried to tell herself that five pounds would refit her, but she knew in her heart that ten or twelve would hardly be too much; artists’ colourmen have their sundries too....

And now she must reckon a whole pound a week as good as gone....

But the press-cuttings from the provincial papers were still coming in, and her courage revived as she remembered Mr. Hamilton Dix’s newest article on her and her work. He was coming to interview her. The market for her twenty-eight canvases was already being prepared. Mr. Dix would hardly be doing all that unless it was intended that her show should come on in the autumn....

She went to sleep, once more resolved that when, presently, she should come into her kingdom, no poor artist, provided he were really deserving, should ask her help in vain.

Two days later she had cast her money cares almost entirely to the winds. Naturally it was not to be supposed that she could come into a hundred pounds and not buy herself at least one frock; as a matter of fact she had bought two. She hoped she had not offended Dorothy about them. It was one of the advantages of Dorothy’s occupation that she was frequently offered clothes, not merely at cost price, but at truly absurd reductions. But then (Amory had thought) they were such clothes—inartistic and irrational in the extreme, conventional Paris and Viennese models, some of them actually resembling those excruciating drawings of Dorothy’s, and hats that (to put it bluntly) Amory would not have been found dead in. Dorothy had offered to get her a number of these, and had said that it was a chance to be jumped at!... Why, even Cosimo, a man, had laughed and said, “Dear old Dot—she means awfully well, doesn’t she?”... And Cosimo had chosen the two frocks Amory actually had bought. One of them was terra-cotta, the other green; both were exquisitely smocked at yoke and hips, and any of the Pre-Raphaelites (Cosimo said) would have gone half wild with delight over the drawing of the myriad intricate folds. He had made a suggestion or two in the shop itself, and when the things had been, delivered at the studio, Cosimo had not rested until he had seen Amory put them on. Amory had looked round the room; the curtain that was to enclose her new bed was not up yet, but she thanked goodness she was not one of your shrinking prudes.... “I don’t suppose a girl’s arms will shock you, will they?” she had asked, smiling.... So she had tried, first the terra-cotta, then the green. “Oh, I say, you do look stunning!” Cosimo had flattered her, lifting his fine dark eyes as she had turned this way and that; “but you ought to have a Portia cap, you know——” And that was only another instance of the way their minds jumped together; for Amory, without saying anything to Cosimo, had already got two of the Portia caps, one for each frock.... Then she had got back into the old frock again, and they had discussed the preparation of the studio once more.

As Cosimo said, they had really got most of the work done. The furniture would not arrive until the morrow, but the walls were already distempered a light green colour, almost white, and the ceiling was done, and the floor was a wide frame glassy with boiled oil and paraffin and polish, only awaiting the square of Japanese matting in the centre. The shining brown border was not yet quite dry, and Cosimo had very cleverly built up a sort of gang-plank across it to the door. To see Jellies, herself of a yielding figure, crossing this yielding plank, was very funny indeed. The framing in passe-partout of the photographs of old masters went down as sundries; Amory, with Myers on Human Personality tucked under her arm, had spent half the day in setting the photographs each in the one and only place for it; and now, until the bed and chest of drawers and things should come, she and Cosimo were sitting cross-legged in the middle of the unstained part of the floor. A yard of casement-cloth was between them, which Cosimo deftly ripped up with a pair of scissors. He had brought his own little work-basket. He was as handy with a needle as a sailor. And as he measured the casement-cloth he talked.

“Steady a moment—you’ve got hold of the wrong end; that’s the end, where I’ve basted it. If I were you I should buttonhole the eyelets.... Look out, you’re giving me a finished pair to cut ... and I say, Amory, you want a fresh binding on that skirt—you’ll be catching your heel and coming down; I’ll put a stitch in it for you as soon as I’ve finished this.... I say you’re quiet; a penny for your thoughts!”

Amory, as a matter of fact, had been once more hoping that Cosimo would by and by find some really nice girl to marry. In his case the wrong one would be dreadfully wrong; he had the woman’s point of view so perfectly. That, in a sense, was why he was so exquisitely right in not wanting to marry Amory herself—supposing, that was, that Amory had not definitely decided never to marry at all. They knew one another too well; were too much alike, too beautifully “pals”; somehow they seemed almost to come within the prohibited degrees.... Still, if Amory couldn’t marry Cosimo, she could keep, as it were, an eye on him. It would be dreadful if he fell into the hands of some jealous creature or other, worthy neither of him nor of Amory herself. Amory had long thought that it would be rather nice to be “Aunt Amory” to a number of eugenically-selected and rationally-clothed boys and girls, who were not told lies about where they came from, and had moral courage enough, when they were afraid, to say that they were afraid; but she wasn’t going to be “come over” by their mother, and permitted as a favour to see Cosimo once in a while, and to be put off with a “Not at Home” when she and Cosimo wished to discuss her art.... So, when Cosimo said, “A penny for your thoughts,” Amory was silent for a moment, and then, lifting her pretty brook-brown eyes over the yard of casement-cloth that united their hands, she smiled pensively and said:

“I was wondering, Cosimo, why—why you don’t marry Dorothy.”

Cosimo dropped his end of the casement-cloth and reached for a needle with black thread in it. He leaned forward.

“Here, let me stitch that binding while I think of it.... What’s that? Marry Dorothy?... Why, you don’t suppose Dorothy would have me, do you? Because I don’t.”

Of course, Cosimo was far too well-bred to say that he wouldn’t have Dorothy. Still, she guessed what he meant. Dorothy (he seemed to say) was a perfect dear, but not in that way. Nevertheless, Amory, who sat in the light and could see herself ever so tiny in Cosimo’s black-coffee-coloured eyes, looked a little doubtful, and said, “Are you quite sure of that?”

“Perfectly sure,” Cosimo repeated, with the same beautiful tact. “Don’t suppose she’d look at me if there wasn’t another man in London. Besides, if I wanted to be absurd, I might ask you why you don’t marry Walter!”

Amory straightened her back and the pretty bluebell-stalk of her neck. She gave a rich little laugh.

“Oh, just at present I’m having enough of marriage to last me for some time to come.... Cosimo,” she added, in impressive tones, “Aunt Jerry’s—awful!”

“How, awful? (Just pull the edge round a bit, will you?”)

“Ugh!... But you don’t know her: I’ll take you round and introduce you: then you’ll see for yourself. What about next Wednesday? or no, I’d better have them here.... Really it seems to me to amount to a public gloating? Their engagement was announced in the ‘Times,’ and ever since they’ve had nothing but advertisements—advertisements for wedding-cakes, dresses, veils, flowers, furniture, houses, and I don’t know what not. The most private things—you wouldn’t believe! It’s as if every tradesman in London was looking at them as those shopmen looked at us when we bought the bed! But the moment I ask a perfectly plain question, oh, the outraged modesty!... And what do you think her latest is? She hopes that if there are any children at all they’ll be boys! Boys! Think of it!”

“Ah, the Feminist Movement was bound to tell,” said Cosimo. “If we’re doing nothing else, we’re driving the reactionaries into the opposite camp and making them declare themselves.”

“You think it’s that?”

“Think, my dear! I’m quite sure. We’re driving them to their last defence. They know that woman’s man’s equal really, and that’s why they’re afraid. Why, look at your own case. You needn’t go further than that. What’s the good of theorizing when one knows? Take the chromosome. If woman’s got one and man hasn’t, then she has something he hasn’t, and is actually his superior. You’ve a chromosome and I haven’t, and look at us.... Yes, that’s why the stick-in-the-muds nowadays all want boys. The female disability’s going to be removed. You’re removing it in your work; the advance-guard are removing it by having girls. It’s all right as long as we know who’s for us and who’s against us. I don’t blame your aunt for a single moment. I’m sorry for her, but that’s a different thing.”

“Dorothy says she’d rather have boys, too,” Amory mused.

“Of course she would; so would Jellies; and making allowances for accidentals, Dot and Jellies are intellectually on a par, you know.”

(“Here’s a piece that wants a stitch too.) But oh, Cosimo, isn’t that going rather too far? Dorothy—and Jellies——!”

“Not far enough,” Cosimo averred stoutly. “The cases are exactly on all-fours. We know what Dorothy is, but we don’t know what Jellies might not have been if she’d had the chance. You aren’t allowing for Environment, you see....”

And only the arrival of the bed, the bath and the chest of drawers cut short (three-quarters of an hour later) the most illuminating talk about Environment that Amory and Cosimo had ever had.

By seven o’clock that evening the studio was practically ready for Amory to come into it. It certainly looked exceedingly comfortable. A fire had been lighted, more for the sake of decorative effect than from any need of one, and the smell of the excellent little dinner Cosimo had cooked filled the room with a delightfully homelike smell. Potatoes roasted in their jackets in the ashes, liver-and-bacon keeping warm on the two hot plates inside the fender, a pancake ready for pouring into the pan, cheese, fruit, coffee in a little lustre jug only needing the hot water to be poured upon it, and half a bottle of “Veuve Dodo” (an Australian burgundy) from the wineshop in the King’s Road—Cosimo had seen to all. Mrs. ’Ill herself, coming in to give a last look round, had found nothing wanting.

“Well, nobody can say as ’ow you won’t be snug—can they, Florence?” Mrs. ’Ill said, leaving it delicately in doubt whether she meant the pronoun to be taken as in the plural. “A prettier little ’ome, all things considered, I never see. I always says as it isn’t riches as makes contentment; and you ’aven’t far to go for your potatoes anyway, which is just downstairs, also apples and oranges. And eggs I can always supply, though my experience is as artists puts too much trust in eggs, which hasn’t the nourishment of meat when all’s said, and not cheaper when you take your ’ealth into consideration, as all of us must, young or old and married or not. Nor winkles, though I’m fond of ’em myself, but not to rely on. Bring the bucket, Florence, and I ’ope you’ve taken notice, so you can tell ’Orris when ’e comes out next week.... Oh, thank you, sir; I don’t deny it would be acceptable, the smell of turps being that drying—and wishing you good night and sweet dreams....”

And Mrs. ’Ill and Jellies curtsied elaborately and left them.

“She almost said the Creek wasn’t five minutes away!” Cosimo laughed when they had gone. “And that idea was a great success of yours, to put the slippers I’d been whitewashing inside the fender. Jellies’s eyes nearly fell into them when she saw them! Aren’t people funny!... Well, let’s have the first meal in the new place....”

He put a pinch of salt into the coffee-jug and reached for the liver-and-bacon.

As they ate and toasted the new studio, in the Veuve Dodo, they discussed the house-warming that, of course, Amory must give. Including the carved wood frame, the two frocks, and more sundries, Amory’s installation had cost her in all forty-three pounds. A fresh supply of materials for her work would bring the sum up to forty-eight or more—call it forty-eight, and to all intents and purposes forty-eight was fifty. A party by all means; one might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. They talked of it. Laura would bring her guitar again, and—who was that new friend of Walter’s, the one with the glasses, who seemed to know Nietzsche by heart?... They would get Walter to bring him. And Katie and Dickie, of course, and Phyllis Hardy, and Amory supposed they’d have to ask Dorothy. They could pull the bed from behind its curtain to sit on; and now, thank goodness, there were plates and glasses enough to go round! Amory’s eyes rested on them where they stood in overlapping rows on the rack that Cosimo had put up where the little bookshelf had been. They shone brightly, and the cups twinkled on the new brass hooks below them; and there were tea and coffee in the tins, and milk in a jug, and butter in a little dish, and everything looked so spick-and-span that Amory had half a mind to paint it all. The flat wide kettle Cosimo had bought would boil on the oil-stove in twelve minutes. The bath was under the bed. Cosimo had marked the spare bed and table linen that was neatly folded in the chest of drawers. A curtain drew across the row of pegs on which Amory’s clothes hung, and the reflections of the candle-flames in the polished floor-borders made simply ripping shimmers of colour. Amory was quite cross that she must return to Glenerne that night; it was such a long way for poor Cosimo to see her home. Well, she would be nearer to him soon—practically just round the corner. Then they would be able to see quite a lot of each other.

After supper Cosimo washed up, and then they drew up two chairs to the fire; and Amory turned back her new terra-cotta skirt so as not to scorch it, and they talked and ate apples. They talked of poor Herbertson’s show (he had died), and Mr. Dix’s articles, and Amory’s own work; and it was long before Amory yawned sleepily. Then she rose. Return to Glenerne she must. She begged Cosimo, who had had a hard day, to let her go alone; but Cosimo would not hear of it. Then, as Cosimo was putting out the lamp, they both laughed together. The absent-minded fellow had actually been on the point of setting out with her to Shepherd’s Bush in the slippers in which he had white-washed, leaving his boots by the side of her bed.

VII
THE VOICE THAT BREATHED O’ER EDEN

The invitations were out for Miss Geraldine Towers’ wedding, and the first acceptance Aunt Jerry received was that of Cosimo Pratt. For Amory had kept her promise and had brought them together. It had been at the studio in Cheyne Walk, which Aunt Jerry and Mr. Massey had come to see the very night before Amory had left Glenerne; and really there had seemed something to be said for Mrs. ’Ill’s cautious practice of coughing as she ascended the stairs and tapping and waiting before she entered the room. Amory had held a candle at the head of the stairs when they had left, but had not descended with them, and she had re-entered her room to find Cosimo at his funniest and most solemn.

“I trust, Amory,” he had said, looking gravely at her, “that my ears deceived me?...”

“Cosimo,” Amory had replied, looking as gravely at him, “I greatly fear....”

“It sounded like one, Amory....”

“It was one, Cosimo....”

“You are sure?...”

“If an aquarium, why not a greengrocer’s entry?... At their age!” Amory had burst out laughing. “Well, one thing’s pretty certain now—you’ll be invited to the wedding!”

At this Cosimo’s gravity had become profounder and funnier still.

“You don’t mean....”

Amory had clapped her hands.

“I do! Didn’t you see it in auntie’s eyes?... Cosimo, dear, you’re approved of—quite an eligible young man!—So that makes Mrs. ’Ill (one), Jellies (two), Dorothy (three), aunt and uncle (five), and the plumber and the chimney-sweep (seven)—seven of these dear, quaint, obsolete souls....”

“All trying to marry you and me, Amory?”

“Yes, Cosimo.”

“And I shall be asked to the wedding as—er—one of the family?”

“Quite, if I know anything about auntie.”

“Then,” said Cosimo, in a deep voice, “I can only say that I shall come.”

“Oh, do!” Amory broke out. She clutched his arm. “And I’ll make a bet with you, Cosimo! Our great pandjandrum will be there—‘Mr. Wellcome Himself,’ they call him, with a capital ‘h,’ almost like God—and I’ll bet you anything you like he says, ‘May all your troubles be little ones!’”

“You promise me he shall say that?” said Cosimo incredulously.

“Oh, you don’t know the atmosphere I’ve had to keep my art alive in!”

“I shall certainly come,” Cosimo had said. He added that he would have gone there barefoot if only Mr. Wellcome would say, “May all your troubles be little ones.”

The wedding was to take place at St. Mark’s, not far from Mr. Massey’s bookshop, and the breakfast was to be given at Glenerne itself. It was to be sent in from Bunters’, all but what Mr. Sandys, the baritone, of the Lillie Road branch of the East Midlands Bank, called “the wet.” That was to be Mr. Wellcome’s wedding-gift. He had vowed that unless he was allowed to stand just one little bottle with a bit of gold foil on it to two of the very best that ever stepped, he would never set foot in Glenerne again; and everybody knew that by “just one little bottle,” Mr. Wellcome meant a case, if not two, not to speak of a liqueur for the sake of which an invading general might have sacked a monastery. Mr. Wellcome was also to give Miss Geraldine Towers away.

The clear-eyed Weiniger, the ruthless Strindberg, the hypochondriac Schopenhauer himself—not one of these could have shed a more searching light of criticism on the whole apparatus of Aunt Jerry’s wedding than did the bride’s pretty and artistic niece. She reduced Cosimo to a state of mere respectful admiration. First there was the age of the contracting parties. It was not even (so to speak) a case of May and December; it was November and December—or, at any rate, October and November. If this was the outcome of young and musical society, what was to be expected of those who really were in the April of their lives? It was a very good thing indeed that Amory and Cosimo were able to set an example of restraint. If age must go a-giddying, youth must show itself sober and responsible. Amory put it fairly and squarely to Cosimo: was that not a Law? Cosimo agreed that it was a Law—the Law of Compensation.

Then there was the Service itself. Amory had just read the Service again for the first time for a number of years, and really the claims it made could only be described as stupendous!... How could you possibly know that you were going to honour somebody until death did you depart? Suppose they turned out to be a different kind of person altogether from what you had supposed? Surely, then, it would be your clear duty, as an open-minded person, not to honour them! And how could you possibly know that you might not be doing a quite criminally improvident thing in promising to endow somebody, as to whose real character you were totally in the dark, with all your worldly goods? Of course, the sensible view was that that person should be endowed with the worldly goods who was best capable of looking after them. And how could you possibly know that you would cleave to one only, and so on? Not that anybody else was likely to take Aunt Jerry away from Mr. Massey, but suppose they did want to? Amory called that stultifying. It was not open-minded: it was a wilful and deliberate shutting of your mind, perhaps to some really wonderful revelation.... And what had Abraham and Sarah, and Isaac and Rebecca, and all these dead-and-gone Jews got to do with it all? Pretty records some of them had for that matter!... Oh no, the whole thing was simply fossilized. Strictly speaking, it ought to be looked on paleontologically, as a curious and interesting historic survival. For that matter, people seemed to have their doubts even in going into it, for they usually talked about “the silken cord of Love” in an apologetic sort of way—silken cord, indeed, with all those cast-iron regulations! Amory liked “silken cord!”... Oh no; the Service started out all right; it hit the nail on the head with “First it was ordained,” and so on, but the rest, eugenically speaking, was mere—mere——

“Obscurantism,” Cosimo suggested, but rather diffidently. Even he had never seen Amory so astonishingly into her stride before. He could have listened to her all day; he did listen to her half the day.

“That’s the very word!” Amory praised him. “Signifying darkness, where it’s pretending to shed light all the time! If exploded ideas like those can be put into the Prayer Book, it seems to me that a Divorce Service ought to go into the Prayer Book too, instead of having to go to a court of law for it! And look, I ask you, at the position of woman in divorce to-day!” (Amory drove ahead as if it had been a question of Aunt Jerry’s divorce already.) “Suppose she gets her decree: there’s an odium attaches to her just the same whether it’s her fault or not! I call it the fault of Abraham and Sarah, and their stupid old Service! Laws that are too harsh are bound to be broken! It’s a duty to break them, so that we can get them altered. What we want is a rational tie, voluntarily entered into, and sweep all these archaic old penalties aside! Not that it’s any business of mine; thank goodness I shan’t marry....”

None the less, out of a noble love of abstract justice and a hatred of wrong merely because it was wrong, Amory found it intolerable.

Then there was the minor apparatus. From the point of view of Eugenics, Amory would have thought that the worst possible preparation for the perfect race of the future was all this over-eating of indigestible things, and over-drinking of things that were, medically speaking, poisons. “Healths” indeed! Pretty name for them!... And all these buffooneries of throwing rice and confetti, and flinging an old shoe after the “happy” (ahem!) pair. For the wedding presents, Amory conceded, there was something to be said. The present economic conditions made it difficult for the really splendid young people to get married at all, and so it was right that they should be in a sense subsidized by those who had wrested (principally by callousness) more out of the competitive struggle than they (of a more sensitive make) had managed to wrest for themselves. Indeed, Amory’s only complaint against the custom of giving presents was that it did not go far enough. What really ought to be done was that the State should pick its best specimens, on the principles laid down by Galton and others, and pension them off for one understood purpose, putting them in the midst of beautiful surroundings ... a sort of Endowment of Motherhood idea, but on a scale of the first magnitude, and not by mere doles, ... and, of course, with everything possible done to ensure the birth of girls.... Science would soon be able to do that at the rate at which it was advancing....

“I say, Amory, you are wonderful!” Cosimo breathed, rapt....

Amory said, “Silly old Cosimo!” But she herself could not help thinking that her lips had rather been touched with the coal.

At Glenerne, nothing but the approaching wedding was talked about. Unhappily, however, the talk was all about those very accidentals that had the least to do with the propagation of a healthy and rational race. True, a knowing eye rested once in a while on the whatnot that contained the photographs of Miss Addams’s “grandchildren,” and a smile was hidden behind a hand or turned hurriedly into a cough; but for the rest the race was left to look after itself just as if Galton had never been born, and a Eugenic Congress had never been held. Very little whist or dancing went on in the large double drawing-room upstairs. Everybody flocked downstairs again into the dining-room, where the tablecloth and cruets were not now left for the next repast, as usual, but removed to make room for Aunt Jerry’s heaps and heaps of linen. Miss Crebbin and Miss Swan marked; Miss Addams and Mrs. Deschamps folded and set all into orderly heaps; and M. Criqui and Mr. Edmondson wrapped the heaps in brown paper and wrote on each package a description of its contents. Mr. Massey was frequently taken by the shoulders by Mrs. Deschamps and turned out of the room, as being only in the way. He either retired to his bedroom and wrote cheques, or else, in the company of other smokers, sat on the garden roller in the little back greenhouse and lighted and threw away again Cubeb cigarettes.

Mr. Edmondson’s case was generally commiserated. He had not been quite himself since Amory’s departure. He had held rather moping discussions, on such subjects as the progress of illustrated journalism and the decay of respect in the attitude of the young towards the old, with Mr. Rainbow and stout Mr. Waddey, the timber-merchant; and he had more than once dropped a dark hint that he might soon be leaving Glenerne—young musical society becomes a little trying when you yourself are the young and musical society. And he took it rather hardly that he would not be able to be present at the wedding-breakfast, but must rise at five-thirty, clean his boots, make his cup of tea over his spirit-kettle, and lunch in the ticket-office as usual. Mrs. Deschamps told M. Criqui that she thought Mr. Edmondson had had more than a penchant for Amory; M. Criqui, who was in the Lyons silk trade, and had given Aunt Jerry a beautiful dress-length, had raised his brows and said “Si?” M. Criqui’s politeness never forsook him. It was as if he asked Mrs. Deschamps where Mr. Edmondson’s eyes could have been to have had a penchant for anybody when Mrs. Deschamps herself was there, to be admired almost whether her victim wished it or not.

But if Mr. Edmondson must be absent, a pretty full gathering of the others was to be present. Mr. Waddey, the timber-merchant, had put off the buying of a Gloucestershire wood for the purpose; Mr. Rainbow had put a red line round the date on the hanging calendar in his bedroom; and Mr. Geake and Mr. Sandys had promised to run in, the one from the Estate Office in Goldhawk Road, the other from the Branch Bank. Miss Crebbin, away in the city, was in Mr. Edmondson’s case, but Miss Swan was turning her class over to the study of art for the afternoon (a subject in which one of the monitors could be trusted to take them), and Miss Tickell would close her milliner’s shop from ten to four. As for five or six of the other ladies, their time was their own. There had been much discussion as to whether the olive-skinned Indians should be invited; finally, they too had been included. Two of them lunched daily at Glenerne. They could hardly be asked to move from their accustomed chairs and wooden napkin-rings; and then there was the solidarity of the Empire to consider. All three had been asked, and were coming. Mr. Massey’s brother and his wife were to be the only outsiders, for Mr. and Mrs. Wellcome and the infant Master Wellcome could hardly be called outsiders. Or if there was another outsider at all it would be Mr. Cosimo Pratt, and he (Glenerne had been given vaguely to understand) might not be an outsider very long. Really the most outside of all was Amory herself. It was true she had lived in the house, but in the body only, not in the spirit, if press-cuttings meant anything. She had stooped on the wing from a brighter air. Her art was not the same kind of art as that to which Miss Swan had turned over her Board School class for the afternoon. It brought in cheques for ninety-five pounds.

The wedding was fixed for a Tuesday, and by the Monday night the Glenerne hall was almost impassable with trunks and bags and cases—the trunks and bags for the going away (to the Lake District), the cases containing nobody knew what until Mr. Massey and Miss Geraldine, who had gone to the Vicarage, should return. Two of them, however, were surmised to contain Mr. Wellcome’s contribution to the morrow’s breakfast, and it was a “wheeze” of the men to attitudinize in mock ecstasies before them and to make luscious noises as of drinking. Another case, a yard square but not very high, was so heavy that the porter had hardly been able to carry it in; and if one might judge from certain conspiratorial whispers, one or two of the borders guessed what that case also contained. Mrs. Deschamps had almost wept over Mr. Massey’s special licence; Mr. Waddey, who was a widower, had remarked that it was strange, when you came to think of it, the meaning there might be in a bit of paper you could easily crumple up and throw into the fire. Mr. Edmondson, too, asked to be allowed to look at the licence. Later he was heard going about saying that it was strange, when you really considered it, how much bits of paper, that you could easily tear up into little pieces, stood for sometimes. “A railway ticket’s nothing in itself,” he said, by way of illustration of what he meant, “but just you try to travel without one....”

The wedding-day dawned. Mr. Massey and his brother (a red-faced, silent man who wore policeman’s boots and seemed uncomfortable in his collar) had gone off arm in arm somewhere; and Amory and Mr. Massey’s brother’s wife were helping Aunt Jerry to dress. Mrs. Deschamps had lent her bedroom for the display of the wedding-presents. The heavy box in the hall had been opened, and had been found to contain, by stupid mistake, a second wedding-cake, all snow and silver, which Mr. Geake and Mr. Sandys had carried into the dining-room and set before the bride’s place. You had to look twice at lavender bonnets and white veils and black coats and light gloves before you were quite sure who the wearers were; and the string of cabs outside, with nosegays in the lamps, stretched away to the end of the road and round the corner. And Glenerne that morning was a school for waiters indeed, for six extra ones had come from Bunters’, and, with their heads held high, looked as it were through their dropped lids at Glenerne’s own Germans and Belgians and the little red-fezzed Omar K.

Then a loud “Hi, Squeegee—Lueegee—Guliulimo! Them things come?” was heard in the hall. Mr. Wellcome, with Mrs. Wellcome bearing a torrent of lace in which the youngest Master Wellcome slept, had arrived. “Brought her after all, you see, Nellie!” Mr. Wellcome cried triumphantly to Mrs. Deschamps, whom he met at the foot of the stairs; and then he spoke behind his hand: “Lucky ... always want one like that at a wedding!”... “Not again!” Mrs. Deschamps whispered back, half shocked, half as if such a man was indeed a creature to be dreaded. “Eh? Why not?” Mr. Wellcome blustered. “We don’t adopt ’em at our house! Not while we have our health! Now, time we were off; where’s this daughter o’ mine pro tem?”

The arrival of the Wellcomes was all they had been waiting for. They set off, the line of cabs drawing up at the gate, stopping, starting, stopping again, until the last had driven off with a couple of urchins sitting on the back of it.

Amory and Cosimo heard every word of that preposterous Service from the front pew. The quick glances that passed between them from time to time only emphasized their rock-like gravity between whiles. And after all, there is such a thing as tolerance. If this Sacrament was really the crumbling institution the pure beam of reason showed it to be, so much the less abolition there would be for Amory and Cosimo to do. You teach a lesson to those who do not respect your convictions when you deal gently with their manifest prejudices, and the fewer who shared the joke the more humour there would be for themselves. So Amory merely noted that her aunt made no bones about the word “obey,” and wondered, as man and wife knelt, where Uncle George’s brother, who was best man, got those extraordinary boots.

But she had promised Cosimo that the real humour should come afterwards, when the wedding-party returned to Glenerne; and her promise was richly fulfilled. There were heads at every window in the street, and they could hardly get in at the gate for the press of watchers about it. And when they had got in and mounted the front steps and passed along the hall, they could hardly get into the dining-room for the crowd of waiters, Bunters’ and Glenerne’s, who, making an international matter of it, covertly elbowed and shouldered one another and muttered words of contempt under their breath and exchanged malevolent glances. But when they had got in, and had found each his or her name written by Mrs. Deschamps on the half-sheets of notepaper with the silver-lettered Glenerne heading, it was worth coming miles to see and participate in. Regular boarders eyed the table, with its dishes glazed and its dishes garnished, its dishes frilled and crimped and made strange with icing and aspic and cochineal, very much as a man who knew a buttercup and a daisy when he saw them might peep, intimidated, into a house of rare and exotic orchids. These fantastic growths of the same kingdom as the dandelion and the dog-rose? These gemmed and enamelled comestibles food also, like Miss Addams’s thin soups and strips of watery fish and semi-transparent slices of Argentine beef and New Zealand lamb?... Each resolved to let his neighbour tackle them first and to see what implement he did so with. For, while fingers might have been made before forks, they were no fewer in number than the bright plated objects of cutlery (including something that seemed to start as a pair of sugar-tongs and to end as a sort of cigar-cutter) that extended for quite six inches on either side of each plate. It might be going too far to say that one must necessarily be born to these things; nevertheless a fellow did feel a bit taken aback when he was confronted with them straight away.

(To anticipate a little: Nobody knew who it was who first discovered that here they had a tower of strength in Mr. Wellcome. But it was presently seen that Mr. Wellcome knew all about fish-knives and finger-bowls, and made nothing of them. Therefore all you had to do was to watch Mr. Wellcome. Then, no idea being so good but that it is capable of improvement, it was discovered that you were quite safe if you watched Mr. Sandys, who watched Mr. Rainbow, who watched Mr. Wellcome. Soon each plat was being attacked with grace and confidence at its proper remove from the fountainhead of good form, the movement passing down the table very much as the cabs had drawn up one by one at the door.)

To ask who occupied Mr. Wellcome’s Chair were to ask who occupies the Throne at a Coronation. Mr. Wellcome Himself occupied it. Mrs. George Massey sat on his right hand, George Massey on his left. This arrangement was duplicated at the other end of the long table, where Miss Addams sat between Cosimo and Amory. These constellations of primary and hardly secondary brilliance were united, along either side of the table, by the lesser stars; and, just as a hole appears in the Southern Heavens, so the three Indian students made a sort of Coal Sack among the whiter faces on Miss Addams’s right hand. Amory thought it far better that she and Cosimo should not be sitting actually together. Apart, they would have all the more notes to compare afterwards.

Cosimo was gathering these already. As once he had taken the broom from the crossing-sweeper, so now he was talking across the corner of the table to Mrs. Wellcome. He was talking about the only person who breakfasted without taking his cue of deportment from anybody—the child; he got, as he said afterwards, “simply priceless things.” Amory, across the other corner, was engaged in a series of lively rallies with Mr. Rainbow. Mr. Rainbow always expanded when Mr. Wellcome came to Glenerne. If he became a little deflated again when Mr. Wellcome had turned his back, nobody thought the less of him on that account. To be able to play up to Mr. Wellcome at all was an achievement beyond the power of most.

Not that Mr. Wellcome Himself showed himself immediately at the top of his form; he husbanded his resources better than that. He had almost reunited the two hostile camps of waiters and set them to make common cause against himself when he had asked which of them knew the top from the bottom of a bottle of G. H. Mumm, and, taking a napkin and a cutter, had shown them how to unwire one and to pour its contents out; and when all the glasses had been filled, and Mr. Wellcome had risen at the head of the table, dark against the bow-window with its indiarubber-plants in the mustard-yellow faience vases, those who rapped with the ends of their knives on the table and called “Order, order!” felt that it would be some minutes yet before he was thoroughly “warm.”

And yet he started at a more humorous level than anybody else could have attained. In the first place (he said) he must apologize for speaking at all. It was all Mrs. W.’s fault. As everybody knew, he was not allowed to get a word in edgeways at home (smiles)—led a dog’s life, in fact (more smiles)—indeed, as he had said to his old friend Charlie Cutbush only the other day, Charlie Cutbush, who used to travel for Dwu Mawr Whisky and now kept “The Silent Woman” in the Borough, “Charlie,” he had said, “you ought to get that sign o’ yours altered—it ought to be a man with his head cut off, not a woman!” (A little more laughter, and a gallant remark from Cosimo to the speaker’s wife that at any rate Mr. Wellcome looked well on it). But to get on (Mr. Wellcome continued). As they all knew, there was a good deal of giving in connexion with weddings. In his own time at Glenerne it had always been a bit of a puzzle where Miss Addams put ’em all to sleep; but they all knew now where Mrs. Deschamps slept, and a pretty little room it was, and its occupant lots of time before her yet (quite a sudden outburst of mirth at this, and confusion and a cry of “Wretch!” from Mrs. Deschamps). Tut-tut!—What Mr. Wellcome meant to say, if they’d be quiet a bit and not jump down his throat like that, was that they’d all been into Mrs. Deschamps’ room to see the wedding-presents. (Laughter.) Now Mr. Wellcome wasn’t going to say they weren’t, one and all, very handsome wedding-presents, especially Miss Addams’s oak-and-silver biscuit-box and the embroidered quilt given by Mrs. Deschamps herself (but Mr. Wellcome would have a word to say to his old friend George Massey, about the comparative inefficacy of embroidered quilts when your feet were really cold, by and by.) (More laughter.) But what Mr. Wellcome was going to say, and he’d say it twice if anybody didn’t hear it the first time, was that he’d been giving something away that morning that he hoped and trusted his old friend George would find worth more than all the rest put together—a bonny bride. (Loud applause, and an instant recognition of their error on the part of those who had thought that a humorist couldn’t on occasion be serious too.) Mr. Wellcome repeated: a bonnie bride. Mr. Wellcome didn’t mean that they didn’t all joke about these things sometimes. He did himself, and so would George Massey be doing by and by. But he did say this about marriage, and he spoke as a man who had been married more years than he cared to remember: that there was nothing like it. (Cries of “Hear, hear!” from married and unmarried alike, and a noisy drumming of knives and hands on the table.) And while Mr. Wellcome was about it he was going to say something else. There seemed to be people about who thought themselves very wise nowadays. They wanted this changed and that changed; Mr. Wellcome didn’t know what they did want, and he didn’t think they themselves did either; sometimes it seemed to him that they just wanted something different—good or bad, but different. In fact he, Mr. Wellcome, called ’em grousers and grizzlers—a pack o’ frosty-faces. Now nobody expected the world to stand still. No doubt there was lots of things could be improved on. There was off-licences, for instance. Likewise Clubs. But (here Mr. Wellcome shook a fat forefinger warningly and impressively) Marriage wasn’t one of ’em. If an Englishman’s house was his castle, Marriage was what Mr. Wellcome might call the front-door key of it! (Applause far more loud and sustained than any mere humorous sally could have called forth.) Now he kept his front-door key on the bunch. (A “Go on with you!” from Mrs. Wellcome.) If the law allowed him two or three wives (and he had only to look round that table to wish ... but that was neither here nor there, and no doubt if he could he’d soon be wishing he hadn’t—much laughter)—what he was going to say was that if he had twenty wives he’d keep ’em all on the bunch too.... “But instead o’ that one of ’em keeps me on a bit of string,” said Mr. Wellcome, dropping his voice so comically and despondingly that the whole table roared with laughter....

“And now,” said Mr. Wellcome, beginning to pat his pockets in search of something, “let’s cut the cackle and come to the horses.... Where is the dashed thing? Ah, here it is!...”

And, as if his gift of champagne had not been enough, from the bottom of his breeches-pocket he drew forth a gold wrist-watch, ordered Aunt Jerry to hold out her hand, and snapped the chain about her wrist.

It was, too, a “coming to the horses” in a sense quite other than the figurative one in which Mr. Wellcome used the expression. They were real horses to which he came. What else (Mr. Wellcome wanted to know) could be expected of him when Toreador had come in at twelve to one yesterday, and all the money on the favourite, and the bookies’ pockets simply spilling gold and notes?... Nay, Mr. Wellcome described the scene. He set himself in an attitude, and his voice dropped to a hush. “I don’t know how ever Sammy did it!” he confided to them. “He seemed to pick her together, then ... hoooosh!—Short head, and a hundred-and-twenty o’ the best for W.W.!... ‘Who give you the office?’ Dick Marks says to me when I goes to touch; ‘if it hadn’t been for you, Old Knowall, it’ld ha’ been grand slam; you know a bit, you do’ ... So now, ladies and gentlemen,” Mr. Wellcome concluded, raising his glass, “in asking you all to drink the health of Mr. and Mrs. George Massey, I’ll do so in the words of the poet:

What is there in the vale of Life
Half so delightful as a wife,
When friendship, love and peace combine
To stamp the marriage-bond divine?...

I ask you to join me, ladies and gentlemen....”

Then was begun the writing of a page unparalleled for brightness in the annals of Glenerne. Health after health was drunk, and it was Mr. Rainbow who proposed that of the youngest bachelor present—the infant Wellcome. Yesterday, he said, had been a fine day for Toreador’s race, but no finer than to-day was for another race—the Human Race!... Such a roar as went up! Nobody had supposed Rainbow had it in him. Aunt Jerry blushed; Mrs. Deschamps, who was sipping champagne at the time, had to have her back slapped by M. Criqui, and did not recover for several minutes; Cosimo’s laugh rivalled that of Mr. Wellcome himself. And then Mr. Rainbow rounded on Cosimo likewise.... For nothing succeeds like success, and Mr. Rainbow, having scored once, immediately scored again. If little birds were to be believed, he said, giving the discreetest of glances at Cosimo and Amory, they might be having another jollification before long. He mentioned no names. He would merely say that one of them was not unknown to fame, fame of what he might call an artistic sort; and all he would say, in the words of a song that used to be sung when he was a good many years younger, was, “That’s the time to do it—while you’re young!”

Then Mr. Rainbow made his best hit of all—he sat down in the perfect moment of his triumph.

“The cake, the cake!” everybody shouted; and one of Bunters’ waiters handed Aunt Jerry a knife.

Then there were fresh shrieks of merriment, for when Aunt Jerry tried to cut that formidable cake it was discovered to be of solid plaster-of-Paris—a white grindstone tricked out with silver-paper cupids and spurious sugar-work.

“Beats Mrs. Deschamps and the Kissing Bee hollow!” roared the authors of the imposture.

And so the real cake had to be brought and cut.

They rose from the table and ascended to the drawing-room, and there the merriment became more furious still. For Mr. Wellcome’s eyes fell on the whatnot with the photographs of Miss Addams’s “grandchildren,” and the seed of an idea sprang into being in his mind. It grew; it blossomed; it spread into the Rose of Eugenics itself. Mr. Wellcome approached Amory and Cosimo. He was perhaps just slightly drunk. His fingers moved lovingly on Cosimo’s biceps, and passed to his pectoral muscles: his other hand was out, almost as if he would have done the same to Amory: and then he gave them, so to speak, their certificate of physical fitness. Noisily he bade Cosimo kiss Amory there and then.

“Be a man ... kiss her, damme!” he cried, a forcible hand on each; and Amory dropped her lids....

But Cosimo, who was there to see others make exhibitions of themselves but not to make one of himself, hung reluctantly back. But the irresistible Wellcome dragged them both forward again. There was no help for it, and so, knocking his head against Amory’s, he gave her a stage kiss only, which, of course, in this tale of Two Kisses, does not count.

“That’s the style!” cried Mr. Wellcome heartily, deceived by appearances. “Hoooosh!... Short head!—Hi, Bonzoline ... what’s your name ... Lorenzo! Hurry up with them liqueurs, and then go downstairs, and feel in the right-hand pocket of my overcoat, and you’ll find a bundle of toothpicks—and hi!—see whether my Missis has changed the boy yet ... I want to show ’em his legs, tell her.... Talk about ‘legs’!... But you’ll see....”

They had seemed to be merry up to then; but all agreed afterwards that only with the bringing up of the coffee and liqueurs and toothpicks did what might be called the real merriment begin.

At six o’clock that evening Amory and Cosimo took tea in the studio in Cheyne Walk and compared notes of the events of the day. Cosimo was ecstatic. He had not believed such things existed. Amory’s utterances, too, were as breathless and explosive as his own, but seemed somehow to lack ring. A close observer might have supposed her to be acting a brightness. Then for the twentieth time Cosimo guffawed.

“But you lost your bet, Amory—he didn’t say, ‘May all your troubles be little ones!’”

“But he showed us the baby’s legs.”

“I admit he did that. That was rather beyond rubies.”

“And he handed the toothpicks round.”

“So he did. I shall keep mine—die in defence of it. And you’ll find that horse’s name written on my heart. A horse-race at a wedding!—Oh, oh, I’m not complaining! It was all you promised, and more!”

“I thought perhaps you were disappointed,” Amory remarked.

“Good heavens, no! I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds! (But, of course, your aunt was charming.)... Isn’t Mr. Massey fond of the police sergeant!”

“Sickly sentiment, I call it,” said Amory abruptly.

“Oh no, not if you take it as part of the general show,” Cosimo explained. “Damon and Pythias, I suppose; not having a brother, can’t say. But the thing can’t be taken to bits. It was a perfect whole. I wonder what there is about a perfect whole that makes it far more than the sum of the parts?”

“Eh?... Oh yes, it is more,” said Amory.

“More?... Rather! Why, take it in art....”

“Don’t talk about art to-night, Cosimo, please,” she said. “You always give me so much to think of when you talk about art.”

“Tired?” said Cosimo solicitously, bending over the back of her chair.

“A little.”

Amory could not have told why she was tired. She only knew that, to-night somehow, Cosimo did not seem as intuitive as he usually was.

PART II

I
PENCE

Amory was not the only one who was grumbling at the weather. Even Mrs. ’Ill, who was usually of an imperturbable temper, complained. The clothes that she hadn’t had out, no, not half an hour, had been drying that lovely it was a treat to see ’em; and of course in running out quick to take ’em in she must go and drop an armful—her most partickler gent’s shirts too—and what with the babies and the hens carrying the dirt in and out and one thing and another, it really was enough to try anybody. Cheyne Walk! Rainy Walk more like——

Indeed, it must have rained an inch or more during the morning. It overflowed so from the roof-gutter overhead that as Amory stood by the casement window she might as well have been looking through a Bridal Veil Waterfall. Not that there was anything to look at beyond it. The park had gone; the Jelly Factory was blotted out; the Suspension Bridge was vignetted into nothing half-way across the river. Gurglings came from underneath the sink in the corner. Whether it was the rain or not, the smell of cabbage-water had returned.

Amory was sure it was raining harder in Cheyne Walk than it was anywhere else; harder than it could possibly be in Oxford Street, for example. And she had wanted, yet not wanted, to go to Oxford Street that morning. She had wanted to go because she wanted money; she had not wanted to go because the only means she knew of getting it was to borrow from Dorothy. Cosimo was away; his uncle had died a week before; Cosimo could not possibly be disturbed. And she had seen Mr. Hamilton Dix, and—thank you! It would be some time before she troubled Mr. Hamilton Dix again!...

Overfed animal!...

October, and still no Show. More, Mr. Hamilton Dix hardly took the trouble now to promise one immediately. But Mr. Dix need not think that Amory didn’t now see perfectly clearly the trick that had been practised upon her. She knew now why he had come so hurriedly to her that morning and dazzled her with his offer of a hundred pounds. Angiers’, a far better firm than Croziers’, had wanted her; that was why. Croziers’ had bought her merely in order that Angiers’ should not have her. “Dishonest,” Amory called it, and she had told Hamilton Dix so to his face. And his reply had been to take her hand and try to pat it.

Wasn’t it dishonest? she had cried hotly to herself any time this past month. If it wasn’t, she would be glad if somebody would tell her what honesty was! And Mr. Dix in his most odious and soothing voice, had said that she really mustn’t talk like that. “Dishonest?” he had repeated. Why, Miss Towers talked as if Croziers’ had anything to gain by deliberately suppressing her work! Nothing (he had assured her) was further from the truth. Croziers’ were in the hands of circumstances, too, the circumstances that made one time ripe for a particular exhibition and another not.... Messrs. Angier? Mr. Dix knew nothing about Messrs. Angier and their arrangements. They might be all right; Mr. Dix had heard it said that Messrs. Angier were rather in the habit of promising more than they performed, but that was only a rumour, and Mr. Dix wouldn’t give it currency. But he could assure Miss Towers that such “options” as that which Messrs. Crozier had obtained on her work were matters of everyday business.... Come now: would she tell him, as her friend, exactly what the trouble was? Was it money? If so, there was perhaps a chance that Messrs. Crozier might be willing to take over a certain quantity of her more recent work on the same terms as before....

Another “option,” in fact....

Then, successively had come the stages when Mr. Dix had told her that in his opinion she was injudicious to change her style so frequently as she did (“Versatility’s all very well, but it puzzles your public,” he had said, as if it had not been precisely the ground of Amory’s complaint that Croziers’ were seeing to it that she had no public at all)—when he had told her, that, if she really thought Angiers’ could do better for her, Croziers’ might be willing to release her from her obligation on repayment of the sum advanced plus a trifle for the accommodation—and when he had ceased to say anything at all. A pretty “option!”—Amory supposed that other man had called it an “option” when he had run away with her godmother’s fifty-two pounds a year.

And of course this was exactly why she didn’t want to ask Dorothy for money. For Dorothy would be able to say—perhaps to say it as if she was crowing over her a little—that she had warned her about that contract. Not that Dorothy had warned her one bit, really. Dorothy had not known any more than herself that her Show would be put off and put off and put off; and if the Show had not been put off, all would have been well. But Dorothy was so—peculiar. Her ways were peculiar. She had ways, in fact, not principles. Amory didn’t want to be severe on Dorothy, but some of the things she did seemed positively unprincipled. Not to go any further, there was Dorothy’s undignified way of regarding her own sex. She seemed to concur in that view of it that made it merely the plaything of the other sex. Of course (to be quite fair) it wasn’t to be supposed for a moment that Dorothy would have let Mr. Hamilton Dix kiss her, as he had wanted to kiss Amory. Amory was sure she wouldn’t. But for all that there would have been—something—not a kiss—not even a “leading on” perhaps—Amory couldn’t have said what it would have been—but there would have been something.... Put coarsely, it was a sort of exaggerated sex-consciousness in Dorothy—that and lack of principle. Amory ought to know that exaggerated sex-consciousness by this time. Glenerne had been full of it. The world seemed to be full of it. It seemed an odious domination; Amory could not understand it at all. Why, Cosimo did not want to kiss her....

Because, of course, that sham gesture at her aunt’s wedding had not been a kiss.

Cosimo quite understood that she was wedded to her art.

Amory could not conceive where the money had gone. Less than six months ago she had had nearly sixty pounds, not counting her regular pound a week; now she had a few shillings only, and quite a number of small debts. She supposed it was because she was not really familiar with the prices of things. Yes, it must be that, for she remembered how surprised she had been at the cost of the little studio-warming she had given when she had first come into this hateful little room. She had not provided anything at all out of the way. There had been a rather nice Greek wine Walter Wyron had told her about, not to be bought in very small quantities, but of course they had not drunk the whole of it that night—indeed, it had lasted for weeks. And there had been cold sausages and salads from a German charcuterie, in glass, not in tins—it was not true economy to run the risk of ptomaine poisoning. And there had also been a few boxes of figs and candied fruits—she admitted those had been rather dear. And so on. Nor, if the party had been a great success, would she have minded a little extra expenditure just for once; but, somehow, it had not been a success. Laura Beamish had had a cold and had not been able to sing; Dickie Lemesurier had wired at the last minute that she was not able to come; Cosimo had done his best, but Dorothy had turned up in an evening frock and had said she could not possibly stay more than an hour; and Walter’s friend, who could quote Nietzsche, had proved to be domineering and had done nothing but wrangle with Walter the whole of the evening. In fact, the party had fallen miserably flat.

But that, after all, was only one evening, and if Amory had been a little extravagant that time, she had more than made up (or so she should have thought) since. Eggs, sardines (in tins), cold boiled ham (at half a crown a pound), bread, butter, and lots of nice hot tea—it was not possible to live much more cheaply than that. At first Mrs. ’Ill cooked her an occasional joint in her own oven at the Creek, but joints are not cheap when you throw a large portion of them away from sheer weariness of the sight of them. She had spent rather a lot on canvases, nothing on clothes. And twice she had been away with Katie Deedes for weekends. Oh yes, and there had been one other party, a river-party just before everybody went away for the summer, which had been Amory’s, all but the railway-fares and the claret and lemonade. That had been quite a success.

Except for these things Amory had not the vaguest idea where the money had gone.

She only wanted to borrow until the Christmas quarter; indeed, it was not so much an advance on her allowance as an anticipation of the Christmas present she was sure to receive from her uncle and aunt. Then she would be straight again, and would know how to spend more wisely for the future. And Dorothy could well afford it, if one might judge of her fortune from her unhygienic but expensive dresses. If only the rain would stop she would go to Dorothy at once. She knew that Dorothy’s position had improved, and, if the world chose to regard its art as a parasitic thing, the artist could hardly be blamed if he spoiled the Philistine whenever he had the opportunity. In one sense she would actually be doing Dorothy a favour. A loan would put Dorothy into the honourable position of being a patron. Many a Philistine name lives on the formal page of an immortal work that otherwise would have been forgotten.

Amory continued to watch the flounces of water that spilled from the eaves and to listen to the runnings and gurglings of the West London drainage system.

But all at once a merry “Cooee!” came from below; a flapping as of shaken garments sounded in the entry; and a step and a call of “Amory!” were heard on the stairs. It was the voice of Dorothy herself. The door flew inwards, and Dorothy Lennard stood there, a pair of blue eyes and the tip of a nose visible, the rest of her a shimmer of some greenish-yellow material, thin as goldbeaters’ skin and trickling rivulets of water. She shook herself on the landing in a haze of water-dust, like a dog that comes out of a pond, and then cried—

“Quick, Amory, and certify me—you shall take ’em off yourself and feel—Mr. Miller said Sloane Street, but it was so near I thought I’d come in—how are you?—No, I’ll unbutton them, then your hands will be quite dry to feel——”

She took from her head a sort of poke that fitted like a bathing-cap, allowed the long garment to rustle in a small close heap to the floor, and cried, “There! Now feel me!”

She seized Amory’s wrist and patted herself with Amory’s palm.

“That damp isn’t the rain come through,” she went on. “Quite the other way; that’s my warmth that did that, they’re as impervious as that! And of course they’re rather dear. But it’s a perfect day for it! There’ll be a column of floods and rainfall in all the papers to-morrow, and we’re setting all the telephones on the jump now getting the space next to it. You do certify me? I said to Mr. Miller, ‘What is the good of sticking a piece of the stuff under a tap in the window? What does it convey to anybody? They only think there’s some fake somewhere (advertisers have faked so much, you see), and besides, it’s been done.’ So I said, ‘Why not let somebody go out in this rain in ’em? If they’ll stand this they’ll stand anything. Then get some known person to certify that at such-and-such a time yesterday (the wettest day for eighteen years) so-and-so arrived as dry as a bone at such-and-such a place, having walked in Ararat Extra Light and Japhet Boots’—but you must feel my stockings too.”

She sat down in one of Amory’s basket-chairs, began to unlace her boots, and presently thrust out for Amory’s examination, one after the other, her grey silk-stockinged soles.

“So they’re mine,” Dorothy cried jubilantly, “and if you’ll give me your signature I’ll get you a set, not to speak of the advertisement for you—can’t do without that nowadays—‘I, the undersigned, Amory Towers’—if they’ve never heard of you they daren’t say so when they see that.... Those Cosimo’s slippers? I’ll put ’em on.... I say, you have let your fire down! No, I’ll set it going—you fill the kettle—I have enjoyed my walk!”

She began to potter about the black fire, gabbling without stopping as she did so.

Amory was almost disinterestedly glad to see Dorothy; on such a day she would have been glad to see anybody. For inside the studio was more desolate than the streets without. No longer did that room over the greengrocer’s shop shimmer and twinkle as on the day when she and Cosimo had sat down to their first little supper there. Half the plates that had overlapped so prettily, half the cup that had dangled from the bright hook, were broken; the sink was full of articles awaiting that dreaded washing-up; and in the cupboard forgotten condensed milk tins and brick-like half-loaves turned yellow and green. Amory had cut off Mrs. ’Ill’s daily visit; she now came on Saturdays only, and Cosimo had not been there to give her a hand. By the time Dorothy had drawn up the fire, and, going for the tea-things, had found plates with sardine-tails on their edges and cups with graduations of brown about their rims, she might have been pardoned had she thought tea hardly worth troubling about; but she merely bustled cheerfully about, scraping things into a bucket, clearing the table, sweeping the hearth. All the time she chatted about the Ararat Extra Light and the photograph of her that would appear in the papers on the morrow. Amory had been shocked to hear that Dorothy had actually consented to this.

“Why not?” Dorothy had demanded. “It won’t have my name on, and by the time the machine men have finished with it, it won’t be either like me or anybody else! My dear, you’re as bad as Aunt Emmie. Hang my family! Would any of them buy me a pair of Japhet Boots? My dear, I have to dress myself well: I can’t afford to go about in rags! You don’t suppose I buy my clothes, do you? Why, you couldn’t get these stockings for thirty shillings! I don’t mean that I get photographed for every stitch I have on, but I have to get things one way or another!”

Amory sighed to be the possessor of a relentless intellect. It was a heavy burden. Far, far happier were they, the simpler ones, whose nature it was to laugh lazily and good-humouredly while others shouldered the responsibility of the world. They did not even know that in order that they might dance somebody else must weep. Dorothy had condemned herself. All sorts of people could put forward that plea of hers, “I have to get things one way and another.” Amory wanted to know what Dorothy gave the world in return. She, Amory, gave her art; but Dorothy would surely hardly claim that those fashion-drawings of hers could not quite well be got along without. Therefore it was even a little sorrowfully that Amory asked Dorothy how she was getting along at the studio.

“Please don’t tread on my new Ararat!” Dorothy cried in fright. “Sorry; my fault for leaving it there.... The studio? Oh, I’m under Miss Benson, of course; it would be a shame to turn her out of a job, and Miss Umpleby would come next anyway; so I just potter along. As a matter of fact, I’m only in the studio about half my time; it’s much more fun downstairs, talking over ideas with Mr. Miller. You wouldn’t suppose, would you, Amory,” she said suddenly, both earnestly and excitedly, “that as I stand here now, filling this teapot, I’ve got an idea worth—I don’t know how much, but certainly Doubledays’ would give me a thousand for it, if Hallowells’ won’t take it, and I should want a pretty stiff contract even then?”

With her hair all rumpled by the Ararat cap and her feet in Cosimo’s old slippers she certainly did not look worth a thousand.

“Sorry I can’t tell you what it is,” she went on, setting down the teapot, thumbing a hard half-loaf and selecting a softer one. “I haven’t told Mr. Miller yet. We have to choose our time for these things; wait for the ripe moment. Wait till Hallowells’ get their last storey up and the roof on, then we’ll see. Mr. Miller thinks I’m just a person who makes a useful suggestion now and then, and I let him think so; but wait a bit. Something better than Benny’s place for me!”——

“But—but—I don’t understand. Is this fashion-drawing?” Amory asked.

“Oh, dear no!” Dorothy replied, drawing up a chair to the table. “Let it stand a minute first—stir it with a spoon.... I don’t mean fashion-drawing now. You see, Hallowells’ are going to wake London up. Mr. Miller’s pretty good at his job—waking London up—in other words, advertising, and I’m only a fashion-artist a long as there’s nothing better going. It will probably come off next Spring—depends how they get on with the building; and I’ll buy a picture from you then, Amory.”

Amory had smiled. Oh, advertisement! She had thought that Dorothy could hardly mean that she was going to make all this money out of fashion-drawing! Advertisements—those funny things that Aunt Jerry was getting! Amory smiled again.

For Aunt Jerry had lately been showing her more of them—advertisements now, not of caterers and wedding-cake makers, job-masters, and house-agents and furnishers, such as she had had at the time of her wedding, but of quite other things. Amory had thought she had never seen anything so funny—and nauseating—funny and nauseating both at once. Really, the things were an outrage! She supposed that somebody—Mr. Miller perhaps—read the top left-hand corner of the front page of the Times and Morning Post day by day, carefully counted the weeks, felt (as it were) Aunt Jerry’s pulse, asked her how she was feeling each morning, penetrated into her hidden thoughts, anticipated her desires, and then sent the things along—descriptions of layettes and perambulators, of cribs and pens and patent bottles, of foods and clothes and schemes for insurance. “Baby will Soon be Cutting his Teeth,” Mr. Miller, or whoever it was, began, whispering (so to speak) confidentially behind his hand; or “Of course if you WANT your Wee One to have Wind!”... That, Amory thought, was the funny aspect; the nauseating one came when you remembered that, properly diffused by this same means, really valuable information about Eugenics and the Chromosome might have been given to the world. That, if Aunt Jerry and Mr. Massey must have children, would have been, not immediately perhaps, but ultimately far more to the purpose. But Amory supposed it would be a waste of time to look for ultimate purposes to Dorothy. Possibly she not only devised the advertisements, but drew the layette too.

But Amory had not forgotten that she wanted Dorothy to lend her ten pounds. The minutes were passing, and no doubt Dorothy would soon be putting on the Ararat again, and going back to Oxford Street and Mr. Miller. Amory turned over this and that “opening”; none of them seemed very promising. Dorothy was already lacing up the Japhet Boots; she was going to make her advertisement a “cinch” by walking back also in the downpour. But suddenly Amory remembered her pride. There was no need for abjectness. Therefore it was with a certain offhandedness that, as Dorothy rose and stamped one Japhet boot after the other, she suddenly said, “Oh, I say, Dorothy, will you lend me ten pounds?”

It is astonishing how rich everybody else appears when we ourselves are poor. For a moment Dorothy’s eyes opened widely, then she broke into a humorous grimace.

“My dear!... Where from, I wonder?” Then she added, “Really? I mean, you really want it?”

“Yes,” said Amory shortly. She wondered whether Dorothy thought she would ask for it if she didn’t want it.

“I haven’t ten pounds in the world,” said Dorothy. Then she considered for a moment. “If it’s really urgent—I mean if you really must have it—I might—I never have yet, but I might be able to get it——” She paused.

There seemed to Amory a certain lack of delicacy in the pause. It was as if she gave Amory an opportunity of saying what she wanted the money for. Amory was sure that some day, when those poor and deserving artists should come to her, she would neither ask questions nor break off into pauses that came to the same thing. She did not deny Dorothy’s right to refuse; she did deny her any other right. If Dorothy’s fashion-drawing or advertisements or whatever it was could not provide ten pounds, then absolutely the only thing that could be said for these absurdities disappeared.

“You see, I should have to borrow it myself——” Dorothy said hesitatingly, and Amory merely hoisted her shapely shoulders.

Then, however, it seemed to strike even Dorothy that she was not behaving very well. Suddenly she said, “All right, I will borrow it; will to-morrow do?”

“I should be awfully obliged,” said Amory, helping Dorothy on with the Ararat Coat.

But Dorothy relapsed from the right attitude again immediately. Without stopping to think that the Ararat sleeve was wet and Amory dry, she suddenly passed her arm about her. She held her close, making her horridly wet, and began to say a number of the so-called sympathetic things that, when they are not impertinences, are banalities.

“I am sorry, dear,” she said. “I see how it is; of course you aren’t cut out for this sort of life. I saw that the moment I came in. Now, look here, what you ought to do would be to give Mrs. ’Ill a sum every week, and to tell her that she’s got to do you, all in, for that. Not too much, either; you can’t buy, but she can. That’s the way I do. I saw how you’d been living when I washed up; eggs and sardines and pressed beef; and you’re really run down. You ought never to have signed that contract, but I’ll tell you what you perhaps can do about that. Tell Croziers’ that you won’t go to another dealer, but that you must have leave to sell things privately, and that you’ll pay them commission just as if they’d sold them. If they won’t—well, just you sell without their permission, and let ’em sue you if they like. They won’t sue you. They can’t afford it. I’m seeing business men every day, remember, and I’m sure that’s what Mr. Miller would say. And if my thing comes off I’ll buy a picture from you next Spring. Will you promise to do that, Amory?”

Even Amory saw the sense of it, but that did not alter the fact that to all intents and purposes Dorothy was lending her money on the condition that she did as she was told with it. Not exactly that, of course, but rather indelicately like it. And she had all but told Amory that her place was disgracefully dirty and herself underfed. Amory wasn’t sure that Dorothy wasn’t simply one mass of pose. She could come here and speak her mind plainly enough, could talk in quite a grasping spirit of the money she intended to get; but Amory could imagine her with Mr. Miller—anything but plain; sly, wheedling, not helping in the emancipation of her sex at all, but actually doing all she could to rivet their chains the faster upon them; neither forgetting, nor allowing Mr. Miller to forget, that she was rather a personable young woman. Amory called it the next thing to—well, she wouldn’t say what. She would be kind, merely say that they were in opposite camps, and let it go at that.

Therefore she was not giving Dorothy one for herself, but was merely showing herself staunch to a high ideal, when she said, effusively, but still with dignity, “Oh, thank you so very, very much ... if you could possibly get me the money.... Perhaps I haven’t managed very well, but as you say, I’ve other things to think of; and about what you say about Croziers’, I hardly think——”

But Dorothy cut bluntly in. “Rubbish! They’ve just taken advantage of your ignorance and inexperience. I should tell ’em they could make kite-tails of their silly old contract! Look here, shall I see Mr. Dix for you?”

Amory hesitated. She did not want to see Mr. Dix again herself, firstly because she felt that an artist ought to be spared these sordid matters, and secondly because she always wanted to wash herself when Mr. Dix had covered her with those galantined eyes. But Dorothy was not an artist, and apparently didn’t mind a glutinous look more or less. To the coarser nature the coarser task. One didn’t chop firewood with a razor....

“What’d be the good?” she sighed. “I signed the thing.”

“Leave that to me,” said Dorothy briskly. “I’ll talk to Mr. Dix for you. At least I’ll get permission for you to sell things privately, and then you can reckon the ten pounds off the price of the picture I’ll buy—for my scheme’s bound to come off! So we’ll call that a bet. And now I must fly. Do try my plan with Mrs. ’Ill. When’s Cosimo coming back? Yes, I saw about his uncle. Good-bye, dear.... And oh, dear, now I’m forgetting the very thing I came for! You will sign that advertisement, won’t you?”

“What advertisement?” Amory asked. She had forgotten all about the Ararat Coat. But now she remembered.... “Oh, that waterproof thing! Oh, you don’t want me to sign that!”

Dorothy turned quickly. “Oh, Amory, don’t be so silly!” she broke out. “Of course it doesn’t matter a button to us whether you sign it or not, but I thought you might as well. Nobody need sign it for that matter, but we have our space, and it’s a pity to waste this rain. And I really could get you the complete outfit, boots and all. As well as getting your name before the public. But don’t if you don’t want.”

Amory lifted her shallow (but penetrating) eyes.

“Well, dear—if it were really necessary—especially after all your kindness—but as you say it isn’t—if you wouldn’t very much mind—I think my signature looks better on my pictures——”

“All right. It doesn’t matter,” said Dorothy. “I’ll let you know how I go on with Mr. Dix——”

And she was gone, once more to put the Ararat and the Japhet Boots to the test of the heaviest rainfall for eighteen years.

No sooner was her back turned than Amory, flinging aside the curtain on its little rail, lay down on her unmade bed. She had the promise of her ten pounds, but it had cost its price. It had cost it in forbearance. Still, that was no more than all the poets and seers and souls dedicated to art had had to suffer before her, and she, like them, had kept her ideal unsullied.

But she was disappointed in Dorothy.

II
A DAMSEL ERRANT

More and more as she thought it over, Amory was glad that she was not going to see Mr. Hamilton Dix again. Excepting always Cosimo, who was different, she had begun to have a poor opinion of men. And as this opinion was based, not on her reading of Association books, nor on anything Laura Beamish or Katie Deedes had told her, but on her own unshakable and inalienable experience, it is perhaps worth a moment’s examination.

By no means, then, did she now think men the efficient, capable creatures they appeared to consider themselves to be. Amory knew men; she knew two of them, no fewer. One of these two men had inveigled her into an all-but-fraudulent contract; the other, definitely fraudulently, had absconded with the funds that had provided Amory Towers with an income of a pound a week, and was not very likely ever to be heard of again. We all speak of the world as we find it. This was the world as Amory had found it; and, since the total sum of the world’s wrong and cruelty was admittedly enormous, what more natural than to try to gauge its enormousness by a process of multiplication?

Amory, sternly and deliberately setting her painting aside until she should have come to some really basic conclusion on these points, began to multiply.

And the day on which she did so was an evil day for those impostors—men. How should it not be an evil day for them? For men, who had had the world’s affairs entirely in their hands in the past, still had them almost entirely in their hands to-day; and what had they made of things? Plainly, the best system they had been able to devise was a system in which it was possible for trustees to abscond with funds entrusted to them by godmothers. And not only that. Forgetting that a real man, Blake (unhappily now dead), had said that the sight of a robin in a cage set all heaven in a rage—totally ignoring that spiritual aspect of the matter—men, when asked for redress, callously weighed the cost of prosecution and the chances of securing a conviction, shrugged their shoulders, and (in Amory’s case) apparently proposed to do nothing at all. Men, in a word, actually approved (though they pretended not to) of the organized robbery of poor girls.

Next, whether they liked it or not, men must shoulder the responsibility for a state of things that permitted iniquitous contracts to be fluttered in the face of necessitous people, and that (in effect) ground the face of the poor because he (or in the present instance she) was poor. Males, as males, could not escape the onus of Mr. Hamilton Dix. Amory might have been more merciful had they made any attempt to do so, but they did not. They spoke of such things as everyday matters of business. They said that no humanly devisable system could be perfect, and told her, with their hypocritical “niceness,” that the whole fabric of society could hardly be pulled down merely because a self-seeking individual here and there crept in and took advantage. But Amory knew that it was not a question of individuals. It was the underlying spiritual principle that was the whole point. That was radically wrong. Even men saw this, a few men, and called themselves Radicals, which was really a Latin word, meaning that they affected to go to the radix or root of the matter; but Amory knew where the root of the matter really lay. It lay in this artificial sex-distinction and in that frightfully laughable masculine theory of the “natural dominance of the male.”

But this was only a part of it, and not the finer part. It was in the finer part that the whole evil came to a head. How (to put the thing in a nutshell) did men (with the honourable exception of Cosimo and one or two others) treat art (namely, Amory’s art)? There you had it!

Here Amory was on her own ground, and could speak once more from that astonishingly useful thing, experience. How had the world, under male dominance, treated her art?... Well, Amory would be fair, even generous. There actually had been a period of a few months, a sort of lucid interval, when Mr. Hamilton Dix’s articles really had given the impression that Mr. Dix knew what he was talking about. They had been written about the time Amory had signed her contract, and had been copied by provincial papers. But oh! the downfall after that. The adulation Dix had lately been spilling over that Harris girl, who (as Amory could demonstrate, absolutely and up to the hilt) had simply stolen Amory’s own subjects and carried one or two of Amory’s own tricks of handling to simply screaming absurdities! More than once Amory had wondered whether Miss Harris let Mr. Dix kiss her.... And when Amory had pointed out the theft to Mr. Dix, and had said that in her poor opinion an action for infringement of copyright might lie (or if it mightn’t, then it ought to), had Mr. Dix done anything but ogle her and insult her with his sticky smile? Not he. He had merely asked her whether she wished to make her demonstration before a jury of matrons!... No doubt he had thought that smart, but even a fool may sometimes tell the truth by accident and unawares. A jury of matrons—that was to say an appeal to a court that did not condone embezzlement and smile at thievish contracts—was exactly what was needed. But had men, during all the centuries in which they had ruled, ever founded such a court? Were they ever likely to do so until they were absolutely driven to it? Not they! And it was probably too late now. The women had seen through them, knew their real nature. At last they had seen the thing to be the sex-war it really had been all along. Amory could have named, offhand, quite a dozen of her old companions of the McGrath who had put the whole question far more clearly than the so-called statesmen. And even among men themselves there was the clear-eyed Otto Weiniger—that notable exception.

For what had Weiniger said, if the dull world would but take the wool out of its ears and listen? Why, what but that the classification by sexes was nothing but the roughest of approximations after all? Because the chromosome didn’t actually show, illogical folk had got into the habit of saying “This is a man” and “That is a woman,” largely by force of hearing it repeated time after time. But what of the masculine qualities in woman, the feminine qualities in man? What about Cosimo’s exquisite perceptions, Amory’s own strong art? Oh no; this rough guesswork really would not do for a generation that at last, in spite of bandages and blinkers, had begun to see the light! Amory knew—by herself and Cosimo, to go no further—that the sexes did intermerge and graduate. The best women to-day had brains that pierced ruthlessly through shams (which was what brains were primarily for); and the best men were Feminist in their sympathies. No doubt it would take a little time for this truth to force its way into the Glenernes of the land. No doubt Mrs. Deschamps would continue to flirt with M. Criqui, and the unspeakable Mr. Wellcome to boast that he was wholly (not partly) the father of his own offspring and his placid wife entirely (and without qualification) their mother. But nobody on the look-out for signs of the true progress turned their eyes Glenernewards. Glenerne had never heard of the chromosome. Ten to one it would have thought it was a mechanical piano-player. That was why Amory had left Glenerne.

And how had the world treated its Weiniger—its Nietzsche—its Strindberg? “Mad as hatters,” it said, merely because they had shot themselves, or died in the madhouses to which it had driven them!

Yes (Amory thought), if that was the best the men could do, it was time the women took hold!

Hungrily, hungrily she wished Cosimo was back, so that they might discuss these things together!

But Cosimo not only remained away; he did not even write very frequently. He appeared to wait until he had received three letters from Amory, and then to “answer” them together, obviously with the letters before him. Amory understood that business in connection with his uncle’s estate detained him; he was in Shropshire: and a phrase about “running up to town presently” had read as if, even when he should come, he would go back to Shropshire again. But he had not given up his studio near the Vestry Hall; Amory knew that because he had sent her the key of it and had asked her to forward his letters; and Amory went there daily. Once she had even tried to work there, but without much success. She had hardly expected it would answer. She had only tried it because she had come to hate her own place so.

Indeed, there had been days when she had approached her easel as reluctantly as if the instrument had been a guillotine with a basket behind it to receive her severed head; and there had been other days when to contemplate the daub on the canvas had almost made her wish it had been one. For she now found her own work execrable. And yet she could not summon the courage to take a knife and scrape it out. Each afternoon she hoped it would appear better in the morning, but it never did. It seemed as if Croziers’ carrier, in fetching away those twenty-eight pictures, had taken away also whatever talent had gone to their painting. On one canvas only that she had produced since then could she bear to look, and that was neither study, sketch, nor picture. It showed the group, all red with firelight, that had sat about her hearth when Laura Beamish, with the coloured ribbons of her guitar falling about her, had sung “The Trees they do Grow High.”

She knew that the reasons for this wretched falling off lay close at hand. In the first place, she badly needed a change. Next, she was making far, far greater attempts than when she had been content to state (as it were with a “Something like this—you know—and this—you’ve seen these things”), the results of her Saturday night wanderings in the streets and of her Sunday mornings in Petticoat Lane or where the Salvation Army gathered to sing. She told herself that she had acquired knowledge more quickly than she had been able to assimilate it. Next, the lean years were always followed by the fat, the fat by the lean: it was a Law.... But she had gleams of hope too. Broadly considered, discontent was no bad sign. Only fatuity could regard its work with unvarying complacence. Despondency might not be in itself a guarantee of genius, but genius and despondency were no strangers. Her work was in a stage of transition. She was in mental and spiritual labour, and a new style would emerge. To the old one she refused to return.... And so on. The more she groped the more she read, and the more she read the more she groped. They are lucky who are merely required to love the highest when they see it: let us sorrow for those who are condemned, not only to love, but also to attempt to realize, the highest when they do not see it.

And let us sorrow especially for the artist who has no choice but to sacrifice, to the vast and thunderous things he cannot do, the frail and small and comfortable things that he can.

Amory’s refuge from herself at that time was to walk the streets until she was ready to drop with fatigue. North, south, east, and west she went, numbing herself with mechanical movement, exhausting herself with speculations that even for herself had no interest. Faces passing, passing, for ever passing, seemed to lend her a stupor; they seemed, not individuals, but aspects of one general, horrible human phenomenon. Sometimes, in this multiple beast of a crowd, her heart palpitated as the heart of a bird palpitates before a spinning, fascinating snare. Sometimes for an hour at a time she would see nothing but eyes—eyes various in shape and colour as the pebbles on a beach, sometimes looking into hers, sometimes looking past her, sometimes tipped with arrowheads of white as they turned, sometimes only to be seen under their lowered lids as a finger-nail is to be seen under the finger of a glove. She wondered how many of them, like her own, were seeing nothing but eyes too. She wondered on what pillows they closed, within what walls, behind what doors and windows, with what other eyes sealed by their sides.... And at other times she saw nothing but doors and windows. As if she had been paid to keep a catalogue of these things, she counted and classified the fanlights of Lincoln’s Inn and the Bloomsbury Squares, the high-railinged balconies of the tenements behind Victoria Street and Shaftesbury Avenue, the numbers on Soho doors, the window-boxes of Mayfair. Then there would take her the fancy that everybody she saw knew everybody else, as the bees of a hive may be supposed to know one another, and that she alone was an intruder and unknown. And for a time she rather liked that. It gave her a sense of specialness. But presently it began to frighten her a little. The specialness turned to an intolerable loneliness. Her elbows touched theirs, but they were remoter from her than the stars. If she could have stopped one of them and asked it what name it bore it would have been rather a relief; to know even a name would have been something; it would have helped in that frightening blankness, and she would have been quite willing to tell her own name in return. But she knew nothing about them—nothing, nothing. Even their sex (if Weiniger was to be believed) was a matter of presumption. Of course some had beards and some had not, but that was a shallow, superficial view. No doubt with the advance of knowledge (she fancied Galton had said something of the sort) beards might be bred on every face, or bred out of existence entirely. Amory hoped the latter. Mr. Jowett, at the McGrath (she remembered), had once lifted his moustache to show her the growth and construction of the ornament, and it had not struck her as a pretty sight; and she could not have endured Cosimo with a beard. It would have been a contradiction of all she found most sympathetic in Cosimo. That nice, friendly other girl Amory was ready to choose for Cosimo should certainly not be a girl who would allow Cosimo to grow a beard....

Amory went into Cosimo’s studio one night, after a long walk through Wandsworth, past Clapham Common, and back through the Old Town to the bus at Victoria, in order to see whether there were any letters for him. There were none, and she sat down on the edge of his bed, where she had sat that morning when she had come to tell Cosimo that she was moving into Cheyne Walk at once. Cosimo’s studio was on the ground floor, at the back of a block. Amory had not lighted the gas. Somewhere away across a yard somebody was going to bed with a blind up, and the distant incandescent shed a raw ugly light. It shone through a narrow side-window of Cosimo’s studio, making quite a bright patch on the floor at the foot of his bed. Amory watched it dully, trying to summon up force to get up and go home.

Aching as she was for Cosimo’s return, she was still a little displeased with him. To be sure, he told her, in those rather perfunctory letters, how horribly he missed her, but somehow she did not feel that his sense of loss was quite as great as her own. She resented his staying so long away. It hardly rose to her conception of their past beautiful friendship. Of course his uncle was dead, but his uncle would still be dead if Cosimo stayed away another couple of months, making four in all, and Amory still waiting and waiting.... Well, he mustn’t think that she was going to ask him to come back, though he never returned at all. She would continue to forward his letters, adding a patient little note of her own once in a while. Indeed, had it not been that Cosimo understood her art, she would hardly have done as much as that for him....

Then, still sitting on the edge of Cosimo’s deserted bed, she remembered the richly comical interpretation that Dorothy and the plumber, the chimney-sweep and Glenerne, had put upon Cosimo’s wellnigh perfect understanding of her art. And that recollection led to another—that of the “stage-kiss” Cosimo had given her when Mr. Wellcome had thrust them into one another’s arms. She remembered that she had been—she hardly knew how to put it—say a little disappointed in Cosimo about that. Hitherto she had not asked herself the reason of this, but she thought she saw it now. Cosimo, for once, had not done the proper thing at all. The proper way to fool those inquisitive, stupid people to the top of their bent would have been to give her a real kiss, not a mock one. As likely as not that clumsy caress had seemed the shyness of a real lover. No; the proper way to throw dust in their eyes would have been to take her face deliberately between his hands, turn it up, and plant the ridiculous emblem fairly and squarely on her mouth. Then, when they had found themselves alone again, they could have laughed together at Glenerne and its folly. Cosimo had not played the game.

And she felt the slight disappointment in him that night especially, for, reaching North Side an hour or two before, she had suddenly left the pavement and struck across the Common towards the “Plough.” It was a coldish night, and not, from the point of view of the phenomena she had passed on the Common, to be compared with any warm evening in the Spring; nevertheless she had seen enough to give an exquisitely ironical point to this obsession of bodily contacts that seemed to engage the world. Simply, they had been kissing everywhere, and Cosimo certainly ought to have been there to exchange with her humorous Olympian comments on the screaming absurdity of it all. Perhaps—Amory was not sure—but perhaps, merely as part of the general joke—as a sort of recognition of their surroundings—a sort of politeness (if you cared to put it in that way)—as a doing in Rome as Rome does, and on Clapham Common as Clapham Common does, Amory might have let him kiss her too.... And then they would have come back here or to Cheyne Walk, to laugh together as he cleared supper away and she braided her inordinate hair. To taste the full savour of folly you yourself must have been a fool too—just once. Perhaps—Amory was not quite certain—it was a Law....

But Cosimo had not been a fool even once....

But Amory was almost too fagged out even for resentment. She could only weakly wish, as she rested her aching back on Cosimo’s bed, that even with his few imperfections he was there. For one thing, twice that very night she had been frightened on the Common by the approach of men. Hating herself for doing anything so unmasculine, she had clutched her skirts and almost made a run for it. To the turning heads of women in the streets, who apparently found something amusing in her demonstratively serviceable Portia hat and her obviously sensible square-toed, flat-heeled shoes, she had long been accustomed; but such alarms as she had felt when Mr. Jowett had turned up his moustache to show the growth of it were only the beginning of her instinctive shrinkings from the rough physique of men. They were not Antinöuses on Clapham Common. She preferred masculinity sublimated, so to speak—purified by the processes of art. Anything else—a caress of Cosimo’s, for example—would have owed its bearableness largely to the philosophic or ironic meaning behind.

She continued to wish that Cosimo was there. Then they would have talked quite a lot about those things.

She had not noticed that the glaring incandescent across the yard had been extinguished and that the studio was now pitch-dark. She wished that before he had left Cosimo had not removed the linen cases from his pillows; the striped ticking tickled her cheek. But she was too tired to move. Some time ago a clock had struck a quarter-past something; a quarter-past eleven she supposed; she decided that when it struck half-past she would get up. That would not be for five minutes yet. She closed her eyes.

She did not immediately realize what it was that caused her to open them again when she did. She only knew that some sound had caused her alarm, and that, a moment later, she was sitting up with a fluttering heart on Cosimo’s bed. She would have called out, but suddenly, at a repetition of the sound, she dared not. Nor dared she move. She put her hand to her breast. Her tiny face had gone white.

Somebody was fumbling softly at the door.

Never in her life had Amory fainted, but she wellnigh did so now. She knew that there were other men in this block of studios; had she been observed to come in and not seen to depart again? It was possible, and burglars also were possible. Instantaneously it had flashed into her mind that the latch was an ordinary one and that it had closed of itself behind her—she remembered to have heard its click—otherwise she would have been defenceless. Terror seized her. It was not her own restraint that prevented her from giving a shrill scream. She had no voice with which to scream....

Then suddenly whoever was at the door was heard to depart again. As the sound of steps died away Amory fell back on Cosimo’s bed.

And as she dared not go out, there was nothing for her to do but to remain where she was.

She simply dared not go out now.

So she lay, hardly closing her eyes once, until the side window became a leaden oblong. Then, slowly and laggardly, Cosimo’s chest of drawers, his washstand, his little bureau, and his row of boots crept into dim shape out of the shadows. The sheet over his arm-chair ceased to be a grey crouching figure, the easel with the duster over it to be a criminal hanging in chains. Soon the milk-carts would be coming round, and the postman——

But she would not wait to see whether any letters came for him——

Cold and stiff, at last she rose. Her feet were leaden, and she neither knew nor cared what anybody might think who saw her coming out into the street at that hour of the morning. She groped for the latch of the front door, and closed the door behind her. Ten minutes later she reached her own studio, dead-beat.

But there, too, somebody—the same somebody—awaited her. She had cast herself wearily into the low window-seat and was watching the sullen day-break over the river, when from behind the curtain that enscreened her bed there came a creak and a heavy sigh. For all her fatigue she sprang up as a skip-jack springs up when its piece of cobbler’s wax yields. It could only be one person.

She ran across the room and flung the curtain aside.

At the same moment Cosimo opened his eyes.

“Urro!” he grunted.

Then he sat sluggishly up.

“Hullo! It’s you. Wherever have you been?” he muttered.

“However did you get in here?” Amory demanded almost sharply.

“Put my hand through that stupid old door and slipped the latch, of course. You ought to get that door seen to, Amory; anybody could get in. But where on earth have you been all night? I came for my key, and then went to my place to see if you were there—went twice, in fact—but I thought you’d be coming in, so I waited and went to sleep. What time is it? By jove, it’s cold.”

Cosimo had lain down dressed on her bed, but his hair—this was the first thing Amory noticed about him—was less disarranged than it might have been. It no longer clung about his head in tendrils. He had had it cut quite short. But Amory did not comment upon the change. She had come to a sudden resolution. She did not intend to tell Cosimo that she had spent the night lying on his bed. So when presently he asked her again where she had been she assumed a brightness that, haggard as it was, was still a feat when her exhaustion was considered. She laughed.

“Oh, I’ve been out looking for subjects. I’ve found one—a ripper—Covent Garden Market. But oh, I’m so tired!”

“But surely you haven’t been there all night, my dear girl?” Cosimo expostulated.

“There and other places. Why not?... Do be an angel and light the fire, Cosimo.”

And as Cosimo rose, stretched himself, and took off his coat, she stole a covert look at his cut hair again. It seemed to her to be not impossible that that might be an index of other changes also.

III
“BUSINESS AS USUAL”

Valuable as were the qualities that had placed Dorothy’s friend, Mr. Miller, high in the estimation of Hallowells’, they entailed one defect that was more valuable than all of them put together. Resolution, hard work, and singleness of purpose had given him an enviable position in the most humorous job of the age; but these would have availed him comparatively little had there not been in that part of him where his sense of humour should have resided, a void that approached as near to a vacuum as nature permits. It was to that void that Mr. Miller really owed his success.

For you simply cannot do these things with your tongue in your cheek. Had Mr. Miller not been able to make, with perfect belief in them, statements that anybody else would have had to laugh in the middle of, he would not have been the Man of Ideas he was. In the ordinary run of his business smart young men came to Mr. Miller with notions and devices for this and that; he bought them, paid for them at the current rates, merely because he had to have them; but they were not what he really wanted. What he really wanted let him explain for himself.

The moment you were shown into his room you were aware that you were in the presence of no funny man. Suppose you had the good fortune not to be “turned down” at once as a mere “smartie,” Mr. Miller would take trouble with you. He would frankly admit that he and his fellows had only themselves to thank for the disrepute into which their craft had fallen; and bold would have been the advertising freebooter or mere space-broker who had held up his head before Mr. Miller’s righteous anger.

“We’ve overdone it,” he would sorrowfully admit. “We want noo blood—noo blood, noo idees, and belief in the reel dignity of our work. If you’ve got them, sit right down and let’s have a look at them; if you haven’t, you’re a busy man and so am I, and I keep my door plain inside and pretty in the passage where it looks best from. Now show.”

Let us assume that you showed and that Mr. Miller found you worth still more trouble. He might then address you as follows:—

“Too smart. Smartness took the full count the fall before last; we’re pushing these funny stunts underground where they belong. And that other idee—too noisy. Shouting don’t go any more to-day. N. G.—— Now you’re an Englishman, and cann’t be expected to see these things in their reel perspective; but you’ve assets right here in this country without these vodeville acts. It ain’t my business to put you wise, but I’ll tell you this: neither noise nor smartness is good enough for Hallowell and Smiths’. Look out o’ that window. You see that edifice. That edifice isn’t going up to be run like the one next door to it. It’s a noo edifice, and it’s going to be run on noo methods. You think your methods are noo. You think again. You think quite a lot. Then when it’s hit you good and hard, ring me up and I’ll make another date with you. You got the right look, and there might be business done between you and I yet. The door closes itself. If you hear a hiss that ain’t me, but the piston. I hope you found the elevator-man courteous in his manner. You did? That’s one of the things there’s going to be at Hallowells’—etiquette. But unobtroosive. Not sticking out a foot on each side. You didn’t observe it sticking out, did you? So. Good morning.”

Mr. Miller had looked up in an etymological dictionary the meaning of the word “gospel,” and had found that it meant “good tidings”; and that, he said, was exactly what advertisement meant too. He had looked up other words also—Valour, Hero, Dignity, Gentleman—and he was for restoring their dimmed lustre. And since he saw things in their true perspective, he saw also the only way in which that could be done. To cut the cackle and come (like Mr. Wellcome) to the horses, he proposed to do it by a putting of the founts of honour to purposes of irrigation. Commerce had vulgarized itself; dignity must therefore be restored to it from where dignity was to be had in quantities sufficient if necessary to throw at the birds—from above. One day Mr. Miller, passing a more than usually ingenious advertisement in a shop window, had stated his point of view in twenty words. “Look at that!” he had exclaimed to his companion. “Now I say the man who invented that was a live wire. He connects. You feel the man. But what does the British public know about him? If he’d rescued a comrade under fire he’d have got your V.C. for it, and everybody’d have known all there was to him; but you stop a hundred people on this sidewalk and ask ’em his name, and if a single one of ’em can tell you then the drinks are on me!”

It is true that Mr. Miller did not say that he wanted the Cross bestowed (as it were) For Value instead of For Valour, but that was the direction in which his thoughts strayed. Before his perspective had become quite so clear he had tried to get permission for the Royal Standard to float over Hallowells’ new premises (the Union Jack having become common trade property, and so of no more value to one emporium than to another); and though he had failed, it was still better to have failed in such an attempt than to have succeeded in the funny stunts that had been pushed underground the fall before last. It remained an ideal for commerce to lift up its eyes to.

In the business sense, though in none other, Mr. Miller had paid a good deal of court to Dorothy Lennard—or perhaps less at first to Dorothy than to Lady Tasker’s niece. Nominally Dorothy was still “third hand” in the fashion studio; but Miss Benson had been wise enough to leave her free to do pretty much as she liked (without that freedom the studio would never have got Hallowells’ catalogue, nor have become what to all intents and purposes it now was—one of Hallowells’ departments), and Dorothy’s intimacy with Mr. Miller had ripened quickly after the famous buying of Glenister’s picture, “Sir Walter and the Cloak,” at the Academy more than a year before. Dorothy had gone round the Exhibition with Mr. Miller, and had seen him stop long before the picture and presently return to it.

“Now that’s what I call a picture, Miss Lennard,” he had said at last. “A reel thoughtful bit of art. I don’t care whether you call it pre-Raphaelite or whatever you call it—you as a lady-artist can put it all over me there—but speaking as a plain man of business I say that picture just appeals to me. It calls me. I feel it. It’s got meaning. There’s your Raleigh, look. And there’s your Queen Bess. And I ask you to observe the chivalrous spirit of it. That’s the reel old-world English courtesy. That’s the thing that hasn’t got to be let die. Hallowells’ has got to pitch its key up to that. It’s got to be as if there was a puddle in front of the Grand Entrance every day, and every lady-shopper was a Queen, and Hallowells’ was”—Mr. Miller had made a low, sweeping gesture with both his arms—“spreading its Cloak. That’s the deportment I want for our Hosts. Where do they keep the Sales Department here?”

And, that an object-lesson should be ever before his Departmental Hosts’ eyes, Mr. Miller had bought the picture.

How Hallowells’ had contrived, during the past two years, with an army of painters and gilders, carpenters and shopfitters, plasterers and electricians and inspectors and engineers swarming all over the place, that business should be “carried on as usual during rebuilding” was nothing short of a modern miracle; but so it had been. And the gradual rising of the visible edifice had been accompanied, course by course and tier by tier, by bright palatial uprearings in Mr. Miller’s busy brain. If the weather should hold for another month, all was expected to be ready for the Grand Inauguration in the spring; and even if the weather did not hold, the impression had somehow got about that the weather must be a mightier power even than had been supposed to be able to postpone an event of such magnitude.... But all this is ancient history now. London knows its Hallowells’ and the wonders that the man who held its Portfolio of Publicity (for surely he was entitled to a seat in the Cabinet of the World’s Commerce) called forth. It has accepted the Hallowell touch. It knows that its shopwalkers rank as Marshals and its head-salesmen as Hosts. It knows that the employé who would win his spurs at Hallowells’ must fast and keep his vigil before the picture of Sir Walter and the Cloak. The funny stunt has taken the full count. Mr. Miller has corrected the perspective of things.... Therefore pass we on to how Dorothy Lennard had now and then a voice in certain of the tertiary wonders of the organization and how into the vast complexity she had contrived to drag the name of Mr. Hamilton Dix.

Mr. Dix had come into the concern over the pictorial advertising. Of Dorothy as an ex-student of the McGrath Mr. Miller had presently come to think almost as much as he did of Dorothy the niece of Lady Tasker; and he had taken her word about Mr. Dix. “Couldn’t your posters and things be made somehow a bit more—important?” Dorothy had suggested one day. “Tell me how,” Mr. Miller had instantly replied—“tell us how; you’ve grasped the idee! You don’t suppose we could enlist the patronage of our president of the Royal Academy, do you?” (Mr. Miller had lately begun to speak of “our” Royal Standard and “our” House of Peers.) Thereupon Dorothy had given a light, rapid sketch of Sir Edward Pointer, not so much disdaining as debarred by his official position from superintending Hallowells’ pictorial advertising; and she had suggested Mr. Hamilton Dix instead. “Is he a live wire?” Mr. Miller had demanded. “No push about him, I mean, no noise, not always forcing himself forward, but the reel solid dignity? If he ain’t excloosive and hard to get, he’s no good to us! He ain’t a ‘Sir,’ is he?”

“No.”

“Nor an ‘Honourable,’ with a ‘u’ in it?”

“No, he’s just plain Mr. Dix.”

“And what place does he take among our critics of art? Is he a one-cent paper man or two cents? I ain’t calling your friend down at all, Miss Lennard, but we can’t afford any but what he’s the very top-tip-top.”

“I think he’d do really well.”

“Then let him name his figure and buy him in.... And now tell me what’s the difficulty about Mr. Stanhope Tasker.”

For a moment Dorothy’s composure was a little shaken. She smiled and blushed both at once. Mr. Stanhope Tasker was her second cousin, and Mr. Miller’s next words explained how Lady Tasker’s nephew had come to be at Hallowells’.

“I hope he ain’t afraid he won’t be able to hold the job down. Between you and I, Miss Lennard, it don’t matter a rusty nail whether he do or he don’t. He’s here to look good; if he does that he fills the bill from A to Zee. Why, walking up our Bond Street only this morning brought it home to me good and hard. ‘Here they are,’ says I, ‘ten of ’em in as many minutes, the reel high-grade goods, with centuries of blue blood in the very way they wear their pantaloons—Sir Walters from ’way back, all with their names spelt one way and pronounced another—the genu-i-ne all-wool article; but can I get ’em? I cann’t. And that’s what Mr. Stan is, if I might call him that without familiarity. Now just you tell me, Miss Lennard, what’s the bother?”

Again Dorothy had bitten her lip, grown pink, and laughed. “Leave him to me. I’ll keep him for you if I can.”

“But great snakes (pardon me) what do these gentlemen want? They fix their own honorarium (has that got a ‘u’ in it?)—a captain in our army don’t get as much by a half—we don’t ask ’em to get shot—they don’t handle goods—they just stand around—it would cipher out at a dollar a smile and a few ‘This way pleases’—and the rank of marshal.”

“But you just said that if they weren’t hard to get they were no good to you.”

“Hard—hard’s the word! That’s a fact! But we got to have ’em. Selling ladies’ goods has got to be made just as noble as killing their husbands and sweethearts on a field of battle. It is as noble. In a properly organized community there ought to be a Distinguished Salesmanship Order just as there’s a Distinguished Service Order for our military classes. And Mr. Stan’s only asked to graduate for the Distinguished Smiling Order, if I may take the liberty of saying so.”

“Well, perhaps he’ll do better after the Inauguration.”

“You think that?” Mr. Miller had questioned eagerly. “You think he’ll be all right on the night, so to say? Well now, if I thought that it would be a weight off my mind. I hope you’ll assist me, Miss Lennard. And thank you very much for your assistance about Mr. Dix. It’s a fact that if these people were easy to get everybody’d be getting ’em. Pardon me, after you——”

And they had parted, but not before Dorothy had wondered whether Mr. Miller’s intelligent look, when he had asked her to help him in the difficulty with Mr. Stan, had meant anything.

If you had asked Dorothy Lennard how it was that her Cousin Stanhope had come to find himself at Hallowell and Smiths’, she would probably have answered you only half candidly. You would have had to guess (as the chances were that Mr. Miller had guessed) the rest. Poor Stan, she would have told you, so far frankly, was a perfect darling, but he had no brains. Successively he had been ploughed for the army, had tried six months in the city, had spent a year in Canada, three months in a motor works, two months more in hawking from club to club a really brilliant idea for a weekly comic paper, and finally, when at the end of every natural asset he possessed, saving only his good looks, had come upon a piece of Mr. Miller’s own publicity—a column article in an evening paper on “The Disappearance of the Slur of Trade.” Stan had been much impressed by the new field thus thrown open. Chancing to meet Dorothy at about that time, for the first time since they had been children, he had spoken of the new opening, and Dorothy had offered there and then to introduce him to the writer of the article. From the first moment Stanhope had shown a willingness to be introduced to anybody whomsoever by Dorothy; and perhaps Mr. Miller had less hope than Dorothy supposed that Mr. Stan now hung about the premises for any reason at all except that Dorothy was to be seen there.... It was a case of love among the ruins, or whatever the upset may be called that is the result, not of demolition, but of rebuilding; and now, when the two were not meeting one another in halls full of trestles and plasterers’ buckets or on passages down which they had to retreat as counters and glass screens and heavy fittings came along, Dorothy, in Miss Benson’s absence, was fighting with Miss Umpleby for possession of the telephone, and talking with the bewildered marshal through a hundred and fifty yards of party-wall and fireproof floor, ceilings and lift-wells and cornices and plate-glass.... Unless an aunt or somebody died, Dorothy supposed that when they got married she would have to keep him.

Having decided that Mr. Miller’s solemn articles on the “Art of the Poster” and the “Academy of the Hoardings” might as well be written by Mr. Hamilton Dix as by anybody else, Dorothy Lennard was not such a fool as to receive that handy critic in the fashion studio on the upper floor. Instead she asked Mr. Miller when he would be out, and borrowed his office—his fourth office since the building had been in progress, and, though not yet his permanent one, still an oasis of upholstery and quietness in a waste of concrete and ladders and new paint and half-hung walls. She also ordered cut flowers, whisky and soda, and tea. She had not forgotten her promise to Amory, that she would, if it was possible, obtain some mitigation of the Crozier contract.

Mr. Dix, for his part, accustomed to shedding the lustre of his name at ordinary space rates, was prepared to be as lustrous as anybody liked when money was flowing as it flowed about the new Hallowells’. He knocked at the door that was plain inside but ornamental without at four o’clock of a Friday afternoon early in January, and Dorothy had all in readiness for him. Before showing Mr. Dix the proofs of the posters on which for many months past Hallowells’ had been spending money like water (they were bound together at the top edge and set, like a huge book of wallpaper patterns, on a special easel so as to be conveniently turned over), she gave him an outline of the general scheme and the part it was hoped he would consent to play in it; and from the outset Mr. Dix liked this young woman’s attitude. For Croziers’ he was not much more than a pen; at Hallowells’, if the bashful and deferential manner in which he found himself received meant anything, he would be a Berenson or a Cavalcaselle at the very least, and really well paid for it at that. She was a comely young woman, too, and appeared to know what she was talking about.... Ah! She had been at the McGrath! (Dorothy had negligently dropped the name of Toulouse-Lautrec.) That explained it! Mr. Dix had thought she spoke with some inside knowledge! A good school, the McGrath. Mr. Dix knew Professor Jowett quite well: a capable master, very, but shockingly given over to a habit of cynicism, especially about the poor critics. By the way, had Miss Lennard ever known a Miss Towers there?...

Dorothy had only mentioned the McGrath in order to give Mr. Dix an opportunity of mentioning Miss Towers; but Miss Towers could wait a bit. It would be better to get Mr. Dix to commit himself to magnanimous generalities before coming to a specific case. Therefore as she gave him tea she told him how lucky Hallowells’ thought themselves to be able to get his services. When (she said) Mr. Miller had first asked her whether she thought he would be approachable about mere posters she had shaken her head; but now that she had seen him (Dorothy slowly lifted her great blue eyes) she was glad she had asked him. Wasn’t it odd, how afraid you were of the pretentious and mediocre people, and not at all of the really big men? (At this point Mr. Dix had begun really to bask.) But of course nothing but the best was good enough for Hallowells’. Not (she went on) that they pretended for a moment to be anything but tradespeople, with no views on art at all; but they did believe this, that while an inferior writer might seem to be just as good, only one thing really paid the best, and that was—the best. That was why they had sent for Mr. Dix. They wanted the incorruptible man. As for what Mr. Dix would see fit to do now that they had got him, that rested entirely with Mr. Dix. It was not for Hallowells’ to say what they wanted, but for Mr. Dix to give them what he thought best for them. And as for the posters themselves....

“But suppose we look at them,” said Dorothy.

They looked at the posters, and Dorothy gave Mr. Dix a whisky and soda and a cigar. And at that point the curtain went down, so to speak, on the first act. Mr. Dix declined for the moment to commit himself; with an hour or two in which to think the matter over he might (he said) be able to come to a conclusion. He understood that time pressed; it was half-past five now. Could—could Miss Lennard possibly dine with him at eight o’clock? He might perhaps say at once that he thought the subject a fascinating one. As Miss Lennard had so truly said, only the mediocre mind thought these things beneath its dignity; in fact—— But if Miss Lennard would give him the pleasure, they could talk about that later. She would? That was charming of her. He would be round with a taxi, then, at twenty minutes to eight.

For the second time the scene was set in the Trocadero Grill. Mr. Dix pointed out that the decoration, garish in detail, nevertheless took its place in the ensemble; and Dorothy’s eyes widened, and she said that she hoped he would say that, in those very words, in one of his articles—she had thought that very thing so many times herself, but had lacked the knowledge to express it: she supposed that was where the genius came in. Didn’t Mr. Dix think (she wanted to know) that genius was just that—the power of expressing what everybody had thought in terms they had never thought of? Given genius as a text, he is a poor critic who cannot talk for an hour without a break; and, as Mr. Dix slowly consumed liqueur brandy as he talked, Dorothy became very beautiful to him. He became tender, not to say mushy. He vowed that the sentimental point of view was something to be proud, not ashamed, of. He spoke of the struggles of poor artists, of the temptations that beset poor critics when they were asked to sell the truth for gold; and Dorothy said that it must be awful, but that it would be a comfort to her thenceforward, whenever she heard such dreadful tales, to know that one man at least understood. Was the Miss Towers of whom he had spoken one of those unfortunate ones? She had heard (she said) of a Mr. Towers, a painter, but that could not be the same....

“The same—the very same!” Mr. Dix laughed, while the curls shook on his head; and he told the story of his early mistake....

“And she has actually signed a contract with these hard-hearted dealers, whoever they are, and can’t sell her own work?” Dorothy sighed meltingly. “Poor thing! And can nothing be done to help her?”

“What a large soft heart you have, Miss Lennard!” murmured Mr. Dix, squegeeing her, so to speak, with his gelatinous eyes; they really might have been of the same substance as printing-machine rollers.

“Poor child!” Dorothy sighed compassionately. “Really, I feel like going round and seeing these horrible people myself! They couldn’t eat me, could they?”

Mr. Dix looked as if he could have eaten Miss Lennard, without sugar.

“Poor dear! But, I’m sure they couldn’t resist you, Mr. Dix—not if you said the beautiful things to them you’ve been saying to me——”

If they could, they could have done more than Mr. Dix could Dorothy.

“Do help the poor child!” Dorothy pleaded. “Half the trouble in the world seems to me to come of goodness and power being in the wrong hands, Mr. Dix.”...

Again she lifted the large baby eyes....

“I’m sure you will....”

And the worst feature about the whole immoral transaction was that she did not ask, but conferred a favour—the favour of showing Mr. Hamilton Dix what a sympathetic, chivalrous, and large-hearted person Mr. Hamilton Dix could be.

IV
“IL FAUT QU’ UNE PORTE—”

Now that Cosimo was back in town again for the second time (he had stayed a week the first time, and had then departed again for Christmas, coming back the first week in the New Year) his manner puzzled Amory a little. Sometimes he seemed changed, sometimes (barring the hair) exactly as before. Sometimes he told Amory all about his business, and sometimes seemed more than ordinarily interested in hers—almost as if he had her a little on his mind and would have liked to be rid of some responsibility. Then, hardly more than three weeks after the previous cutting, he got his hair cut again. It was cooler so, he said—this on a distinctly raw January day.

The cutting altered his appearance surprisingly. Amory thought the change very much for the worse. The tendrilled clusters had “massed” so beautifully before; she had sometimes given them a light touch or two with her fingers, taking an æsthetic delight in the way they “came.” He had reminded her a little of the Antinöus. But now he reminded her of nothing save of a young human animal of the opposite sex. He wore starched white collars too, and went about in a hat.... On the other hand, he mended Amory’s door so that it was no longer possible to intrude a hand and to slip the latch. It wasn’t the thing, he said. What did it matter? Amory asked; but Cosimo only replied that he didn’t like the idea at all.

The door, however, gave way again; and this time Cosimo made a thorough job of it, taking it from its hinges and laying it on the floor while he screwed a stout batten on the back that remedied its warping once for all. This was late on a Saturday evening; in order to bring the bent door flush with the batten Amory had to sit down on one end of it; and the lamp stood on the floor between them as Cosimo, kneeling, screwed. The lamp was not so near, however, as to be a source of danger if Amory (as she had so often done before) took down her hair. She did take it down. Cosimo, the top of his cropped head turned to Amory, continued to screw.

“There!” he said at last. “I think that’ll make you safe, Amory.”

“Thanks most awfully, Cosimo,” Amory replied quietly.

“I’ve intended to do that ever since that night you were out at Covent Garden,” Cosimo continued. “If I could have got in, anybody else could, of course. Anyway, you’re all right now. You can get up.”

“Thanks,” said Amory again.... “I’m sure I don’t know what I’m safe from,” she added. “Jellies’ young man might burgle me, I suppose; but he’s ‘in’ again.”

“No! Really?” said Cosimo, so eagerly that Amory wondered whether he was glad to change the subject. “I say! What is it this time?”

“Oh, they found no fewer than ten bicycles in his place, all bright green, newly enamelled. And he isn’t a cycle dealer. I suppose they drew conclusions.”

“By Jove!” Cosimo exclaimed. “When was that?”...

Amory was quite sure that that too was part of the change in Cosimo. He wanted to be on a topic that was—like the mended door—“safe.” He had risen on his knees and straightened his back; Amory had thought he was about to rise altogether; but she herself did not move, and he sat down again, cross-legged, on the other end of the door. He asked further questions about Jellies, Orris, and the ten bicycles. Amory, shaking back her thick, raw-gold mane, answered him quite freely; and then Cosimo returned to the subject of the door again.

“It ought to have new hinges too, really,” he grunted, “but I suppose it’s too late to get them to-night. Look how rusty that one is.”

Amory leaned forward, and together they inspected the hinge. Then she gave a little laugh. It was almost a reckless little laugh.

“Oh, it will do,” she said lightly. “I shouldn’t bother about it. Leave it till to-morrow. You can just prop it up for to-night.”

“Prop it up!” repeated Cosimo. “Oh no. Wouldn’t do at all.”

Then, all at once, apparently, Amory saw. She laughed again.

“Oh!... Good gracious, Cosimo, how ridiculous you are! Why, I thought you were joking at first! As if anybody but you ever came up here nowadays—and even you only once in awhile!” Then, with another reckless little laugh, she added, “Why, what difference could a door make?”

“A good deal, or else why have ’em?” Cosimo retorted. He did not seem comfortable.

“Quite so: why?” Amory replied. “What a strange idea! Really, I never knew you confuse Accidentals and Essentials so before! Why, if a person’s made up his mind to do a thing, how will a door stop it? And if it won’t, why a door? You know as well as I do that these things happen within ourselves. Besides, I thought we’d arrived at our conclusions.”

“Of course, so we have,” said Cosimo apologetically. “I know we’ve got quite down to fundamentals. Still, there’s no actual harm in having a hinge.”

Amory shook her head slowly. The lamp on the floor shone tiny in either brook-brown eye. Somehow Cosimo felt as uncomfortable as a guilty dog under those eyes.

“You’ve changed, Cosimo,” she said. “Something’s changed you.... Why,” she suddenly made a soft little appeal and held out both hands—“why don’t you tell me what it is?”

Cosimo appeared not to notice her hands. His own fumbled with a screw.

“I haven’t changed, Amory, really—really I haven’t,” he protested.

“You have, Cosimo,” Amory replied, her head critically a little on one side. “You mayn’t know it, but you’re becoming—ordinary.”

“Oh!” Cosimo broke out, revolted. “Ordinary—Cosimo!——”

“I’m not reproaching you,” Amory continued. “I suppose that if you examine it, it’s nothing to be ashamed of—I mean that ‘ashamed’ isn’t quite the word. But words are only symbols after all; it’s the thing that matters.”

“Of course,” Cosimo agreed quickly. “You don’t think I’ve changed my mind about that, I hope, Amory? We came to the conclusion that words were only symbols years ago.”

But again Amory made her tender little appeal. Her fingers touched Cosimo’s hand lightly for a moment.

“Won’t you tell me, Cosimo? You see, it’s purely a matter of our intellectual identity. That’s been such a beautiful thing. Hasn’t it been a beautiful thing?” The fingers rested on his hand.

“Don’t say ‘been,’ Amory—it is,” Cosimo interrupted.

“Such a precious thing. Isn’t it Emerson who says that at bottom all friendship is based on equality of intellectual understanding? It’s a mingling of minds, Cosimo. When we use the same words we mean the same things by them, and—oh, how rare that is! Of course, I know your uncle’s dead, and that may have upset you, and you’ve all sorts of business about property and so on on your mind, but I can’t believe that accounts for all of it. I know you too well, you see! Or is it”—she gave a little start, as at a quite new surmise—“I don’t believe it can be, but is it—that you find me changed?”

Cosimo protested that Amory had not changed in the least. Neither of them had changed. A person might change from prejudice and intolerance to the larger view, but nobody in their senses thought of changing back again.

“Because if we have, either of us,” Amory continued, looking fearlessly before her, “I think we ought to face the fact. There can’t be two opinions about that. Whatever else we do, Cosimo, don’t let’s muddle. I simply couldn’t bear to sloven along, keeping up a pretence of friendship that was simply an intellectual hypocrisy. Either we still think the same about the great basic facts of Life, or we don’t; but don’t in either case let’s be cowards about it. If I’m to go forward alone, I’d much, much rather know it. No doubt it’ll be strange at first, but I shall get used to it, I suppose.”

She might have found it a little difficult to tell Cosimo exactly what it was she was so brave about, but unflinchingly brave about something she certainly seemed to be. With both hands she cast back her hair, showing her dauntless brow; her chin was held high above the bluebell-stalk of a throat, the lids were dropped over the shallow, gold-flecked eyes. As if she saw before her the bleak prospect of years to come without the intellectual companionship of Cosimo, the corners of her mouth gave a momentary twitch, but were instantly courageous again; and she reopened the eyes. They were full of sorrow and resolve. Cosimo had changed....

“Amory,” he pleaded, “don’t look like that.” This time he touched her hand.

“Like what?” she asked, without emotion.

“As if—it’s so ridiculous—as if it wasn’t all your fancy. You’re a bit run down, that’s all that’s the matter with you.”

“I have felt better,” she admitted, closing the eyes again and passing her finger-tips over the lids.

“Look here—can I get you something—knock a chemist up or anything?”

“No, thank you, Cosimo.”

“But—but—I’m really worried about you, dear——”

“You mustn’t worry, Cosimo. These things have to be faced.”

“But, my dear girl!... What things? I assure you it’s pure fancy! Look here,” he said resolutely, “tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself this past week, and I’ll bet I can tell you what’s the matter with you! In the first place, have you had proper meals?”

“All I wanted, thank you.”

“That means eggs, I expect. You haven’t a headache, have you?”

“Only quite a slight one. No, please don’t brush my hair; if you wouldn’t mind getting me a drink of water instead——”

“But,” said Cosimo presently, bending solicitously over her with the water he had fetched, “I used to be able to stroke your headaches away. Do let me try——”

“No, thank you so awfully much, Cosimo—I don’t think it would do this one any good—and I really think you ought to be going now. I shall go to bed.”

“Is it made?”

“I don’t know. Would you mind giving me a hand up? I expect I shall be all right again in the morning——”

He helped her weary but enduring form to the curtained corner where the bed lay. Then he looked anxiously at her. He stood irresolute.

“I’ll put you a jug of water by your side, shall I?”

“Yes, please, and Tchekoff—the little book there——”

“Oh, come, reading in bed’s the very worst thing you can do!”

“Perhaps Tchekoff’ll buck me up. He is stimulating. You haven’t read him? You should. I feel I need him to-night. Thank Heaven, one can always have the companionship of these men through their works.... When are you going away again? I suppose you’ll be giving up the studio in March? I shall go out for a long walk to-morrow by myself. I’ll prop the door up after you, but it really didn’t matter; there’s nothing anybody would come for. Thank you so much for mending it, though, and for the glass of water. I’m quite all right now. Good night, Cosimo——”

She had crossed the floor again. They held the tottering door up between them. “Stupid not to have waited till Monday,” Cosimo was muttering; “look here, shall I try to fix it up again as it was? Afraid the screwholes wouldn’t hold, though; they’ll have to be plugged.... Then put something heavy against it inside—your chest of drawers or something—won’t you?”

“Oh, very well, if you wish.”

“I was a fool not to wait till Monday.... You’re all right?”

“Perfectly.”

“I shall come round in the morning to see how you are.... Good night.” He was peering round the edge of the door.

“Good night.”

Cosimo left slowly. He felt a brute. He couldn’t have told why, but it seemed to him that, by comparison with this brave girl, who preferred the sharpest pains of knowledge to the lethargy of ignorance, and would have the truth though it were a blade in her lonely breast, he was inferior and a coward. But for all that, Amory had been quite wrong in thinking he had changed. He had not. He still thought Amory splendid. And not only that: he hadn’t quite realized before how very pretty she was. He had known she was pretty, but not how pretty; perhaps she hadn’t been quite so pretty before?... And now Cosimo came to think of it, he had been noticing lately whether girls were pretty or not. Somehow Pattie Wynn-Jenkins had got him into the way of it. Pattie, whose father’s plantation adjoined the western boundary of the grazing that was now Cosimo’s own, was pretty herself, and seemed to raise the question.... Still, Cosimo had not changed. He could admire Pattie without in the least taking away from the devotion he owed to Amory. And as for anything else than mere prettiness, Pattie wasn’t in it. Pattie would never have dreamed of reading Weiniger and Tchekoff. Just at present she cared for nothing in the world so much as how she should reduce her golf handicap. It was hard to call a girl so pretty as Pattie a fool, but, not to mince matters, that was about the long and the short of it....

And, on the whole, Cosimo was rather glad that Amory didn’t suspect there was such a girl as Pattie in existence.

Cosimo half expected to find Amory still in bed when he went round to Cheyne Walk at ten o’clock on the following morning; but she was dressed and ready for going out. He was lucky, she said, to have caught her; she would have been off in another five minutes.—“Off where?” Cosimo asked. Oh, Amory didn’t know.—“All right, come along,” he said.

But when she turned her eyes slowly round to his he saw that the night had only set higher their clear courage. Again he could not have told why he felt guilty.

“Do you think it would be wise?” she asked gravely.

“Why not?” he asked, taken aback anew.

“Oh, very well,” she answered indifferently. “I’m ready.”

Many times they had walked together in the direction of Earl’s Court and Brook Green, but never in such a silence as this. Yet on Amory’s part it was a calm and cheery silence. It was so calm and cheery that uneasily Cosimo fell to wondering whether Amory had not been right and he had not, after all, changed without knowing it. These geniuses were terrible people: there was never any telling what they did not see. As they passed through Hammersmith, Cosimo longed to break out, “I haven’t changed, Amory—you’d know I thought more of you than ever if you’d seen the pretty but awfully stupid sort of girl I’ve been seeing while I’ve been away—everything we’ve agreed a self-respecting woman can’t be any longer: a mere man’s toy, a chattel, property, on sale just as much as if she was in an Oriental slave-market, economically dependent, hopelessly apathetic to everything that’s fine and feminist and new——” He knew that Amory would have called that “facing the facts.” But something, he knew not what, held him back. Oh, it was none of the things you might have thought—that Amory might make more of it than there had been (indeed, there had been nothing), nor that he realized that the whole truth can never be told, and that the more you explain the more there remains still to be explained, nor that hypocrisy and lack of candour are not without their poor uses when all is said and done. Cosimo would have denied these obsolescent propositions one by one.... So he concluded that he could not be very well either. That must be the reason for his reticence. Pattie’s company must have put him a little out of accord with the finer things. Pattie in Shropshire, too, seemed a thought less pretty than did Amory by his side that Sunday morning. If Amory were only a little differently dressed she might be incomparably pretty, as she was already incomparably clever....

But suddenly Amory broke the silence. It was as they approached Ravenscourt Park.

“Cosimo,” she said slowly—“I’ve been wondering again——”

He waited for her to continue. As she delayed to do so, he said, “What, Amory?”

“I’ve been wondering again—why you don’t marry Dorothy.”

When Amory had said this same thing before, Cosimo had laughed, and with beautiful tact had replied that Dorothy would never have married him: but there was something of the still, of the rapt, about Amory that morning that would have made a laugh an offence. Instead, he said, almost reproachfully, “Oh,—Amory!”

“Why don’t you?” she continued dreamily. “I hope it’s not that mere settling down of opinion that is fatal to real vitality of thought. An idée fixe isn’t an idée at all; it’s a Law that in course of time thoughts become petrified. Then they’ve got to be got fluid again. Are you sure that you haven’t got Dorothy wrongly classified?”

She looked earnestly at him.

“But——” he began, but Amory interrupted him gently.

“Let’s face the facts about Dorothy without prejudice,” she said. “First, I know she’s mixed up with perfectly impossible people, but you mustn’t forget that she was with us at the McGrath. Her work’s impossible too, poor dear Dot, but search where you will, Cosimo, you won’t find a better appreciator than she is. It would only need a little encouragement of that side of her nature and a little suppression of the other and Dorothy would be an almost ideal wife for an advanced and fine-thinking man. It’s merely her Environment that doesn’t give her a chance. Of course, from the point of view of Eugenics, those people of hers may be a little epuisées; intermarried too much: but she doesn’t show it—she may be a throw-back. And it isn’t a drawback any longer that Dorothy’s rather fond of her own way. Equality of Opportunity is admitted nowadays, and in another ten years the conception of woman as property will be quite dead. And think how much worse you might do, Cosimo! Suppose you got hold of a mere doll!... Cosimo,” she added earnestly, “it would be—hell!”

Cosimo quailed inwardly, nor could he, in the face of Amory’s earnestness, dissemble his quailing with a laugh. “But,” he protested by and by, “I—I don’t want Dorothy, Amory!”

“I only ask you to ask yourself whether that isn’t an idée fixe.”

“I really don’t think it’s an idée fixe,” Cosimo returned, after further examination of it. “And besides, you’ve rather spoiled me for the companionship of—of anybody who comes along——”

“It has been beautiful,” said Amory, with a detached air, “and it will be more beautiful still to look back on. I don’t conceal from you, Cosimo, that quite the most precious and significant part of my life has been shared with you.”

He broke out almost angrily—“The past tense again, Amory! Really, I—I don’t know what’s come over you!”

“You mean that you’d miss me a little too?”

“Miss you!——” This time he did give a little mirthless laugh.

“Then,” Amory went on presently, “there’s something else to remember. Dorothy’s used to me. We are friends. Another girl might not be. You see how much I care who you marry, Cosimo, and why.”

“But—but—whatever’s put it into your head that I want to marry at all?” Cosimo cried, stopping and looking blankly at her.

She, too, looked at him; then she moved slowly forward again.

“Ah, you’re at the very heart of the feminist Movement there, if you only knew it, Cosimo,” she replied. “A man has only his intelligence; a woman has intelligence and her intuitions as well.”

“You mean you’ve an intuition I want to get married?” Cosimo broke out. “I swear——”

“Oh, Cosimo, what’s the good of swearing? That’s merely like that antiquated old Service again, when you promise to love and honour and all the time you’re absolutely in the dark. You may not want to at this moment. But you don’t know that to-morrow somebody may not want to marry you. I only want it to be the right person—chum of mine,” she added softly.

As she put her hand on his arm Cosimo had a little brotherly warming.

He was not aware—or if he had been aware, he had forgotten—that Amory’s Aunt Jerry and Mr. Massey lived on Chiswick Mall, hardly a stone’s-throw from where they were. They were passing the “Doves” when suddenly Amory exclaimed, “Why, we’re quite near to Aunt Jerry’s. Shall we go in to lunch?”

Her quick tone seemed a change from the past tense and broodings about his marriage, and he welcomed it eagerly. Moreover, to call on the Masseys would recall enlivening thoughts of that merry wedding day when Mr. Wellcome had got slightly drunk and had passed round the toothpicks. It would be the very thing to take Amory out of herself.

“Ripping idea!” said Cosimo enthusiastically. “Which is the house?”

“The one you’re walking past now,” said Amory, putting her hand on the knob of a tall wrought-iron gate. “I don’t suppose Aunt Jerry’s been to church.”

They walked up a narrow flagged path and Amory rang an old bell by the side of a torch-extinguisher. Already Aunt Jerry had waved her hand from the drawing-room window of the first floor. The door was opened, and they were admitted.

“We’ve asked ourselves to lunch, Cosimo and I,” said Amory, kissing her aunt where she sat by the window. “May we stay?”

Aunt Jerry affected a severity.

“I’m not so sure, after the disgraceful time you’ve thought fit to stop away,” she replied. “I’m very cross with both of you. If you’d left it one week longer, Cosimo—you see I haven’t forgotten I was to call you Cosimo—I really don’t think George would have had you in the house. But I forgive you now you are here. George will be back from church presently. Go and take your things off, child, and Cosimo will talk to me. You know the little room—or is it so long since you were here that you’ve forgotten?”

There were hyacinth bulbs in the glasses of Aunt Jerry’s rounded bow-window, and a canary in a white and gilt cage; and to Amory the house seemed furnished consonantly with the age of its owners, that is to say, its chairs and tables were not old enough in style to be antique and not new enough to be anything but what doubtless some of them were—second-hand. But the panelling was pleasant, and the airy view up the river delightful. Aunt Jerry pointed out the view to Cosimo at once; she sat there all day, she said, but it was almost as good as being out of doors. There was no need to ask why she sat there, watching her swelling hyacinths and listening to the trilling of her bird. Amory expected to be made a cousin early in April.

“I’m so glad you’ve come,” said Aunt Jerry to Cosimo. “Mrs. Deschamps is coming; George will meet her after church; and Miss Crebbin (do you remember Miss Crebbin?)—she’s bringing her young man. But I ought to say that our lunch is really our dinner on Sundays because of the girls’ afternoon off. Well, and now tell me how you are.”

She was fresh as a rose, and talked as if she and Cosimo had been old friends. Cosimo remembered the joke of Mrs. ’Ill, the plumber, Mr. Wellcome, and the chimney-sweep. Only for a moment had Aunt Jerry glanced at Cosimo’s suit of tweeds. She had heard of Cosimo’s bereavement, but, after all, a loss can be felt as deeply in tweeds as in anything else, and the glance had seemed to admit that perhaps it wasn’t altogether a bad thing that the old custom of extravagant funerals, often at the expense of the needs of the living, was dying out. “We must all go sometime,” her short silence seemed to say, “and those who follow us must take up the burdens we leave.” Perhaps it was not all burden either. Aunt Jerry had forgotten the precise number of acres, but she remembered that Cosimo was now “eligible.”

Aunt Jerry was telling Cosimo how all at sea Amory had seemed during the past weeks, when Mr. Massey arrived with Mrs. Deschamps. They were followed a few minutes later by Miss Crebbin and her young man, a Mr. Allport. And Mrs. Deschamps, too, greeted Cosimo as quite an old friend.

“I shall never, never forget that wedding day, Mr. Pratt!” she exclaimed vivaciously. “That cake—the wretches! But they’re always up to something, scaring you out of your wits with a jam-splash on the tablecloth or a spill of ink on your book—you’ve seen them, Mr. Pratt; they’re a penny, and I’ve had dreadful turns with them! But I simply cannot call you ‘Mr. Pratt.’ It isn’t like Glenerne here. I admit it’s best to be on the safe side there, but at Oasthouse View we’re a family party—aren’t we, George? And don’t I come on Sundays till you’re sick of the sight of me and say, ‘Here’s that nuisance of a Nellie again?’ He needn’t shake his head,” the bright little widow continued to Cosimo; “Geraldine thinks we go to church together, but really I’m making love to him—aren’t I, George?”

“Yes—yes, yes, yes,” Mr. Massey hissed softly over his teeth, entering into the joke and smiling amiably about him.

And Mrs. Deschamps confided to Cosimo in a stage whisper that it was already arranged that she was to be “Number Two.”

They lunched in the panelled room beneath Aunt Jerry’s drawing-room, Amory and Cosimo on one side of the table facing Miss Crebbin and her young man on the other. Cosimo presently became aware that this was a quite amusing variation of the joke of Jellies, Dorothy, the plumber, etc. It lacked the boisterousness of that day when Mr. Wellcome had thrust him into Amory’s arms, but it had a subtle flavour of its own. Cosimo had only one uneasiness, which was that Amory was perhaps not well enough in health to extract the last particle of savour from all this taking-for-granted. She sat next to Mr. Allport, but said little. She ate hungrily of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and quite agreed when Mr. Allport said what “an A1 little pitch Oasthouse View was.” Then Mr. Allport talked water-rates and gas-fittings to Mr. Massey. He could be seen making mental notes of fixtures and furniture against the day when he and his young woman should set up together for themselves. He seemed, too, to be advising Cosimo also to be picking up wrinkles in good time. Cosimo was secretly glad that Mr. Wellcome was not there. His robustiousness would have spoiled the quiet and artistic character of the comedy.

And again he hoped that Amory was not missing anything.

Then the ladies ascended to the drawing-room again, and Mr. Massey, who knew perfectly well everything that the sideboard did and did not contain, pretended to be in doubt, and “thought there ought to be a little port somewhere.” He found it, and the three men sat, Mr. Allport again talking of cupboards and drains, but obviously thinking that ... but let Cosimo and Amory tell the rest.

“My—dear!” Amory broke out when, at half-past three, they passed the “Doves” again. “Did you ever!”

Cosimo’s light fears that Amory might have missed the delicate comedy had been wasted; Amory was quite her old self again. That, Cosimo thought, was the good meal of roast beef. She bubbled freely, and caught at Cosimo’s arm.

“My—dear! If only you could have heard the priceless things that were said upstairs!”

Cosimo was wondrously bucked by the change in her.

“Oh, this is torture—do tell me!” he implored.

“Oh, it’s beyond words—I don’t know where to begin! Aunt Jerry—and that incredible Deschamps woman—and that doll of a girl who’s going to love, honour, obey, and all the rest of it!... Have the poor dears an inkling of what it all really means?”

“You mean——?” said Cosimo tentatively.

“Of course I do—the stupid institution of the Family again! Did George say anything to you? No, I suppose he wouldn’t; high-and-mighty man again; quite too superior; hopes that as long as he says nothing he’ll be taken for wise, as somebody says. But Aunt Jerry’s got it all—oh, perfection hardly describes it!” Lightly she threw up her hands and allowed them to drop again.

“Not the old conceptions, of the father as the head of the Family and so on?” Cosimo said incredulously.

“Yes!”

“No!—Parental Despotism?”

“Despotism!”

“Not corporal punishment!”

“Cor-por-al punishment!”

“No Justice for children?”

“Love and Authority instead!”

“And woman as the mere plaything of man?”

“The mere plaything of man!”

“Property?”

“A chattel!”

“Woman’s place at home with her children?”

“C’est ça!”

“By—Jove!”

Cosimo whistled.

“Yes, I thought I should surprise you,” said Amory, with quiet satisfaction.

“Surprise!—I’m thunderstruck!”

“You didn’t know you’d been lunching in a regular museum of it all, did you?”

“A museum? A catacomb!”

“You wouldn’t suppose that we lived in this Year of Grace, would you?”

“About 1100, I should have said.”

“Oh no,” Amory interrupted, “under Feudalism it would have been all right. It would have been proper to their stage of development. But—to-day! Or rather next April, I should say——!”

“The hands of the clock are to be set back in April?”

“So the doctor says. I dare say his rule-of-thumb carries him as far as that.”

“Awful impostors, doctors.”

Then Amory spoke slowly and impressively.—“What I want to know is, how much longer can Individualism last? We heard that American lady last year; would you have thought it possible that the system could have survived such a slashing attack? When will people begin to have even a rudimentary conception of the function of the State in these matters? When will they see, for instance, that when a dispute arises between a parent and a child the case is exactly like any other dispute, with the plaintiff on one side and the defendant on the other? If the parent’s the plaintiff, how can he speak for the defendant as well? Why, it’s making him judge and executioner and all the lot!... And those, Cosimo,” she went on, with still deeper gravity, into which contempt crept, “are my aunt’s and uncle’s ideas! Violence, harshness, and repression. Russianizing the Home, instead of abolishing it altogether, or only allowing it under the very strictest inspection, in such cases as when a parent has really proved his fitness for Child-culture! The Home!... Oh, when will the dawn come?” She turned up the pretty eyes to the sky; she spoke passionately. “Aunt Jerry fit to be a Mother of the Race! Why,” she broke out witheringly—“has she (to begin with the very elements) a notion of what to feed a child on? Does she know what a proteid is? Does she know what albumen is? Has she as much as seen a bit of yeast under the microscope? (I have; a girl once showed me.) Doesn’t she choose her very feeding-bottles out of these awful circulars of Dorothy’s or whose ever they are? And the clothes she showed us!... Ribbons, pink if it’s a girl and blue if it’s a boy! This hateful insistence on sex from the very beginning! From before the beginning!... And the pride of these people in their ignorance and conceit! Bursting with it!”...

Cosimo was awed. But he was glad, too, that there was no more talk about the end of their friendship. Amory was incomparable. Never had he honoured her so. It was almost a pity she painted, so magnificent a lecturer was lost in her. Not that just at present she was painting very much. She was doing better than painting. With all the strength of which she was capable she was resolutely not painting. She was laying strong and enduring foundations. There would be time enough for pinnacles by and by.

“And then,” Amory continued, more quietly, but even more stingingly, “in what spirit do they undertake this enormous responsibility? From the highest motive known to Ethics you’d think, wouldn’t you—the sense of Duty to Mankind? Yes, you’d think so. You wouldn’t think they’d regard it as a mere personal gratification, would you? You wouldn’t think they thought they’d accounted for it all when they said they were ‘in love,’ would you? But it is so, Cosimo. That’s exactly their mental development. They are exactly as advanced as the animals. Neither more nor less.... Mind you, I don’t deny what’s called ‘love’ altogether. I suppose it does serve some such purpose as the perfume does to the flower. The perfume attracts insects, and insects do fertilize some flowers. So love has its place. But what I want to know is, is it going to be allowed to supplant plain reason and common sense? I say no. There ought to be a State Mating-season. They can do it about fishing and game; why not about love? Because everything’s in the hands of men, and men think more about fishing and game than they do about these things. Oh, if only a Woman would arise! We should soon see all this altered!”...

“Well, you know I’m heart and soul with you about that, Amory,” Cosimo said, a little uneasily, as if he personally might be included in her arraignment of his sex.

“You!” said Amory, with an intellectually affectionate look of her golden eyes.... “If it weren’t for you, Cosimo, I should despair altogether. Nobody else understands me—nobody. The others—well, take a man like Hamilton Dix, who might be supposed to have higher interests: really, it’s as much as I’ve been able to do sometimes to keep him from pawing me! And once he did kiss my hand.... Cosimo”—she lifted the golden eyes almost bashfully, and then dropped them again—“I said last night that there ought perhaps to be an end of our friendship. Not an end, I mean, because I should always respect you and honour your views. And I still think it might be best. But—I don’t know whether I should have the strength to do it, Cosimo. I ought to, but—I’m only a woman in some things. I know they aren’t the real things, and it’s only because my sex has been downtrodden and we’ve been denied our opportunities; but we do have transmitted fears from those barbarous times when you used to drag us about by the hair. So I don’t know whether I should really have the strength, Cosimo——”

She was even nobler in her confession of weakness than she had been in the strength and rush of her outburst. Again, for no reason that he could have explained, Cosimo felt a brute.... He paw this bright little creature, as the odious Dix had done? He sully a thing so radiant as their relation with—pawing?

Suddenly Cosimo found himself disliking Mr. Hamilton Dix more intensely than he had ever done before.

Amory, for her part—though she did not know whose—rather fancied that she had put a spoke into somebody’s wheel.

V
BOND AND FREE

The truth was, Amory presently began to tell herself, that Cosimo’s life was in danger of becoming rather an aimless sort of thing. Few people knew the perils of aimlessness so well as did Amory Towers. She knew them because for a time she had suffered them in her own thought and work. But that was all past now. She had begun to work again. The foundations of a real picture were being laid at last. This was the famous canvas, “Barrage,” that afterwards made her name. None knew better than Amory herself its shortcomings as mere painting, but she had learned in bitterness that issues greater than those of painting were at stake to-day. To-day or never was the time to do all the things that had never been done. Accordingly, her picture was partly a painting and partly a sociological symbol. It was, as far as it was at present designed, a medley in which, before a series of guarded cave-mouths and dropped portcullises and defended doors, women of the various stages of civilization were grouped with men. Now they were in the attitude of menials at their feet, or hewing their wood, or drawing their water; anon, set on high pedestals, before which men made mock reverences, they stood wreathed with roses from beneath which iron fetters peeped grimly forth; and later, in apotheosis, Womanhood herself walked by man’s side, equal, sworded, flashing and free. If something of a likeness to Amory herself was to be traced in all these figures, every artist who works in a single room knows how frequently, for lack of pence, he must use himself as a model. It was this picture, of which more later, that enabled Amory to see so clearly the peril that beset Cosimo.

Of course Amory recognized that Cosimo was not absolutely aimless as long as he had Amory’s own art to admire; but that was a narrow and selfish way of looking at it. Amory didn’t want Cosimo to admire her art for any personal glory she might get of it. She wanted him, not for herself, but for a Cause. In her picture he posed as the champion who had stricken the bonds from the belted and sworded and flashing and free young woman (who was quite frankly Amory herself), because that was the rôle she wished to see him in; but she knew how easy it would be (Cosimo was so good natured) for any designing and retrogressive young woman to get hold of him and to enlist his support for the forces of conservatism and the night. That (Amory’s pretty lips compressed and her eyes shone with a cold and opal-like fire) must not be. In order that it might not be, Amory had made use of Dorothy’s name; not that she really wanted him to marry Dorothy, but that even to marry Dorothy would be better than to marry somebody more benighted still. It was a mere ruse de guerre, justified by the larger issue. These things have to be done when the fiends of ignorance and the angels of knowledge contend. Amory called these fiends and angels the Anabolic and the Katabolic forces in human progress. It didn’t matter what you called them. Two principles always had contended and always would contend. It was a Law.

Therefore Amory wanted Cosimo on the side of the angels and victory. Ever so much more she wanted him on that side now that he was a man of some substance. For money is the sinews of Anabolic and Katabolic warfare also. Cosimo with his money and Amory with her new art—what might they not accomplish, working together? A whole Promised Land of endeavour lay shining before them. For Amory herself (for example) there were all the possibilities of symbolic painting—a style of painting which (actual draughtsmanship being admittedly her weak point) would suit her genius the more exactly for that very reason. Nobody can dismiss a symbol because it is badly drawn; any old drawing will do for a symbol. For the holy purposes of social regeneration the novelists thought any old writing good enough; and so it was. So it should be for Amory too. She had half a mind to let drawing go altogether. Then, with drawing out of the way, she saw her task. “Barrage” would be followed by a picture (perhaps a newer word than “picture” would be necessary to describe it) that would symbolize Labour Unrest; she was thinking it out in her spare moments already. Then there should be another, a slap in the face for Militarism. After that should come canvases dealing with Education, and Disestablishment, and the Triumph of Sentimental Government and the establishment of the New Matriarchy. Oh yes, Amory saw her task though twenty lifetimes lay before her....

And Cosimo? She could guide Cosimo too. No doubt at his own doors in Shropshire there lay wrongs to be righted—sites for village halls waiting to be built upon, libraries and communal kitchens and wash-houses to be founded, greens for morrice-games (Amory vetoed archery, as coming dangerously near to Militarism and the miniature rifle-range), societies for the study of folk-song, ethical societies, lectures on economics, bands for the exchange of foreign picture postcards (that the spirit of brotherhood among the enlightened of all nations might be fostered), and so on.... Oh, with Amory to direct him, there would be plenty for Cosimo, too, to do. And he had the money with which to do it.

And if Amory shrank from the cost to herself—the cost, namely, of conforming to the outworn institution of marriage—it was but for a moment. What was she, to attempt to stem the River of the Race? She must bear the burden cheerfully. And after all, with a little thought she ought to be able to ensure it that Cosimo as her husband should not be very different from Cosimo as he was now. By keeping his eyes constantly uplifted to the shining peaks of their joint duty, mere personal thoughts of self could be kept in their place. He would hardly want a wife when he possessed the heroine of a Feminist Crusade, she hardly a husband when she had an ally placed by his sex in the fortress that, whether by beleaguering or by assault, must be won. Yes, she would strive to bear even this. The glory of a campaign would supplant the private self-seeking of a courtship. They would mingle, not love-sick sighs, but the aspirations of their souls. No doubt when they were both old, and looked back, it would seem well worth the cost....

Amory herself would have been the first to confess the weakness that set her wondering how many bedrooms the Shropshire house had, and whether there were rose gardens and fruit trees on the southern walls. Even from thoughts of duty weak mortals must sometimes stoop. Besides, if there was not a village green with a maypole on it, some arrangement would probably have to be made. Amory didn’t think she would want morrice-dancing on the lawn in front of the drawing-room windows, except, of course, on birthdays and festival days and the days when the tenants paid their rent. The people themselves would probably prefer to have their merrymaking to themselves. Very likely they would only be shy before their betters. She would show the tenantry (she did not insist on the name) every consideration, as she should expect them to consider her.... And if there was a lily garden as well as a rose garden, she would send lilies as well as roses to the cottages quite frequently.

But Cosimo must be saved for the Cause quickly, for he was giving up his studio in March, and once he got away again he might fall into the hands of the designing woman whose existence Amory had suspected. She knew those designing women. She knew them by the simple process of inversion of everything that was noble within herself.

Amory had only seen Dorothy Lennard once since the afternoon when Dorothy had promised to see what she could do about Croziers’ contract. That had been when Dorothy had come to tell her of the mitigation of its rigour she had secured from Hamilton Dix. But, finding herself in Oxford Street one afternoon, she sought Hallowells’, and tried to find her way upstairs to the fashion-studio. “Tried,” one says, for nearly twenty minutes Amory was hopelessly lost in the wilderness that seemed to grow ever more and more complicated as the time fixed for the opening drew nearer. It was during her wandering through this labyrinth that Amory received a shock. Passing along a corridor of such vast length that she seemed to be looking at it through the wrong end of a pair of opera-glasses, she entered a large apartment where three women on their knees polished the floor. There she saw a large historical painting. It was the picture of Queen Bess, Sir Walter, and the Cloak.

Her first impulse was to fall back; her second one, which she obeyed, was to stand her ground, to put her head back and a little on one side, and to smile defiantly, indulgently, truculently, all three. It was as if she said to the picture, “We meet unexpectedly, but since we are here we may as well have a few words together, you and I!”

A certain amount of skill, manual and ocular, had gone to the making of the picture—enough, as we have seen, to “hit” Mr. Miller “right there.” Perhaps that was the reason why it hit Amory right there too, though in the contrary sense. She stepped forward and examined it near; then she stepped back and examined it at a distance. As she did so, a man in an astrachan-collared overcoat and an indented grey hat hurried past, dropping his cigar and uncovering his head as he found himself in the presence of a lady, even one he did not know; and then Amory continued her gazing.

The picture struck her as incredibly funny. First, there was the subject—“Our old friend Chivalry,” Amory mused. Oh yes, Chivalry in other words, those garlands of roses in her own picture beneath which the iron chains peeped forth. Chivalry! Oh yes, Amory knew—any feminist knows—the toils men impose on women when they talk about Chivalry! Amory became cynical.... Let them amend the Divorce Laws, and then Amory would listen to what they had to say about Chivalry! Let them give women equal opportunities with men, and she would excuse the lifting of a hat or the offering of a seat in a train! Chivalry might have had its place in the social organization of the Year Dot (see “Barrage”), but things had moved a bit since then, and woman to-day would walk through puddles if she wished, though twenty cloaks were outspread for her to step on! Thank you very much for your Chivalry ... and now will you give us a little Justice for a change?... And then the complacent handling of the thing! There was really nothing to be said! Nobody could say it wasn’t “finished”; that was just it; it was fatally “finished”; the man had done exactly what he had set out to do, and—there it was. No unseizable desire, no unattainable dream, no Promethean attempt, no suspicion that here was not the last possible word on the subject; and this in a new and straining and eager age, when men were just beginning to know that they knew nothing, and to put off their past boastings, and to take the cave-dweller into their counsels as their equal, perhaps their superior, in knowledge! Here, actually to-day, was a man who truly thought that he knew a thing or two more than the cave-dweller! Oh, the smugness, the self-satisfaction! Really, Amory would not dare to show such a man her “Barrage”; its pure heart of fire, shining even through all its shortcomings, would have shrivelled him and his conceit up! For surely there, in “Barrage,” was the true impulse of the arts to-day. Some called it “propagandist,” but what, Amory wanted to know, had all these Virgins and Children, all these Crucifixions, all these Holy Families of the past been but propaganda? The arts had been shackled to the propagation of superstition and dogma, and of the tenets of a religion that had found its expression one day in seven; but in the Newer Day all days were going to be equally holy, with the abolition of the Sabbath as a first step to the consecration of the other six. To the Virgins and Children of the future a proper comprehension of the Rights of Woman and the Responsibilities of Parentage would be brought. Eugenics would have a word to say about the Holy Families. The Crucifixions would probably be cut out altogether.... To bring that day nearer was Amory’s mission. If she could only sell “Barrage”—and she thought she could now, for the Women’s Manumission Guild had approached her about it, and an Executive was further considering it....

And she would ask a good price for it, for the labourer is worthy of her hire, and she really must study her dress a little more....

Amory turned away from the picture and resumed her search for Dorothy.

But she had hardly left the room where the women polished the floors (showing how, even in physical strength, women were not the inferiors of men), when she received a second shock. She was backing out again from a room where a telescopic ladder rose to a sagging sheet under a skylight when she saw, beyond an oval section of redwood counter, the fair head of Dorothy herself. It was now luncheon time, the workmen had left, and Dorothy appeared to be eating her lunch amid the smell of shavings and varnish and plaster. Amory advanced.

But once more, she started back. She saw that Dorothy was not alone. And not only was Dorothy not alone, but she was sitting with a good-looking but ridiculously smart young man on a box so narrow that from mere necessity the young man had passed his arm about Dorothy’s waist. They were eating sandwiches from a paper bag, and if they were not sharing the same glass of lemonade, the second glass was certainly not visible.

Then, with his mouth full of sandwich, the young man kissed Dorothy, who performed the same idiotic gesture on him in return.

Now no really sensitive person likes to see other persons in the act of an embrace, and Amory was exquisitely sensitive. And in this hard world it is the sensitive person who suffers for the dull. Further, even suffering takes a keener edge when you are seen to suffer. Therefore the least that Dorothy and her smart young man could have done, when, turning, they became aware of Amory’s presence, would have been to spare her the gratuitous pain of looking at her. But they did not. Having outraged her, they stared at her. They stared at her almost as if they asked her what she meant by stealing upon them like that. It struck Amory as it had never struck her before that Glenerne would have been Dorothy’s proper place. If this was the way she carried on during lunch time at Hallowells’, nothing at the boarding-house would have shocked her.

“Hallo!” said Dorothy, not (Amory thought) exactly welcomingly.

Still, if Dorothy had no tact, that was no reason why Amory should not act up to her own finest instincts. The truest delicacy would be to let it be supposed that she had noticed nothing. Therefore she too said “Hallo!” very brightly. They must not guess that they had caused her pain.

At first Amory thought that Dorothy was not going to introduce her friend, but when Dorothy did so, in three words—“My cousin Stan”—she was able to guess that even Dorothy was not quite without some sense of shame and confusion. Her cousin! Such unfertility of invention would have done discredit even to Jellies! But of course Dorothy was embarrassed, and had said the first thing that had come into her head. Amory bowed with reserve to “the cousin,” who, for his part, seemed inclined to laugh. Very rudely, he pulled out his watch.

“By Jove, a quarter to two! I must cut, Dot. Dusty’ll be looking for me. See you at tea-time? Right, I’ll ring you up. So long.”

And with scarce a look at Amory he was off.

No sooner had he gone than Amory broke into voluble speech.

“My dear, what a place! I’ve been looking everywhere for you this last half-hour—upstairs, downstairs, everywhere! I was almost sure I remembered the way to the studio—wasn’t it past a square room that has a painting in it now?”

“It was, but they moved us two months ago,” Dorothy replied. “Did you ask for me?”