A Crooked Mile

by Oliver Onions · English · Gutenberg #37584 · 483,104 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: A Crooked Mile

Author: Oliver Onions

Release date: October 1, 2011 [eBook #37584]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37584

Credits: Produced by Judith Wirawan, Suzanne Shell and the Online
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A CROOKED MILE ***

Produced by Judith Wirawan, Suzanne Shell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)

A CROOKED MILE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE EXCEPTION
GOOD BOY SELDOM
THE TWO KISSES

A CROOKED MILE

OLIVER ONIONS
AUTHOR OF "THE TWO KISSES"

METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

_First Published in 1914_

CONTENTS

PART I

CHAP. PAGE

I THE WITAN 1

II THE POND-ROOM 17

III THE "NOVUM" 33

IV THE STONE WALL 51

V THREE SHIPS 76

VI POLICY 98

PART II

I THE PIGEON PAIR 119

II THE 'VERT 132

III THE IMPERIALISTS 148

IV THE OUTSIDERS 171

V "HOUSE FULL" 189

VI THE SOUL STORM 210

PART III

I LITMUS 239

II BY THE WAY 254

III _DE TROP_ 274

IV GREY YOUTH 285

TAILPIECE 307

A CROOKED MILE

THE WITAN

Lady Tasker had missed her way in the Tube. She had been on, or rather
under known ground on the Piccadilly Railway as far as Leicester Square,
but after that she had not heard, or else had forgotten, that in order
to get to Hampstead by the train into which she had stepped she must
change at Camden Town. Or perhaps she had merely wondered what Camden
Town supposed itself to be that she should put herself to the trouble of
changing there. With the newspaper held at arm's length, and a little
figure-8-shaped gold glass moving slightly between her puckered old eyes
and the page, she was reading the "_By the Way_" column of the
"Globe."--"All change," called the man at Highgate; and, still
unconscious of her mistake, Lady Tasker left the train. She was the last
to enter the lift. But for an unhurried raising of the little
locket-shaped glass as the attendant fidgeted at the half-closed gate
she might have been the first to enter the next lift.

Only from the policeman outside Highgate Station did she learn that she
must either take the Tube back again to Camden Town or else walk across
the Heath.

Now Lady Tasker was seventy, and, with the exception of the Zoo, a place
she visited from time to time with troops of turbulent great-nephews,
the whole of North London was a sort of Camden Town to her, that is to
say, she had no objection to its existence so long as it wasn't
troublesome. It was half-past three when she said as much to the
Highgate policeman, who up to that time had been an ordinary easy-going
Conservative; by five-and-twenty minutes to four she had made of him a
fuming Radical. He was saying something about South Square and Merton
Lane. Lady Tasker addressed the bracing Highgate air in one of those
expressionless and semi-ventriloquial asides that, especially in a mixed
company, always made her ladyship very well worth sitting next to.

"Merton Lane! Does the man suppose that conveys anything to me?.... I
want to know how to get to Hampstead, not the names of the objects of
interest on the way!"

The newly-made Radical told her that there might be a taxi on the rank,
and turned away to cuff the ears of an urchin who was tampering with an
automatic machine. It was a wonder that Lady Tasker's glare, focussed
through the gold-rimmed glass on a point between his shoulder-blades,
did not burn a hole in his tunic.

Taxis at eightpence a mile, indeed, with the house at Ludlow already
full of those children of Churchill's, and three of Tony's little girls
eating their way through the larder in Cromwell Gardens, and young
Tommy, Emily's boy, who had just "pulled" his captaincy, arriving at
Southampton in the "Seringapatam" on Saturday with another batch for her
to take under her wing! Did people suppose she was made of money?...

The policeman's tunic was just beginning to scorch when Lady Tasker,
dropping the glass, turned away and set out for Hampstead on foot.

She might very well have been excused had she omitted to return Mrs.
Cosimo Pratt's call. Indeed she had vowed that very morning that nothing
should drag her up to Hampstead that day. But for twenty times that Lady
Tasker said "I will not," nineteen she repented and went, taking out the
small change of her magnanimity when she got there. And after all, she
would be killing two birds with one stone, for her niece Dorothy also
lived somewhere in this northern Great Karroo, and unless she got these
things over before the "Seringapatam" dropped anchor on Saturday there
was no knowing when next she would have an hour to call her own. As she
turned (after a brush with a second policeman, who summed her up quite
wrongly on the strength of her antiquated pelisse and trailing old
Victorian hat) down Merton Lane to the ponds, she told herself again
that she was a foolish old woman to have come at all.

For the Cosimo Pratts were not bosom friends of hers. True, they had
been, until six months ago, her neighbours at Ludlow, and for that
matter she had known young Cosimo's people for the greater part of her
life: but she had not forgotten the hearty blackguarding the young
couple had got, any time this last two years, from the rest of the
country-side. Small wonder. What else did they expect, after the way in
which they had made farm-labour too big for its jacket and beaters
hardly to be had for love or money? Not that Lady Tasker herself had
seen very much of their antics. Great-nieces and nephews had kept her
too busy for that, and she was moreover wise enough not to believe all
she heard. And even were it true, that, she now told herself, had been
in the country. They would have to behave differently now that they had
let the Shropshire house and had come to live in town. They could hardly
dance barefoot round a maypole in Hampstead, or stage-manage the yearly
Hiring-Fair for the sake of the "Daily Speculum" photographer (as they
had done in Ludlow), or group themselves picturesquely about the feet of
the oldest inhabitant while that shocking old reprobate with the
splendid head recited (at five shillings an hour) the stories of old,
unhappy, far-off things he had learned by heart from the booklets they
had printed at the Village Press. No: in London they would almost
certainly have to do as other people did, and Shropshire, after its
three years of social and artistic awakening, would no doubt forget all
about the aesthetic revival and would sink back into a well-earned rest.

It was a Thursday afternoon in September, warm for the time of the year,
and a half-day closing for the shops. Had Lady Tasker remembered the
half-holiday she certainly would not have come. She hated crowds, and,
if you would believe her, had no illusions whatever about the sanctity
of our common nature and the brotherhood of man. She would tell you
roundly that there was far too much aimless good-nature in the world,
and that every sob wasted over a sinner was something taken away from
the man who, if he was a sinner too, had at least the decency to keep up
appearances. And so much for brotherhood. Great-nephewship, of course,
was another matter. Somebody had to look after all those youngsters, and
if her sister Eliza, the one at Spurrs, went into a tantrum about every
bud that was picked in the gardens and every chair-leg that was an inch
out of its place in the house, so much the worse for Lady Tasker, who
must walk because she had something else to do with her money than to
waste it on taxis.

She had been told by her niece Dorothy to look out for a clump of tall
willows and an ivied chimney; that was where the Pratts lived; but
Dorothy had spoken of the approach from the Hampstead side, not from
Highgate way. Lady Tasker got lost. She was almost dropping for want of
a cup of tea, and the Heath seemed all willows, and all the wrong ones.
No policeman, Radical or Conservative, was to be seen. Walking across an
apparently empty space, well away (as she thought) from a horde of
shouting boys, the old lady suddenly found herself enveloped in a game
of football. This completed her exhaustion. Near by, one of Messrs.
Libertys' carts was ascending a steep road at a slow walk; somehow or
other Lady Tasker managed to get her hand on the tail of it; and the car
gave her a tow. She was seventy after all.

As it happened, that was her first piece of luck in a luckless
afternoon. The cart drew on to the left; Lady Tasker trailed after it;
and suddenly it stopped before a high privet hedge with a closed green
door in the middle of it. Lady Tasker did not look for the ivied
chimney. On the door was painted in white letters "The Witan." She was
where she wanted to be.

Ordinarily Lady Tasker would have approved of the height of the privet
hedge, which was seven or eight feet; that was a nice, reassuring,
anti-social height for a hedge; but as it was she could not even put up
her hand to the bell. The carter rang it for the pair of them. Over the
hedge came the low murmur of voices and the clink of cups and saucers,
and then the door was opened. It was opened by the mistress of the
house. No doubt Mrs. Pratt had expected the cart, had heard its drawing
up, and had not waited for a maid to come. Her eyes sought the carman,
who had stepped aside. She spoke with some asperity.

"It's Libertys', isn't it?" she said. "Well, I've a very good mind to
make you take it back. It was promised for yesterday."

"Can't say, I'm sure, m'm."

"It's always the same. Every time I----"

Then she saw her visitor, and gave a little start.

"Why, it's Lady Tasker! How delightful! Do come in! And do just excuse
me--I shan't be a minute.... Why didn't this come yesterday? It was
promised faithfully----"

She stepped outside to scold the carman, leaving Lady Tasker standing
just within the green door.

The altercation was plainly audible:

"Very sorry, m'm. You see----"

"I will see, if it occurs again----"

"The orders is taken as they come, m'm----"

"They said the first delivery----"

"We wasn't loaded till one o'clock----"

"That's none of my business----"

"Very sorry, m'm----"

"Well, the next time it occurs----"

And so forth.

Now in reading what happened the next moment you must remember that Lady
Tasker was very, very tired. Had she been less tired she might have
wondered why one of the two maids she saw crossing to the tea-table
under the copper beech had not been allowed to take in Mrs. Cosimo
Pratt's parcel. And she would certainly have thought it extraordinary
that she should be left standing alone while Mrs. Cosimo Pratt scolded
the carrier, and wanted to know why the parcel had not been brought
yesterday. But, tired as she was, her eyes had already rested on
something that had momentarily galvanized even the weariness out of her.
It was this:--

Seven or eight people sat in basket-chairs or stood talking; and, under
the copper beech, as if Mrs. Pratt had just slid out of it, a hammock
of coloured string still moved, slung from the beech to a sycamore
beyond. Lady Tasker saw these things at once; she did not at once see
what it was that stood just beyond the hammock.

Then it moved, and Lady Tasker raised her glass.

No doubt you have seen the cover of Mr. Wells's "Invisible Man." It will
be remembered that all that can be seen of that afflicted person is his
clothes; and all that Lady Tasker at first saw of the Invisible Man by
the copper beech was his clothes. These were of light yellow tussore,
with a white double collar and a small red tie, sharp-edged white cuffs
and highly polished brown boots. At collar and cuffs the man ended.

And yet he did not end, for the lenses of a pair of spectacles made
lurking lights in the shadow of the beech, a few inches above the white
collar.

The phantom wore no hat.

Then Lady Tasker, suddenly pale, dropped her glass. Between the collar
and the spectacles a white gash of teeth had appeared. The Invisible Man
had smiled, and at the same moment there had shown round the bole of the
beech a second smoky shape, this one without teeth, but with white and
mobile eyes instead.

Lady Tasker was in the presence of two Hindoos.

* * * * *

Now all her life, and long before her life for that matter, Lady Tasker
had been accustomed ... but no: that is not the way to put it. The
following table will save many words:--

PORTION OF TREE OF THE LENNARDS AND TASKERS
(COMMENTS BY LADY TASKER)

Tasker, Sir Richard, 3rd Bart.; Lennard, "Old John," "Spurrs,"
"The Brear," Ludlow Montgomery

You see how it was, and had to be. Not only was Lady Tasker insular,
arrogant, and of opinion that Saint Paul made the mistake of his life
when he set out to preach the Gospel to all nations, but she made a
virtue of her narrowness and defect. Show her a finger-nail with a
purple half-moon, and you no longer saw a charming if acid-tongued old
English lady, who cut timber in order to pay for governesses for those
grandchildren of Emily's and sent, under guise of birthday gifts, useful
little cheques to the descendants of her brother-in-law the groom. Babu
or Brahmin, all were the same to her. No defence is offered of an
attitude so indefensible. Such people do still exist. Let us sigh for
their narrowness of mind, and pass on.

The smile of the first Hindoo was for Mrs. Pratt, who had got her row
with the carman over and had reappeared behind Lady Tasker and closed
the door of The Witan again. Her face, pretty and finished as a
miniature, and the great chestnut-red helm of her hair, showed over the
slant of the box in her arms. "Do excuse me, just _one_ moment!" she
said, smiling at Lady Tasker as she passed; and she ran off into the
house, her mistletoe-berry white robe with its stencilling of grey-green
whipping about her heels as she did so. And fortunately, as she ran in
at the door, Cosimo Pratt came out of the French window, saw Lady
Tasker, and strode to her. He broke into rapid and hearty speech.

"You here! How delightful!--Amory!--I didn't hear you come! So kind of
you!--Amory, where are you?--How are you? Do let me get you some
tea!--Amory!----"

Lady Tasker spoke faintly.--"I should like," she said, "to go into the
house."

"Rather! Hang on to my arm.--Amory! Where is that girl?--Sure you won't
have tea outside? I can find you a nice shady place under the beech----"

Lady Tasker closed her eyes.--"Please take me in."

"Tube headache? I hate the beastly thing. I thought you were in Ludlow.
Charming of you----"

And he led Lady Tasker into the house.

This was a low building of stucco, with slatted window-shuts which, like
the sashes of the slightly bowed French window and of the two windows
beyond, were newly painted green. This painting seemed rather to
emphasize than to mitigate a certain dogseared look the place had, not
amounting to dilapidation, but enough to make it probable that Cosimo
Pratt had taken it on a repairing lease. The copper beech, the high
privet hedge and the willows beyond it, shut out both light and air. The
fan-lighted door had two electric bell buttons, with little brass
plates. The upper plate read, "Mr. Cosimo Pratt"; the lower one "Miss
Amory Towers (Studio)."

But Lady Tasker noticed none of these things. In the hall she sank into
the first chair she came to. "Tea, please," she said faintly; and Cosimo
dashed out to get it. He returned, and began to murmur something
sympathetic, but Lady Tasker made a little movement with her hand. She
didn't want him to "send Amory." She only wanted to rest her tired legs
and to collect her dispersed thoughts.

An eight-foot hedge, not to shut the populace out, but to shut Indians
in! And she, Lady Tasker, had been kept standing while some parcel or
other had been taken into the house--standing, and watching a
still-moving hammock with a smiling Invisible Man bending over it! Was
this England, or a Durbar?... And even yet her hostess didn't come to
ask her if she felt better!... Not that Lady Tasker was greatly
surprised at that. She knew that Mrs. Pratt was quite capable of
reasoning that the greatest respect is shown to a tired old lady when no
fuss is made about her tiredness. The Pratts were like that--full of
delicacies so subtle that plain folk never noticed them, but jumped
instead to the conclusion that they were bad-mannered. And it would not
in the least surprise Lady Tasker if, presently, Mrs. Pratt allowed her
to leave without a word about her indisposition. Of course: Lady Tasker
had a little forgotten the Pratts at Ludlow. That would be it:
"Good-bye--and do come again!" She could see Mrs. Pratt's pretty
brook-brown eyes did anybody (say a Japanese or an Ethiopian) point out
this so-called omission to her. She could see the surprise in them. She
could hear her earnest voice: "_Say_ these things!... Why, does she
suppose I was _glad_ then?"...

Yes, Lady Tasker had a little forgotten her Pratts.

It was an odd little hall in which she sat. It appeared to be an
approach to the studio of which the electric bell gave notice, for it
was continued by a narrower passage that led to a garden at the back;
and either the studio "properties" were gradually thrusting the hatstand
and hall table out of the fan-lighted front door, or else these latter
ordinary and necessary objects were fighting as it were for admission.
Thus, the chair on which Lady Tasker sat was of oak, but it had a
Faust-like look; beyond it stood a glass-fronted cupboard of
bric-a-brac, with a trophy of Abyssinian armour hanging over it; and the
whole of the wall facing Lady Tasker was hung with a tapestry which, if
it had been the only one of its kind in existence, would no doubt have
been very valuable. And two other objects not commonly to be seen in
ordinary halls were there. One of these stood on the narrow gilt console
table next to Lady Tasker's cup of tea. It was a plaster cast, taken
from the life, of a female foot. The other hung on the wall above it.
This also was a plaster cast, of the whole of a female arm and shoulder,
ending with a portion of the side of the neck and the entire breast--of
its kind an exquisite specimen. Many artists make or buy such things,
but Brucciani has nothing half so beautiful.

It was as Lady Tasker finished her tea that her gaze fell on the two
casts. Half negligently she raised her glass and inspected, first the
foot, and then the other piece. It is probable that her first remark,
uttered in a casual undertone to the air about her, was prompted by mere
association of ideas; it was "Hm! I wonder if Mrs. Pratt nursed those
twins herself!" Any other reflection that might have followed it was cut
short by a sudden darkening of the doorway by which she had entered.
Mrs. Pratt stood there. Lady Tasker had been wrong. She _had_ come to
ask if she felt better. She did ask her, gathering up long swathes of
some newly unpacked white material she carried over her arm as she did
so.

"Sorry you were done up," she remarked. "Won't you have some more tea?"

Already Lady Tasker was rising.--"No more, thank you.--I was just
looking at these. What are they?" She indicated the casts.

The gesture that Mrs. Pratt gave she could probably no more have helped
giving than an eye can help winking when it is threatened with a blow.
Within one mistletoe-white sleeve an arm moved ever so slightly; very
likely a foot also moved within a curiously-toed Saxon-looking white
slipper; and she gave a confused and conscious and apologetic little
laugh.

"Oh, those silly things!" she said deprecatingly. "I really must move
them. But the studio is so full.... Do you know, it's a most horrid
feeling having them done--first the cold plaster poured on, and then,
when they take it off again--the mould--you know----"

Lady Tasker plainly did not understand. Perhaps she did not yet even
apprehend.--"But--but--," she said, "they're from a statue, aren't
they?"

Again Mrs. Pratt gave the pleased bashful little laugh. It was almost as
if she said it was very good of Lady Tasker to say so.

"No, they're from life," she said. "As a matter of fact they're me, but
I really must move them; they aren't so remarkable as all that.... Oh,
you're not going, are you?----"

For Lady Tasker had given a jump, and a movement as sudden and sprightly
as if she had only that moment got freshly out of her bed. Nervously she
put out her hand, while her hostess looked politely disappointed.

"Oh, and I was hoping you'd come and join us in the garden! We've Brimby
there, the novelist, you know--and Wilkinson, the young Member--and Mr.
Strong, of the 'Novum'--and I should so much like to introduce Mr.
Suwarree Prang to you----"

"Oh, thank you so much--," sprang as effusively from Lady Tasker's lips
as if she had been a schoolgirl allowed for the first time to come down
to dinner, "--it's so good of you, but really I half hoped you'd be out
when I called--I only meant to leave cards--I'm going on to see my
niece, and really haven't a moment----"

"Oh, I'm sure Dorothy'd excuse you for once!----," Mrs. Pratt pressed
her.

"Oh, she wouldn't--I'm quite sure she wouldn't--she'd never forgive me
if she knew I'd been so near and hadn't called," said Lady Tasker
feverishly.... "How do I get to Dorothy's from here?"

"Oh, Mr. Wilkinson will take you, or Mr. Prang; but are you sure you
won't stay?"

Lady Tasker was so far from staying that she was already out of the hall
and walking quickly towards the green door in the eight-foot hedge.
"Thank you, thank you so much," she was murmuring hurriedly. "I don't
see your husband anywhere about--never mind--so good of
you--good-bye----"

"Come again soon, won't you?"

"Yes, yes--oh, yes!... No, no, please don't!" (Mrs. Pratt had made a
half-turn towards the hammock and the copper beech). "Straight across
the Heath you said, didn't you? I shall find it quite easily! Don't come
any further--good-bye----"

And, touching Mrs. Cosimo Pratt's extended fingers as timorously as she
might have touched those of the cast itself, she fairly broke into a
run. The door of The Witan closed behind her.

THE POND-ROOM

The truth was not very far to seek: Lady Tasker was too old for these
things. Nobody could have expressed this more effectively than Mrs.
Cosimo Pratt herself, had it entered the mind of Mrs. Pratt to conceive
that any human soul could be so benighted as the soul of Lady Tasker
was. "Those casts!" Mrs. Pratt might have cried in amazement--or rather
Miss Amory Towers might have cried, for there is nothing in the Wedding
Service about making over to your husband, along with your love and
obedience, the valuable goodwill of a professional name. "Those poor
casts!... Of course they may not be _very_ beautiful--," here the
original of the casts might have modestly dropped her eyes, "--but such
as they are--goodness me! How _can_ people be so prurient, Cosimo? Don't
they see that what they really prove has nothing at all to do with the
casts, but--ahem!--a good deal to do with their own imaginations? I
don't want to use the word 'morbid,' but really!... Well, thank goodness
Corin and Bonniebell won't grow up like that! Afraid of the beautiful,
innocent human form!... Now that's what I've always claimed,
Cosimo--that that's the type of mind that's made all the mischief we've
got to set right to-day."

But for all that Lady Tasker was too old. Invisible Men in the garden
(or, if not actually invisible, at any rate as hard to be seen against
the leaves of the copper beech as a new penny would have been)--and in
the hall those extraordinary replicas! In the hall--the very forefront
of the house! It was to be presumed that Mrs. Pratt's foreign friends,
who were permitted to lean over her hammock, would not be denied The
Witan itself, and, for all Lady Tasker knew, the rest of Mrs. Pratt
might be reduplicated in plaster in the dining-room, the drawing-room,
and elsewhere....

Had she not said it herself, Lady Tasker would never have believed
it....

What a--what a--what an extraordinary thing!----

Lady Tasker had fled from The Witan still under the influence of that
access of effusive schoolgirlishness in which she had told Mrs. Pratt
that she really must go; nor did she grow up again all at once. But
little by little, as she walked, she began to resume the burden of her
years. She became eighteen, twenty-five, thirty again. By the time she
reached the lower pond Arthur had just got that billet in the India
Office, and her brother Dick, of the Department of Woods and Forests,
had married Ada Polperro, daughter of old Polperro of Delhi fame, and
her sister Emily had got engaged to Tony Woodgate, of the Piffers. (But
those casts!)... Then as she took the path between the ponds she
remembered the children at Ludlow, the three little girls at Cromwell
Gardens, and the arrival on Saturday of the "Seringapatam." (But those
natives!)... The thought of the children settled it. Her curious lapse
into juvenescence was over. By the time she rang Dorothy's bell she was
the same Lady Tasker who changed the political opinions of policemen and
deprecated the wanderings of Saint Paul.

Dorothy's flat was as different as it could well be from that other
house which (Lady Tasker had already decided) had something odd and
furtive about it--stagnant yet busy, segregated yet too wide open. The
flat had one really brilliant room. This room did not merely overlook
the pond in front of it; it seemed actually to have asked the pond to
come inside. A large triple window occupied the whole of one end of it;
this window faced west; and not only did the September sun shine
brightly in, but the inverted sun in the water shone in also, doubling
(yet also halving) all shadows, illumining the ceiling, and setting the
cream walls a-ripple with the dancing of the wavelets outside. Sprightly
chintzes looked as if they also might begin to dance at any moment; the
china in Dorothy's cupboards surprised the eye that had not expected
this altered light; and presently, to complete the complexity, the
shadow of the sycamore in the little garden below would move round, so
that you would hardly be able to tell whether the ceaseless creeping on
the cream walls was glitter of ripples, pattern of leaves, or both.

Dorothy sat in her accordion-pleats by the window, surrounded by
letters. And pray do not think it mere coincidence in this story that
her letters were Indian letters. Some interests that the home-amateur
takes up as he might take up poker-work or the diversion of jig-saw hold
a large part of the hearts and lives of others, and so Dorothy, as she
did more or less every week, had been reading her cousin Churchill's
letter, and that of her little niece and namesake Dot, up in Murree, and
Eva Woodgate's, who had sent her a parcel from Kohat, and others. She
rose slowly as her aunt was announced, and put her finger on the bell as
she passed.

"How are you, auntie?" she said, kissing Lady Tasker on both cheeks.
"Give me your things. Somehow I thought you might come to-day, but I'd
almost given you up. Do look what Eva's sent me! Really, with her own to
look after, I don't know how she finds the time! Aren't they sweet!----"

And she held them up.

Now Lady Tasker knew perfectly well the meaning of her niece's
accordion-pleating; but she was seventy and worldly-wise again now.
Therefore as she looked at the things she remarked off-handedly, "But
they're far too small."

"Too small!" Dorothy exclaimed. "Of course they aren't. Why, Noel was
only nine, and that's pretty big, and Jackie only just over
eight-and-a-half, though he put on weight while you watched him. They're
just right."

Lady Tasker reached for a chair. "But they _are_ for Jackie, aren't
they?"

Dorothy's blue eyes were as big as the plates in her
cupboards.--"Jackie! Good gracious, auntie!----"

"Eh?" said Lady Tasker, sitting down. "Not Jackie? Dear me. How stupid
of me. Of course, I did hear, but I've so many other things to think of,
and nobody'd suppose, to look at you----"

Dorothy ran to her aunt and gave her a kiss and a hug, a loud kiss and a
hug like two.

"You dear old thing!--Really, I'd begun to _hate_ all the horrid kind
people who asked me how I felt to-day and whether I shouldn't be glad
when it was over! What business is it of theirs? I nearly made Stan sack
Ruth last week, she looked so, and I positively refuse to have a young
girl anywhere near me!... But wasn't it sweet of Eva? I'll give you some
tea and then read you her letter. Indian or China?"

"China," Lady Tasker remarked.

"China, Ruth, and I'll have some more too. I don't know whether His
Impudence is coming in or not; he's gadding off somewhere, I expect....
But you weren't only _pretending_ just now, were you, auntie?----"

She put the plug of the spirit-kettle into the wall.

"Well, how are the Bits?" Lady Tasker asked....

(Perhaps "His Impudence" and "The Bits" require explanation. Both
expressions Dorothy had from her "maid," Ruth Mossop. "Maid" is thus
written because Ruth was a young widow, who, after a series of
disciplinary knockings-about by the late Mr. Mossop, was not
over-troubled with maternal anxiety for the four children he had left
her with. When asked by Dorothy whether she would prefer to be called
Mrs. Mossop or Ruth, Mrs. Mossop had chosen the latter name, giving as
her reason that it had been like Mr. Mossop's impudence to ask her to
accept the other name at all; and very many other memories also, brooded
on and gloomily loved, including the four children, had been bits of Mr.
Mossop's impudence. Stan had adopted the phrase, finding in it chuckles
of his own; and so His Impudence he had become, and Noel and Jackie the
fruits thereof.)

Dorothy put her fair head on one side, as if she considered the absent
Bits critically and dispassionately, and really thought that on the
whole she might venture to approve of them.

"Ra-ther little dears; but oh, Heaven, how _are_ we going to manage with
a third!"

Her aunt dissociated herself from the problem with a shrug.--"Well--if
Stan will persist in thinking that his dressing-room is merely a room
for him to dress in----"

"So I tell him," Dorothy murmured, with great meekness. "But--but flats
aren't made for children. We did manage to seize the estate agent's
little office for a nursery when all the flats were let, but when Stan
brings a man home we have to sleep him in the dressing-room as it
is--," (Lady Tasker shook her head, but the words "Wrong man" were
hardly audible), "--and a house will mean stair-carpets, and hall
furniture, and I don't know what else. Besides, Stan hasn't time to look
for one----"

"No?" said Lady Tasker drily.

"He really hasn't, poor boy," Dorothy protested. "And he's after
something really good this time--Fortune and Brooks, the
what-d'-you-call-'ems, in Pall Mall----"

"What about them?"

"Well, Stan's been told that they pay awfully good commissions, for
introductions, new accounts, you know; Stan dines out, say, and makes
himself nice to somebody with whole stacks of money, and mentions
Fortune & Brooks's chutney and pickled peaches and things, and--and----"

"I know," remarked Lady Tasker, with not much more expression than if
she had been a talking doll and somebody had pulled the string that
worked the speaking apparatus. She did know these dazzling schemes of
her smart and helpless nephew's--his club secretaryships, his projects
for journals that should combine the various desirable features of the
"Field" and "Country Life" and the "Sporting Times" and "Punch," his
pony deals, and his other innumerable attempts to make of his saunters
down Bond Street to St. James's and back _via_ the Junior Carlton and
Regent Street a source of income. Perhaps she knew, too, that Dorothy
knew of her knowledge, for she went on, "Well, well--let's hope there's
more in it than there was in the fishing-flies--now tell me what Eva's
got fresh."

"Oh, yes!" cried Dorothy, plunging her hand into her letters. "Eva sent
the things, but here's Dot's first--look at the darling's writing!----"

And from a sheet of paper with a regimental heading Dorothy began to
read:

"DEAREST AUNT DOROTHY,--

"were in murree and we got a servant that wigles his toes when we
speak to him and he loves baba and makes noises like him and
there are squiboos in the tres--"

--(she means squirrels)--

"--and ive got a parrot uncle tony bought me and uncle tony says
the monsoon will praps fale and the peple wont have anything to
eat but weve lots and i like this better than kohat the shops are
lovely but there are lots of flees and they bite baba and he
cries this is a long letter how are Jackie and noel i got the
photograf--"

--(that's the new one on the mantelpiece)--

"--were going to tifin at major hirsts little girls one is called
marjorie and were great friends----"

"Where's the other page got to? It was here----"

She found the other page, and continued the reading of the child's
letter.

Suddenly Lady Tasker interrupted her.

"Had Jack to borrow money to send them up there?"

"To Murree? I really don't know. Perhaps he had. But as adjutant of the
Railway Volunteers he'd have his saloon."

"H'm!... Anyway, the child oughtn't to be there at all. India's no place
for children."

"I know, auntie; but what can one do? They do come."

"H'm!... They didn't to me. Thank goodness I've done with love and
babies." (Dorothy laughed, perhaps at a mental vision of the houses in
Ludlow and Cromwell Gardens.) "Anyway, now they are here somebody's got
to look after them. They may as well be healthy...."

She mused, and Dorothy reached for other letters.

Lady Tasker's additions to her responsibilities usually began in this
way. Dorothy had very little doubt that presently little Dot also would
be handed like a parcel to some man or other coming home on leave, and
Lady Tasker would send to the makers for yet another cot.... Therefore,
pushing aside her last letter, she exclaimed almost crossly, "I _do_
think it's selfish of Aunt Eliza! There she is, with Spurrs all to
herself, and she never once thinks that Jack might like to send Dot to
England!"

"Neither would I if I had my time over again," said Lady Tasker
resolutely. "You needn't look like that--I wouldn't. Cromwell Gardens is
past praying for, and in another year there won't be a stick at the
Brear that's fit to be seen. The next batch I certainly intend to charge
for. I'm on the brink of the poorhouse as it is."

This time it was Dorothy who mused. She was a calculating young woman;
the wife of His Impudence had to be; and she was far too shrewd to
suppose for a moment that her aunt could ever escape her destiny, which
was to be imposed upon by her own flesh and blood while hardening her
heart against the rest of the world. Dorothy, and not Stan, had had to
keep that flat going, and the flat before it; unless Fortune & Brooks
turned up trumps--a rather remote contingency--she would have to
continue to do so; and she was quite casuistical enough to argue that,
while Aunt Eliza might keep her old Spurrs, Aunt Grace might properly be
victimized because Dorothy loved Aunt Grace. Therefore there were
musings in Dorothy's wide-angle blue eyes ... musings that only the
sound of a key in the outer lock interrupted.

"Hallo, that's His Impudence," Dorothy exclaimed. "I do hope he hasn't
brought anybody. I shall simply rush out if he has."

Stan hadn't. He came in at the door drawing off a pair of lemon-yellow
gloves, said "Hallo, Aunt Grace," and rang the bell. He next said,
"Hallo, Dot! Been out? Beastly smelly in town. No, I've not had tea.
Look here, you've eaten all the hot cakes; never mind; bread and
butter'll do, if you've got some jam--no, honey. Got an invitation for
you, Dot, to lunch, with Ferrers on Monday; can't you buck up and manage
it?... Well, Aunt Grace, what brings you up here? Bit off your beat,
isn't it? Awfully rude of me, I know, but it is a long way. Glad I came
in."

"I've been to see the Cosimo Pratts," said Lady Tasker.

Dorothy looked suddenly up.

"Oh, auntie, you didn't tell me that!" she exclaimed.

A grin lighted up Stan's good-looking face.

"Oh? How many annas to the rupee are they to-day? By Jove, they are a
rum lot up there! Any new prime cuts?"

"Stan, you mustn't!" said Dorothy, peremptorily. "Please don't! Don't
listen to him, auntie; he's outrageous."

But His Impudence went on, with his mouth full of bread and butter.

"I've only seen the fore-quarter and the trotter, but you see I haven't
been over the house. Did they show you the Bluebeard's Chamber? What is
there there? By Jove, it's like Jezebel and the dogs.... But I don't
suppose they'll have me up again. There was some chap there, and I got
him by himself and told him he didn't know what he was talking about;
rotten of me, I know, but you should have heard him! Anarchist--Votes
for Women--all the lot; whew!... More tea, Ruth, please----"

Lady Tasker felt the years beginning to ebb away from her again. She
had remembered the hammock and the Invisible Men.

"I hope he was--English?" she murmured.

"Who?"

"The man you say you were rude to."

"English? Yes. Why? English? Rather! No end of gas about the Empire.
Said it was on a wrong basis or something. Why do you ask?"

"I only wondered."

But Stan was perspicacious; he could see anything that was as closely
thrust under his nose as is the comparative rarity of the Englishman in
Hampstead. He laughed.

"Oh, that! We're used to that. We've all sorts up here.... By Jove, I
believe Aunt Grace has been thrown into the arms of a Jap or a nigger or
something! Well, if that doesn't put the lid on!... So of course you
wondered what I meant by the fore-quarter and Jezebel and the dogs.
Those are just some things they used to have.... Well, I'll tell you
what you can do about it next time, auntie. You talk to 'em about
Ludlow. That shuts 'em up. Sore spot, Ludlow; they're trying to forget
about Ye Olde Englysshe Maypole, and that row with old Wynn-Jenkins, and
old Griffin letting his hair grow and reciting those poems. They look at
you as if it never happened. But they didn't shut _me_ up."

"You seem to have been thoroughly rude," Lady Tasker remarked.

"Well, dash it all, they ask for it. She used to be some sort of a pal
of Dorothy's----"

"She's very clever, and she was always very kind to me," Dorothy
interpolated over her sewing.

"When, I should like to know? But never mind. I was going to say, Aunt
Grace, that I've had to put my foot down. I won't have the Bits meeting
those kids of Pratt's. It's perfectly awful; why, those children know as
much as I do--and I know a bit! They'll be wanting latchkeys presently.
That day I was up there I heard one of 'em say that little boys weren't
the same as little girls. I forget how she put it, but she knew all
right; think of that, at about four! I wish I could remember the words,
but it was a bit thick for four!----"

A restrained smile, perhaps at the thought of Stan putting his foot
down, had crossed Lady Tasker's face; no doubt it was part of the smile
that she presently said, toying with the little gold-rimmed glass,
"Quite right, Stan.... Anything fresh about Fortune & Brooks? Dorothy
told me."

Stan's feelings on any subject were never so strong but that at a word
he was quite ready to talk about something else. "Eh? Rather!" he said
heartily, and went straightway off at score.--New? Yes. He'd seen old
Brooks the day before; not a bad chap at all really; and they quite
understood one another, he and old Brooks. He'd told Stan things, old
Brooks had, (which Stan wasn't at liberty to disclose) about the
commissions they paid for really first-class introductions, things that
would astonish Lady Tasker!----

"You see," he explained, "as Brooks himself said, they can't afford to
advertise in the ordinary way; _infra dig_. They'd actually lose custom
if they put an ad. in the 'Daily Spec.' I don't mean that they don't put
a thing now and then into the right kind of paper, but just being
mentioned in general conversation, at dinners and tamashas and so on,
that's _their_ kind of advertisement! For instance--but just a minute,
and I'll show you----"

He jumped up and dashed out of the room. Lady Tasker took advantage of
his absence to give a discreet glance at Dorothy, but Dorothy's head
remained bent demurely over her work. Stan returned, carrying a small
parcel.

"Here we are," he said, unfastening the package: and then suddenly his
voice and manner changed remarkably. He took a small pot from the parcel
and set it on the palm of his left hand; he pointed at it with the
index-finger of his right hand; and a bright and poster-like smile
overspread his face. He spoke slightly loudly, and very, very
persuasively.

"Now I have here, Aunt Grace, one of our newest lines--Pickled Banyan.
Now I'm not going to ask you to take my word for it; I want you to try
it for yourself. It isn't what this man says or what that man says;
tasting's believing. Give me your teaspoon."

"My _dear_ Stan!" the astonished Lady Tasker gasped.

"We're selling a great many of this particular article, and are
prepared to stake our reputation on it," Stan went on. "Established
1780; more than One Hundred Gold Medals. Those are our credentials.
Those are what we lose.--Pass your spoon."

Lady Tasker was rigid. Perhaps Stan would have been better advised to
cast his spell over those who were going up in the world, and not on
those who, like themselves, were coming down or barely holding their
own. Again he went on, pointing engagingly at the small pot.

"But just try it," he urged, pushing the pot under his aunt's nose. "It
isn't what this man says or--I mean, it doesn't cost you anything to try
it. A free trial invited. Here's the recipe, look, on the
bottle--carefully selected Banyans, best cane sugar, lemon-juice refined
by a patent process, and a touch of tabasco. The makers' guarantee on
every label--none genuine without it--have a go!"

With a "Really, Stan!" Lady Tasker had turned away in her chair,
revolted. "And do you expect to go to a house again after an exhibition
like that?" she asked over her shoulder.

"Eh?" said Stan, a little discomfited. "Too much salesman about it,
d'you think? Brooks warned me about that. Fact is, he had a chap in as a
sort of object-lesson. This chap came in--I didn't know they had schools
and classes for this kind of thing, did you?--this chap came in, and I
was supposed to be somebody who didn't want the stuff at any price, and
he'd got to sell it to me whether I wanted it or not, and old Brooks
said to me, 'Now ask him how much the beastly muck is,' and a lot of
facers like that, and so we'd a set-to.... Then, when the fellow had
gone, he said he'd had him in just to show me how _not_ to do it.... But
he was an ingenious sort of beast, and I can't get his talk out of my
head. I'd thought of having a shot at it to-night, but perhaps I'd
better practise a bit more first. Thanks awfully for the criticism, Aunt
Grace. If you don't mind I'll practise on you as we go along. I'm dining
with a man to-night, but I'd better be sure of my ground.--Now what
about having the Bits in, Dot?"

"I think I hear them coming," said Dorothy, whose demureness had not
given as much as a flicker. Perhaps she was wondering whether she could
spare the sovereign His Impudence would presently ask her for.

The door opened, and Noel and Jackie stood there with a nurse behind
them. Noel walked stoutly in. Jackie, not yet very firm on his pins,
bumbled after him like an overladen bee.

III

THE "NOVUM"

Stan was quite right in supposing that the Cosimo Pratts wished to
forget all about the Ludlow experiment that had disturbed the Shropshire
country-side a year or more before, but he was wrong in the reason he
assigned them. They were not in the least ashamed of it. As a stage in
their intellectual development, the experiment had been entirely in its
place. Especially in Mrs. Pratt's career--as an old student of the
McGrath School of Art, a familiar (for a time) with Poverty in cheap
studios, the painter of the famous Feminist picture "Barrage," and so
forward--had this been true. Cosimo, in "The Life and Work of Miss Amory
Towers," a labour to which he devoted himself intermittently, pointed
out the naturalness and inevitability of the sequence with real
eloquence. Step had led to step, and the omission of any one step would
have ruined the whole.

But nobody with work still in them lingers long over the past. They had
dropped the task of regenerating rural England, or rather had handed it
over to others, only when it had been pointed out to them that capacity
so rare as theirs ought to be directed to larger ends. One evening
there had put in an appearance at one of the Ludlow meetings--a meeting
of the Hurdy-gurdy Octette, which afterwards gave instrumental
performances with such success at Letchworth, Bushey and Golder's
Green--Mr. Strong, the original founder and present editor of the "Novum
Organum," or, as it was usually called, the "Novum." Mr. Strong, as it
happened, was the man whom the scatter-brained Stan had met at The
Witan, and of whom he had expected that impossibility of any man
whomsoever--an admission that he did not know what he was talking about.
At that time Mr. Strong had been perambulating the country with a Van,
holding meetings and distributing literature; and whatever Mr. Strong's
other failings might have been, nobody had ever said of him that he did
not recognize a good thing when he saw it. The Cause itself had served
as an introduction between him and Cosimo; it had also been a sufficient
reason for his inviting himself to Cosimo's house for a couple of days
and remaining there for three weeks; and then he had got rid of the Van
and had come again. He was a rapturous talker, when there was an end to
be gained, and he had expressed himself as strongly of the opinion that,
magnificent a field for the sowing of the good seed as the country-side
was, there was simply stupendous propaganda to be done in London. He
knew (he had gone on) that Mrs. Pratt would forgive him (he had a
searching blue eye and an actor's smile) if he appeared for a moment to
speak disparagingly of what he might call the mere graces of the
Movement, (alluring as these were in Mrs. Pratt's capable and very
pretty hands); it was not disparagement really; he only meant that these
garlands would burgeon a hundred-fold if the stern and thankless work
was got out of the way first. Mr. Strong had a valuable trick of
suddenly making those searching blue eyes of his more searching, and of
switching off the actor's smile altogether; both of these things had
happened as he had gone on to point out that what the Cause was really
languishing for was a serious and responsible organ; and then, and only
then, when they had got (so to speak) the diapason, there would be time
enough for the trills and appoggiaturas of the Hurdy-gurdy Band.

Before the end of Mr. Strong's second visit Cosimo had put up the
greater part of the money for the "Novum."

So you see just where the feather-pated Stan was wrong. The Cosimo
Pratts were not outfaced from anything; they had merely seen a new and
heralding light. They did not so much recede from the Rural Experiment,
and discussions of the Suffrage, and eating buns on the floor at
assemblies of the Poets' Club, and a hundred and twenty other such
things, as become as it were translated. They still shed over these
activities the benignity of their approval, but from on high now. Amory
could no longer be expected actually to "run" the Suffrage Shop
herself--Dickie Lemesurier did that; nor the "Eden" (the new offshoot
off the Lettuce Grill)--that she left to Katie Deedes; nor the
"Lectures on Love" Agency--that was quite safe in the hands of her
friends, Walter Wyron and Laura Beamish. Amory merely shed approval
down. She was _hors concours_. She ... but you really must read Cosimo's
book. You will find it all there (or at any rate a good deal of it).

For Amory Pratt, in so far as Cosimo was the proprietor of the "Novum,"
was the proprietor of the proprietor of a high-class weekly review that
was presently going to put the two older parties out of business
entirely. She had more than a Programme now; she had a Policy. She had
crossed the line into the _haute politique_. Her At Homes were already
taking on the character of the political salon, and between herself and
the wives of ministers and ambassadors were differences, in degree
perhaps, but not in kind. And that even these differences should become
diminished she had taken on, ever since her settling-down at The Witan,
slight, but significant, new attitudes and condescensions. She was
kinder and more gracious to her sometime equals than before. She gave
them encouraging looks, as much as to say that they need not be afraid
of her. But it was quite definitely understood that when she took Mr.
Strong apart under the copper beech or retired with him into the studio
at the back of the house, she must on no account be disturbed.--Mr.
Strong, by the way, always dressed in the same Norfolk jacket, red tie
and soft felt hat, and his first caution to Cosimo and Amory had been
that Brimby, the novelist, was an excellent chap, but not always to be
taken very seriously.

Amory did not often put in an appearance at the "Novum's" offices. This
was not that she thought it more befitting that Mr. Strong should wait
on her, for she went about a good deal with Mr. Strong, and did not
always trouble him to come up to The Witan to fetch her. It was, rather,
if the truth must be told, that she found the offices rather dingy. Her
senses loved the newly-machined smell of each new issue of the paper,
but not the mingled odour of dust and stale gum and Virginia cigarettes
of the place whence it came. Moreover, the premises were rather
difficult to find. They lay at the back of Charing Cross Road. You
dodged into an alley between a second-hand bookseller's and a shop where
electric-light fittings were sold, entered a narrow yard, and, turning
to the right into a gas-lighted cavern where were stacked hundreds and
hundreds of sandwich-boards, some back-and-fronts, some with the iron
forks for the bearer's shoulders, you ascended by means of a dark
staircase to the second floor. There, at the end of a passage which some
poster-artist had half papered with the specimens of his art, you came
upon the three rooms. The first of these was the general office; the
second was Mr. Strong's private office; and the third was a room which,
the "Novum" having no need of it, Mr. Strong had thought he might as
well use as a rent-free bedroom as not. The door of this room Mr. Strong
always kept locked. It was more prudent. He was supposed to live
somewhere in South Kentish Town, and gave this address to certain of
his correspondents. The letters of these reached him sooner or later,
through the agency of a barber, in whose window was a placard, "Letters
may be addressed here."

Perhaps, too, the extraordinary people who visited Mr. Strong in the way
of business helped to keep Amory away. For an endless succession of the
queerest people came--contributors, and would-be contributors, and
friends of the Cause who "were just passing and thought they'd look in,"
and artists seeking a paper with the courage to print really stinging
caricatures, and article-writers who were out of a job only because they
dared to tell the truth about things, and Russian political exiles, and
Armenians who wanted passages to America, and Eurasians who wanted
rifles, and tramps, and poets, and the boy from the milkshop who brought
in the bread and butter and eggs for Mr. Strong's breakfast. And out of
these strange elements had grown up the paper's literary style. This was
unique in London journalism: philosophical, yet homely; horizon-wide of
outlook, yet never without hope that the shining thing in the gutter
might prove to be a jewel; and, despite its habitual omissions of the
prefix "Mr." from the names of statesmen, and its playful allusions to
this personage's nose or the waist-measurement of the other, with more
than a little of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine about it.
"Damn" and "Hell" were words the "Novum" commonly used. Once Amory had
demurred at the use of a word stronger still. But Mr. Strong had merely
replied, "If I can say it to you I think I can say it to them." He was
no truckler to his proprietors, and anyhow, the man whom the word had
encarnadined was only a colliery-owner.

The "Novum" had hardly been six weeks old when a certain desire on
Amory's part to make experiment of her power had, putatively at any
rate, lost it money. The little collision of wills had come about over
the question of whether the "Novum" should admit advertisements to its
columns or not. Now as most people know, that is a question that seldom
arises in journalism. A question far more likely to arise is whether the
advertisements can be got. But when a journal sets out to do something
that hitherto has not only not been done, but has not even been
attempted, you will admit that the case is special. The experience of
other papers is useless; their economics do not apply. What did apply
was the fact that Mrs. Pratt had been an artist, looked on sheets of
paper from another angle than that of the mere journalist and literary
man, and loved symmetry and could not endure unsightliness. Besides, "No
Compromise" was the "Novum's" motto, and what was the good of having a
motto like that if you compromised in the very form of your
expression?... A "shoulder-piece," "_The Little Mary Emollient_," had
brought out all Mrs. Pratt's finer artistic instincts. Here was a
journal consecrated to a great and revolutionary cause, and the very
first thing to catch a reader's eye was, not only an advertisement, but
a facetious advertisement at that--a Pill, without a Pill's robust
familiarity--a commercial cackle issuing from the "Novum's" august and
oracular mouth.... For the first time in her life Mrs. Pratt had wielded
the blue pencil, tearing the rubbishy proof-paper in the energy with
which she did so. Mr. Strong's blue eyes, bluer for the contrast with
his red knot of a tie, had watched her face, but he had said nothing. He
was willing to humour her....

But when all was said and done he was an editor, and no sooner was
Amory's back turned than he had restored the announcement. The paper had
appeared, and there had been a row....

"Then I appeal to Pratt," Mr. Strong had said, with all the good-nature
in the world. "I take it the 'Novum's' a serious enterprise, and not
just a hobby?"

Cosimo had glanced a little timidly at his wife. Then he had replied
thoughtfully.

"I don't know. I'm not so sure. That is, I'm not so sure it oughtn't to
be a serious enterprise _and_ a hobby. The world's best work is always
done for love--that's another way of calling it a hobby--you see what I
mean--Nietzsche has something about it somewhere or other--or if he
hasn't Ruskin has----"

Any number of effective replies had been open to Mr. Strong, but he had
used none of them. Instead his eyes had given as it were a flick to
Amory's face. The proprietor's proprietor had continued indignantly.

"It ruins the whole effect! It's _unspeakably_ vulgar! After that
glowing, that impassioned Foreword--_this_! Hardly a month ago that
lovely apostrophe to Truth Naked--that beautiful image of her stark and
innocent on our banners but with a forest of bright bayonets bristling
about her--and now _this_! It's revolting!"

But Mr. Strong had himself written that impassioned Foreword, and knew
all about it. Again he had given his proprietor's wife that quietly
humouring look.

"Do you mean that the 'Novum's' going to refuse advertisements?"

"I mean that I blue-pencilled that one myself."

"And what about the others--the 'Eden' and the Suffrage Shop and Wyron's
Lectures?"

"They're different. They _are_ the Cause. You said yourself that the
'Novum' was going to be a sort of generalissimo, and these the brigades
or whatever they're called. They are, at any rate, doing the Work. Is
_that_ doing any Work, I should like to know?"

Mr. Strong had refrained from flippancy.--"I see what you mean," he had
replied equably. "At the same time, if you're going to refuse
advertisements the thing's going to cost a good deal more money."

"Well?" Amory had replied, as who might say, "Has money been refused you
yet?"

Strong had given a compliant shrug--"All right. That means I censor the
advertisements, I suppose. New industry. Very well. The 'Eden' and
Wyron's Lectures and Week-end Cottages and the Plato Press only, then.
I'll strike out that '_Platinum: False Teeth Bought_.' But I warn you it
will cost more."

"Never mind that."

And so the incident had ended.

But perhaps Mrs. Pratt's sensitiveness of eye was not the only cause of
the rejection of that offending advertisement. Another reason might have
lain in her present relation with her sometime fellow-student of the
McGrath School of Art, Dorothy Tasker. For that relation had suffered a
change since the days when the two girls had shared a shabby day-studio
in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. At that time, now five years ago, Amory Towers
had been thrust by circumstances into a position of ignoble envy of her
friend. She had been poor, and Dorothy's people (or so she had supposed)
very, very wealthy. True, poor Dorothy, without as much as a single
spark of talent, had nevertheless buckled to, and, in various devious
ways, had contrived to suck a parasitic living out of the wholesome body
of real art; none the less, Amory had conceived her friend to be of the
number of those who play at hardship and independence with a fully
spread table at home for them to return to when they are tired of the
game. But the case was entirely changed now. Amory frankly admitted that
she had been mistaken in one thing, namely, that if those people of
Dorothy's had more money, they had also more claims upon it, and so were
relatively poor. Amory herself was now very comfortably off indeed. By
that virtue and good management which the envious call luck, she had
now money, Cosimo's money, to devote to the regeneration of the world.
Dorothy, married to the good-tempered and shiftless Stan, sometimes did
not know which way to turn for the overdue quarter's rent.

Now among her other ways of making ends meet Dorothy had for some years
done rather well out of precisely that kind of work which Amory refused
to allow the "Novum" to touch--advertisements. She had wormed herself
into the services of this firm and that as an advertisement-adviser. But
her contracts had begun in course of time to lapse, one or two fluky
successes had not been followed up, and two children had further
tightened things. Nor had Stan been of very much help. Amory despised
Stan. She thought him, not a man, but a mere mouth to be fed. Real men,
like Cosimo, always had money, and Amory was quite sure that, even if
Cosimo had not inherited a fortune from his uncle, he would still have
contrived to make himself the possessor of money in some other way.

Therefore Amory was even kinder to Dorothy than she was to Dickie
Lemesurier of the Suffrage Shop, to Katie Deedes of the "Eden," and to
Laura Beamish and Walter Wyron, who ran the "Lectures on Love." But
somehow--it was a little difficult to say exactly how, but there it
undoubtedly was--Dorothy did not accept her kindnesses in quite the
proper spirit. One or two she had even rejected--gently, Amory was bound
to admit, but still a rejection. For example, there had been that little
rebuff (to call it by its worst name for a moment) about the governess.
Amory had, in Miss Britomart Belchamber, the most highly-qualified
governess for Corin and Bonniebell that money and careful search had
been able to obtain; Dorothy lived less than a quarter of an hour's walk
away; it would have been just as easy for Britomart to teach four
children as to teach two; but Dorothy had twisted and turned and had
finally said that she had decided that she couldn't put Amory to the
trouble. And again, when the twins had had their party, Amory would
positively have _liked_ Noel and Jackie to come and dance "Twickenham
Ferry" in those spare costumes and to join in those songs from the Book
of Caroline Ditties; but again an excuse had been made. And half a dozen
similar things had driven Amory to the conclusion, sadly against her
will, that the Taskers were taking up that ridiculous, if not actually
hostile attitude, of the poor who hug their pride. It was not nice
between old friends. Amory could say with a clear conscience that she
had not refused Dorothy's help in the days when the boot had been on the
other leg. She was not resentful, but really it did look very much like
putting on airs.

But of course that stupid Stanhope Tasker was at the bottom of it all.
Amory did not so much mind his not having liked her from the first; she
would have been sorry to let a trifle like that ruffle her equanimity;
but it was evident that he did not in the least realize his position.
She was quite sure, in the first place, that he couldn't afford (or
rather Dorothy couldn't afford) to pay eighty pounds for that flat,
plus another twenty for the little office they had annexed and used as a
nursery. And in the next place he dressed absurdly above his position.
Cosimo dressed for hygiene and comfort, in cellular things and things
made of non-irritant vegetable fibre; but those absurdly modish jackets
and morning-coats of Stan's had, unless Amory was very much mistaken, to
be bought at the expense of real necessaries. And so with their
hospitality. In that too, they tried to cut a dash and came very near to
making themselves ridiculous. Amory didn't want to interfere; she
couldn't plan and be wise for everybody; she had her own affairs to
attend to; but she was quite sure that the Taskers would have done
better to regulate their hospitality as hospitality was regulated at The
Witan--that was, to make no special preparation, but to have the door
always open to their friends. But no; the Taskers must make a splash.
They must needs "invite" people and be a little stand-offish about
people coming uninvited. They were "At home" and "Not at home" for all
the world as if they had been important people. But Amory would have
thought herself very stupid to be taken in by all this ceremony. For
example, the last time she and Cosimo had been asked to the flat to
dinner she knew that they had been "worked off" only because the Taskers
had had the pheasants given by somebody, and very likely the fish too.
And it would have been just like Stan Tasker's insolence had he asked
them because he _knew_ that the Pratts did not eat poor beasties that
should have been allowed to live because of their lovely plumes, nor
the pretty speckled creatures that had done no harm to the destroyer who
had taken them with a hook out of their pretty stream.

But, kind to her old friend as Amory was always ready to be, she did not
feel herself called upon to go out of her way to be very nice to her
friend's husband. He had no right to expect it after his rudeness to
Edgar Strong about the "Novum." For it had been about the "Novum" that
Stan had given Strong that talking-to. Much right (Amory thought hotly)
he had to talk! Just because he consorted with men who counted their
money in rupees and thought nothing of shouldering their darker-skinned
brothers off the pavement, he thought he was entitled to put an editor
into his place! But the truth, of course, was, that that very
familiarity prevented him from really knowing anything about these
questions at all. Because an order was established, he had not
imagination enough to see how it could have been anything different. His
mind (to give it that name) was of the hidebound, official type, and too
many limited intelligences of that kind stopped the cause of Imperial
progress to-day. Or rather, they tried to stop it, and perhaps thought
they were stopping it; but really, little as they suspected it, they
were helping more than they knew. A pig-headed administration does
unconsciously help when, out of its own excesses, a divine discontent is
bred. Mr. Suwarree Prang had been eloquent on that very subject one
afternoon not very long ago. A charming man! Amory had listened from
her hammock, rapt. Mr. Prang did the "Indian Review" for the "Novum," in
flowery but earnest prose; and as he actually was Indian, and did not
merely hobnob with a few captains and subalterns home on leave, it was
to be supposed that he would know rather more of the subject than Mr.
Stanhope Tasker!----

And Mr. Stanhope Tasker had had the cheek to tell Mr. Strong that he
didn't know what he was talking about!

Amory felt that she could never be sufficiently thankful for the chance
that had thrown Mr. Strong in her way. She had always secretly felt that
her gifts were being wasted on such minor (but still useful) tasks as
the "Eden" Restaurant and the "Love Lectures" Agency. But her personal
exaltation over Katie Deedes and the others had caused her no joy. What
had given her joy had been the immensely enlarged sphere of her
usefulness; that was it, not the odious vanity of leadership, but the
calm and responsible envisaging of a task for which not one in ten
thousand had the vision and courage and strength. And Edgar Strong had
shown her these things. Of course, if he had put them in these words she
might have suspected him of trying to flatter her; but as a matter of
fact he had not said a single word about it. He had merely allowed her
to see for herself. That was his way: to all-but-prove a thing--to take
it up to the very threshold of demonstration--and then apparently
suddenly to lose interest in it. And that in a way was his weakness as
an editor. Amory, whom three or four wieldings of the blue pencil had
sufficed to convince that there was nothing in journalism that an
ordinary intelligence could not master in a month, realized this. She
herself, it went without saying, always saw at once exactly what Mr.
Strong meant; she personally liked those abrupt and smiling stops that
left Mr. Strong's meaning as it were hung up in the air; but it was a
mistake to suppose that everybody was as clever as she and Mr. Strong.
"I's" had to be dotted and "t's" crossed for the multitude. But it was
at that point that Mr. Strong always became almost languid.

It was inevitable that the man who had thus revealed to her, after a
single glance at her, such splendid and unsuspected capacities within
herself, should exercise a powerful fascination over Amory. If he had
seen all this in her straight away (as he assured her he had), then he
was a man not lightly to be let go. He might be the man to show her even
greater things yet. He puzzled her; but he appeared to understand her;
and as both of them understood everybody else, she was aware of a
challenge in his society that none other of her set afforded her. He
could even contradict her and go unsacked. Prudent people, when they
sack, want to know what they are sacking, and Amory did not know.
Therefore Mr. Strong was quite sure of his job until she should find
out.

Another thing that gave Mr. Strong this apparently off-hand hold over
her was the confidential manner in which he had warned her not to take
Mr. Brimby, the novelist, too seriously. For without the warning Amory,
like a good many other people, might have committed precisely that
error.... But when Mr. Brimby, taking Amory apart one day, had expressed
in her ear a gentle doubt whether Mr. Strong was quite "sound" on
certain important questions, Amory had suddenly seen. Mr. Strong had
"cut" one of Mr. Brimby's poignantly sorrowful sketches of the East
End--seen through Balliol eyes--and Mr. Brimby was resentful. She did
not conceal from herself that he might even be a little envious of Mr.
Strong's position. He might have been wiser to keep his envy to himself,
for, while mere details of routine could hardly expect to get Amory's
personal attention, there was one point on which Mr. Strong was quite
"sound" enough for Amory--his sense of her own worth and of how that
worth had hitherto been wasted. And Mr. Strong had not been ill-natured
about Mr. Brimby either. He had merely twinkled and put Amory on her
guard. And because he appeared to have been right in this instance,
Amory was all the more disposed to believe in his rightness when he gave
her a second warning. This was about Wilkinson, the Labour Member. He
was awfully fond of dear old Wilkie, he said; he didn't know a man more
capable in some things than Wilkie was; but it would be foolish to deny
that he had his limitations. He wasn't fluid enough; wanted things too
much cut-and-dried; was a little inclined to mistake violence for
strength; and of course the whole point about the "Novum" was that it
was fluid....

"In fact," Mr. Strong concluded, his wary blue eyes ceasing suddenly to
hold Amory's brook-brown ones and taking a reflective flight past her
head instead, "for a paper like ours--I'm hazarding this, you
understand, and keep my right to reconsider it--I'm not sure that a
certain amount of fluidity isn't a Law...."

Amory nodded. She thought it excellently put.

THE STONE WALL

Amory sometimes thought, when she took her bird's-eye-view of the
numerous activities that found each its voice in its proper place in the
columns of the "Novum," that she would have allowed almost any of them
to perish for lack of support rather than the Wyron's "Lectures on
Love." She admitted this to be a weakness in herself, a sneaking
fondness, no more; but there it was--just that one blind spot that mars
even the clearest and most piercing vision. And she always smiled when
Mr. Strong tried to show this weakness of hers in the light of a merit.

"No, no," she always said, "I don't defend it. Twenty things are more
important really, but I can't help it. I suppose it's because we know
all about Laura and Walter themselves."

"Perhaps so," Mr. Strong would musingly concede.

Anybody who was anybody knew all about Laura Beamish and Walter Wyron
and a certain noble defeat in their lives that was to be accounted as
more than a hundred ordinary victories. That almost historic episode had
just shown everybody who was anybody what the world's standards were
really worth. Hitherto the Wyrons have been spoken of both as a married
couple and as "Walter Wyron" and "Laura Beamish" separately; let the
slight ambiguity now be cleared up.

Mrs. Cosimo Pratt became on occasion Miss Amory Towers for reasons that
began and ended in her profession as a painter; and everybody who was
anybody was as well aware that Miss Amory Towers, the painter of the
famous feminist picture "Barrage," was in reality Mrs. Cosimo Pratt, as
the great mass of people who were nobody knew that Miss Elizabeth
Thompson, the painter of "The Roll Call," was actually Lady Butler. But
not so with the Wyrons. Reasons, not of business, nor yet of fame, but
of a burning and inextinguishable faith, had led to their noble
equivocation. Deeply seated in the hearts both of Walter and of Laura
had lain a passionate non-acceptance of the merely parroted formula of
the Wedding Service. So searching and fundamental had this been that by
the time their various objections had been disposed of little had
remained that had seemed worth bothering about; and in one sense they
had not bothered about it. True, in another sense they had bothered, and
that was precisely where the defeat came in; but that did not dim the
splendour of the attempt. To come without further delay to the point,
the Wyrons had married, under strong protest, in the ordinary everyday
way, Laura submitting to the momentary indignity of a ring; but
thereafter they had magnificently vindicated the New Movement (in that
one aspect of it) by not saying a word about the ceremony of their
marriage to anybody--no, not even to the people who were somebody. Then
they had flown off to the Latin Quarter.

It had not been in the Latin Quarter, however, that the true character
of their revolt had first shown. Perhaps--nobody knows--their relation
had not been singular enough there. Perhaps--there were people base
enough to whisper this--they had feared the singularity of "letting on."
It is easy to do in the Boul' Mich' as the Boul' Mich' does. The real
difficulties begin when you try to do in London what London permits only
as long as you do it covertly.

And if there had been a certain covertness about their behaviour when,
after a month, they had returned, what a venial and pardonable
subterfuge, to what a tremendous end! Amory herself, up to then, had not
had a larger conception. For while the Wyrons had secretly married
simply and solely in order that their offspring should not lie under a
stigma, their overt lives had been one impassioned and beautiful protest
against any assumption whatever on the part of the world of a right to
make rules for the generation that was to follow. No less a gospel than
this formed the substance of those Lectures of Walter's; great as the
number of the born was, his mission was the protection of a greater
number still. The best aspects both of legitimacy and of illegitimacy
were to be stereoscoped in the perfect birth. And he now had, in quite
the strict sense of the word, a following. The same devoted faces
followed him from the Lecture at the Putney Baths on the Monday to that
at the Caxton Hall on the Thursday, from his ascending the platform at
the Hampstead Town Hall on the Tuesday to his addressing of a
garden-party from under the copper-beech at The Witan on the Sunday
afternoon. And in course of time the faithfulness of the followers was
rewarded. They graduated, so to speak, from the seats in the body of the
building to the platform itself. There they supported Laura, and gave
her a countenance that she no longer needed (for she had earned her
right to wear her wedding-ring openly now), and flocked about the
lecturer afterwards, not as about a mere man, but rather as seeing in
him the physician, the psychologist, the expert, the helper, and the
setter of crooked things straight that he was.

As a lecturer--may we say as a prophet?--Walter had a manner original
and taking in the extreme. Anybody less sustained by his vision and less
upheld by his faith might have been a little tempted to put on "side,"
but not so Walter. Perhaps his familiarity with the stage--everybody
knew his father, Herman Wyron, of the New Greek Theatre--had taught him
the value of the large and simple statement of large and simple things;
anyhow, he did not so much lecture to his audiences as accompany them,
chattily and companionably, through the various windings of his subject.
With his hands thrust unaffectedly into the pockets of his knickers,
and a sort of sublimated "Well, here we are again" expression on his
face, he allayed his hearers' natural timidity before the magnitude of
his mission, and gave them a direct and human confab. on a subject that
returned as it were from its cycle of vastness to simple personal
experience again. His every sentence seemed to say, "Don't be afraid;
it's nothing really; soon you'll be as much at your ease in dealing with
these things as I am; just let me tell you an anecdote." No wonder Laura
held her long and muscular neck very straight above her hand-embroidered
yoke. Everybody understood that unless she adopted some sort of an
attitude her proper pride in such a married lover must show, which would
have been rather rubbing it in to the rest of her sex. So she booked
dates for new lectures almost nonchalantly, and, when the platform was
invaded at the end of the Lecture, or Walter stepped down to the level
of those below, she was there in person as the final demonstration of
how well these things actually would work as soon as Society had decided
upon some concerted action.

Corin and Bonniebell, Amory's twins, did not attend Walter's Lectures.
It was not deemed advisable to keep them out of bed so late at night.
But Miss Britomart Belchamber, the governess, could have passed--had in
fact passed--an examination in them. It had been Amory who, so to speak,
had set the paper. For it had been at one of the Lectures--the one on
"_The Future Race: Are We Making Manacles?_"--that Miss Belchamber had
first impressed Amory favourably. Amory had singled her out, first
because she wore the guarantee of Prince Eadmond's Collegiate
Institution--the leather-belted brown sleeveless djibbah with the
garment of fine buff fabric showing beneath it as the fruit of a roasted
chestnut shows when the rind splits--and secondly because of her
admirable physique. She was splendidly fair, straight as an athlete, and
could shut up her long and massive limbs in a wicker chair like a
clasp-knife; and for her movements alone it was almost a sin that
Walter's father could not secure her for the New Greek Society's revival
of "Europa" at the Choragus Theatre. And she was not too quick mentally.
That is not to say that she was a fool. What made Amory sure that she
was not a fool was that she herself was not instinctively attracted by
fools, and it was better that Miss Belchamber should be ductile under
the influence of Walter's ideas than that she should have just wit
enough to ask those stupid and conventional and so-called "practical"
questions that Walter always answered at the close of the evening as
patiently as if he had never heard them before. And Miss Belchamber told
the twins stories, and danced "Rufty Tufty," with them, and "Catching of
Quails," and was really cheap at her rather stiff salary. Cosimo loved
to watch her at "Catching of Quails." If the children did not grow up
with a love of beauty after that, he said, he gave it up. (The twins, by
the way, unconsciously served Amory as another example of Dorothy
Tasker's unreasonableness. As the mother of Noel and Jackie, Dorothy
seemed rather to fancy herself as an experienced woman. But Amory could
afford to smile at this pretension. There was a difference in age of a
year and more between Noel and Jackie. No doubt Dorothy knew a little,
but she, Amory, could have told her a thing or two).

On a Wednesday afternoon about a fortnight after Lady Tasker's visit to
The Witan, Amory walked the garden thoughtfully. The weather was growing
chilly, the hammock had been taken in, and her feet in the fallen leaves
made a melancholy sound. Cosimo had left her half an hour before;
certain points had struck him in the course of conversation which he
thought ought to be incorporated in the "_Life and Work_"; and it was a
rule at The Witan that nothing must ever be allowed to interfere with
the impulse of artistic creation. For the matter of that, Amory herself
was creating now, or at any rate was at the last preparatory stage that
immediately precedes creation. Presently she would have taken the plunge
and would be deep in the new number of the "Novum." For the moment she
was thinking of Mr. Strong.

As she tried to clear up exactly what place Mr. Strong had in her
thoughts she was struck by the dreadful tendency words and names and
definitions have to attach themselves to vulgar and ready-made
meanings--a tendency so strong that she had even caught herself more
than once jumping to a common conclusion. To take an example, though a
rather preposterous one. Had Dorothy, with one of her ridiculous
advertisements waiting to be done, confessed to her that instead of
setting about it she was thinking of a male person with a pair of alert
blue eyes and a curiously mobile and clean-cut mouth (not that it was
likely that Dorothy would have had the candour to make such a
confession)--well, Amory might have smiled just like anybody else. She
was not trying to make herself out any better than others. She was
candid about it, however, which they were often not.

Still, the trouble about her feeling for Mr. Strong was to find a word
for it that had not been vulgarized. She was, of course, exceedingly
interested in him, but that was not saying very much. She "liked" him,
too, but that again might mean anything. Her difficulty was that she
herself was so special; and so on second thoughts she might have been
right in giving an interpretation to Dorothy's actions, and Dorothy
quite wrong in giving the same interpretation to hers merely because the
data were the same.

Nor had Mr. Strong himself been able to help her very much when, a
couple of days before, she had put the question to him, earnestly and
without hateful false shame.

"What _is_ this relation of ours?" she had asked him, point-blank and
fearlessly.

"Eh?" Mr. Strong had replied, a little startled.

"There _must_ be a relation of some sort between every two people who
come into contact. I'm just wondering exactly what ours _is_."

Then Mr. Strong had knitted his brows and had said, presently, "I
see.... Have you read '_The Tragic Comedians_?'"--Amory had not, and the
copy of the book which she had immediately ordered had not come yet. And
then she too had knitted her brows. She had caught the trick from him.

"I suppose that what it really comes to is knowing _yourself_," she had
mused; and at that Mr. Strong had given her a quick approving look,
almost as if he said that if she put in her thumb in the same place
again she might pull out a plum very well worth having.

"And not," Amory had continued, curiously heartened, "anything about the
other person at all."

"Good, good," Mr. Strong had applauded under his breath; "have you
Edward Carpenter's book in the house, by the way?... Never mind: I'll
send you my copy."

He had sent it. It was in Amory's hand now. She had discovered that it
had a catching and not easily identifiable smell of its own, of Virginia
cigarettes and damp and she knew not what else, all mingled; and somehow
the smell seemed quite as much an answer to the question she had asked
as anything in the book itself.

Nor, despite Walter's special knowledge of these indications, could she
go to the Wyrons for diagnosis and advice. For one thing, there was her
own position of high patronage to be considered; for another, splendidly
daring as the Wyrons' original protest had been, the Lectures had lately
begun to have a little the air of a shop, over the counter of which
admittedly valuable specifics were handed, but with a kind of "_And_ the
next article, please?" suspicion about it. Besides, the Wyrons, having
no children, had of necessity to "chic" a little in cases where children
formed a complicating element. Besides ... but anyway, Amory wasn't
going either to Laura Beamish or to Walter Wyron.

She made a charming picture as she walked slowly the length of the
privet hedge and then turned towards the copper beech again. Mr. Strong
had said that he liked her in that dress--an aluminium-grey one, very
simple and very expensive, worn with a handsome Indian shawl, a gift of
Mr. Prang's, the mellow colour of which "led up" to the glowing casque
of her hair; and she had smiled when Mr. Strong had added that Britomart
Belchamber's rough tabards and the half-gym costume in which she danced
"Rufty Tufty" would not have suited her, Amory, at all. Probably they
wouldn't--not as a regular thing. Cosimo liked those, especially when
the wearer was largish; indeed, it was one of Cosimo's humours to pose
as Britomart's admirer. But Amory was small, and never shut her limbs up
like a multiple-lever in a basket chair, but drew her skirt down a foot
or so below her toes instead whenever she sat down. She fancied, though
Mr. Strong had never used the word, that the "Novum's" editor found Miss
Belchamber just a little hoydenish.

Amory wished that something would bring Mr. Strong up that afternoon. It
was one of the days on which the editing of the "Novum" could take care
of itself, and besides, they would actually be editing it together. For
the next number but one--the forthcoming one was already passed--was to
be their most important utterance yet. It was to indicate clearly,
firmly and once for all, their Indian policy. The threatened failure of
the monsoon made the occasion urgent, and Mr. Suwarree Prang himself had
explained to Amory only the night before precisely what the monsoon was,
and how its failure would provide, from the point of view of those who
held that the present wicked regime of administration by the strong hand
was at last tottering to its fall, a providential opportunity. It had
struck Amory as wondrously romantic and strange that a meteorological
condition half-way round the world, in a place she had never seen,
should thus change the course of her quiet life in Hampstead; but,
properly considered, no one thing in this wonderful world was more
wonderful than another. It was Life, and Life, as she remembered to have
read somewhere or other, is for the Masters of it. And she was beginning
to find that after all these things only required a little confidence.
It was as easy to swim in six miles deep of water, like that place in
Cosimo's atlas of which the name escaped her for the moment, as it was
in six feet. And Mr. Prang had talked to her so long and so vividly
about India that she sometimes found it quite difficult to realize that
she had never been there.

Still wishing that Mr. Strong would come, she slowly left the garden
and entered the house. In the hall she paused for a moment, and a tender
little smile softened her face. She had stopped before the exquisite
casts of the foot and the arm. Pensively she took the foot up from the
console table, and then, coming to a resolution, she took the arm down
from its hook on the wall. After all, beautiful as she had to admit them
to be, the studio, and not the hall, was the proper place for them.

With the foot and Edward Carpenter in her left hand, and the plaster arm
hugged to her right breast, she walked along the passage and sought the
studio.

It was called the studio, and there certainly were canvases and easels
and other artists' paraphernalia there, but it was less used for
painting than as a room for sitting and smoking and tea and discussion.
It was a comfortable apartment. Rugs made islands on the thick cork
floor-covering, and among the rugs were saddlebag chairs, a long
adjustable chair, and a wide couch covered with faded tapestry. The room
was an annex of corrugated iron lined with matchboarding, but
electric-light fittings depended from the iron ties overhead, and in
place of an ordinary hearth was a sort of stage one, with an imitation
log of asbestos, which, when you put a match to it, broke into a licking
of blue and yellow gas-jets. The north window occupied the whole of the
garden end, and, facing it, was the large cartoon for Amory's unfinished
allegorical picture, "_The Triumph of Humane Government_." High up and
just within the door was the bell that answered to the button outside.

Amory was putting down the casts on a Benares tray when the ringing of
this bell startled her. But as it rang in the kitchen also, she did not
move to answer it. She stood listening, the fingers of one hand to her
lips, those of the other still resting on the plaster shoulder. Then she
heard a voice, and a moment later there came a tap at the door.

It was Mr. Strong.

He advanced, and did a thing he had not done before--lifted the hand she
extended to his lips and then let it drop again. But Amory was not
surprised. It was merely a new and natural expression of the homage he
had never concealed, and even had Amory been vain enough to suppose that
it meant anything more, the briskness of the "Good afternoon" that
followed it would have disabused her. "Glad I found you," Mr. Strong
said. "I wanted to see you. Cosimo in?"

Her husband was always Cosimo to him, but in speaking to herself he used
no name at all. It was as if he hesitated to call her Amory, and refused
to call her Mrs. Pratt. Even "Miss Towers" he had only used once, and
that was some time ago.

Amory's fingers left the cast, and Mr. Strong walked towards the
asbestos log.--"May I?" he said, drawing forth a packet of Virginia
cigarettes; and afterwards he put the match with which he lighted one of
the cigarettes to the log. Amory drew up a small square footstool, and
put her elbows on her knees and her interwoven fingers beneath her
chin. Mr. Strong examined the end of his cigarette, and thrust his chin
down into his red tie and his hands deep into his trousers pockets. Then
he seemed to plunge into thought.

Suddenly he shot a glance at Amory, and said abruptly, "I suppose you've
talked over the Indian policy with Cosimo?"

It was nice and punctilious of him, the way he always dragged Cosimo in,
and Amory liked it. She felt sure that the editor of the "Times,"
calling on the Prime Minister's wife, would not ignore the Prime
Minister. But to-day she was a little abstracted--dull--she didn't know
exactly what; and so she replied, without moving, "Would you like him
here? He's busy with the '_Life_'."

"Oh no, don't trouble him then."

There was a pause. Then, "I did talk to him about it. And to Mr. Prang,"
Amory said.

"Oh. Hm. Quite so," said Mr. Strong, looking at the toes of his brogues.

"Yes. Mr. Prang was here last night," Amory continued, looking at the
points of her own slippers.

"Yes."

Again Mr. Strong's chin was sunk into his red tie. He was rising and
falling slowly on his toes. His eyes moved ruminatively sideways to the
rug at Amory's feet.

"Yes. Yes. I've been wondering----" he said thoughtfully.

"Well?"

"Oh, nothing really. I dare say I'm quite wrong. You see, Prang----"

"What?" Amory asked as he paused again.

There was a twinkle in the eyes that rose to Amory's. Mr. Strong gave a
slight shrug.--"Well--Prang!----" he said with humorous deprecation.

Amory was quick.--"Oh!--You don't mean that Mr. Prang isn't sound?"

"Sound? Perfectly, perfectly. And a most capable fellow. Only I've
wondered once or twice whether he isn't--you know--just a little _too_
capable.... You see, we want to use Prang--not to have Prang using
_us_."

Amory could not forbear to smile. If that was all that was troubling Mr.
Strong she thought she could reassure him.

"I don't think you'd have been afraid of that if you'd been here last
night," she replied quietly. "We were talking over England's diabolical
misrule, and I never knew Mr. Prang so luminous. It was
pathetic--really. Cosimo was talking about that Rawal Pindi case--you
know, of that ruffianly young subaltern drawing down the blinds and then
beating the native.--'But how do they take it?' I asked Mr. Prang,
rather scornfully, you know; and really I was sorry for the poor fellow,
having to apologize for his country.--'That's it,' he said sadly--it was
really sad.--And he told me, frankly, that sometimes the poor natives
pretended they were killed, and sometimes they announce that they're
going to die on a certain day, and they really _do_ die--they're so
mystic and sensitive--it was _most_ interesting.... But what I mean is,
that a gentle and submissive people like that--Mr. Prang admits that's
their weakness--I mean they _couldn't_ use _us_! It's our degradation
that we aren't gentle and sensitive too. You see what I mean?"

"Oh, quite," Mr. Strong jerked out. "Quite."

"And that's why I call Mr. Prang an idealist. There must be something
_in_ the East. At any rate it was splendid moral courage on Prang's part
to say, quite openly, that they couldn't do anything without the little
handful of us here, but must simply go on suffering and dying."

There fell one of the silences that usually came when Mr. Strong lost
interest in a subject. Merely adding, "Oh, I've not a word to say
against Prang, but----," he began to rise and fall on his toes again.
Then he stepped to the Benares table where the casts were. But he made
no criticism of them. He picked the foot up, and put it down again. "I
like it," he said, and returned once more to the asbestos hearth. The
silence fell again.

Amory, sitting on the footstool with her knees supporting her elbows and
her wrists supporting her chin, would have liked to offer Mr. Strong a
penny for his thoughts. She had had an odd, warm little sensation when
he had picked up that cast of the perfect foot. She supposed he must
know that it was her foot, but so widely had his thoughts been ranging
that he had merely put it down again with an abstracted "I like it."
Amory was not sure that any other woman than herself would not have been
piqued. Any other woman would have expected him either not to look at
the thing, or else to say that it was small, or to ask whether the real
one was as white, or something foolish like that. But Amory was superior
to such things. She lived on higher levels. On these levels such an
affront to the pure intellect as a flirtation could not exist. Free Love
as a logical and defensible system--yes, perhaps; or a combination so
happy of marriage and cohabitation as that of the Wyrons'--yes again;
but anything lower she left to the stupid people who swallowed the
conventions whole, including the convention of not being found out.--So
she merely wondered about their relation again. Obviously, there must be
a relation. And yet his own explanation had been quite insufficient; it
had been no explanation at all to ask her whether she had read "_The
Tragic Comedians_" or whether she had Edward Carpenter in the house. No
doubt it was flattering to her intelligence to suppose that she could
"flash" at his meaning without further words on his part, but it was
also a little irritating when the flash didn't come. And, now that she
came to think of it, except that he allowed it to be inferred that he
found Britomart Belchamber a bit lumpish, she didn't know what he
thought, not merely of herself, but of women at all.

And yet there was a passed-through-the-furnace look about him that might
have piqued any woman. It was not conceivable that his eyes had softened
only over inspired passages in proof, or that the tenderest speeches his
lips had shaped had been the "Novum's" rallying-cries to the devoted
band of the New Imperialists. Amory was sure that his memory must be a
maze of things, less spacious perhaps, but far more interesting than
these. He looked widely now, but must have looked close and intense too.
He pronounced upon the Empire, but, for all he was not married, must
have probed deep into the palpitating human heart as well.

Amory was just thinking what a gage of intimacy an unembarrassed silence
can be when Mr. Strong broke it. He lighted another cigarette at the end
of the last, turned, threw the end on the asbestos log, and stood
looking at the purring blue and yellow jets. No doubt he was full of the
Indian policy again.

But as it happened it was not the Indian policy--"Oh," Mr. Strong said,
"I meant to ask you--Who was that fellow who came up here one day?"

This was so vague that when Amory said "What fellow?" Mr. Strong himself
saw the vagueness, and laughed.

"Of course: 'How big is a piece of wood?'--I mean the fellow who came to
The Witan in a morning-coat?"

This was description enough. Amory's back straightened a little.

"Oh, Stanhope Tasker! Oh, just the husband of a friend of mine. I don't
think you've met her. Why?"

Surely, she thought, Mr. Strong was not going to tell her that "Stanhope
Tasker was an excellent fellow in his way, but----," as he had said of
Mr. Brimby, Mr. Wilkinson and Mr. Prang!----

"Oh, nothing much. Only that I saw him to-day," Strong replied
offhandedly.

"He's often about. He isn't a very busy man, I should say," Amory
remarked.

"Saw him in Charing Cross Road as I was coming out of the office," Mr.
Strong continued. "I don't think he saw me though."

"After his abominable manners to you that day I should think he'd be
ashamed to look you in the face."

For a moment Mr. Strong looked puzzled; then he remembered, and laughed
again.

"Oh, I didn't mind that in the least! Rather refreshing in fact. Far
more likely he didn't notice me because he had his wife with him. I
think you said he was married?"

Amory was just about to say that Mr. Strong gave Stan far more
magnanimity than he deserved when a thought arrested her. Dorothy in
Charing Cross Road! As far as she was aware Dorothy had not been out of
Hampstead for weeks, and even then kept to the less frequented parts of
the Heath. It wasn't likely....

Her eyes became thoughtful.

"Oh? That's funny," she said.

"What, that he shouldn't see me? Oh no. They seemed far more interested
in electric-light fittings."

Amory's eyes grew more thoughtful still--"Oh!" she said; and added, "Did
you think her pretty?"

"Hm--in a way. Very well dressed certainly; they both were. But I don't
think these black Spanish types amuse me much," Mr. Strong replied.

Dorothy a black Spanish type!

"Oh, do tell me what she had on!" said Amory brightly.

She rather thought she knew most of Dorothy's dresses by this time.

A black Spanish type!

The task of description was too much for Mr. Strong, but he did his best
with it. Amory was keenly interested. But she pocketed her interest for
the present, and said quite banteringly and with an almost arch look,
"Oh, I should have thought Mrs. Tasker exactly your type!"

Again the quick motion of Mr. Strong's blue eyes suggested an audible
click--"Oh? Why?" he asked.

"Oh, there's no 'why' about it, of course. It's the impression of you I
had, that's all. You see, you don't particularly admire Miss
Belchamber----"

"Oh, come! I think Miss Belchamber's an exceedingly nice girl, only----"

"Well, Laura Beamish, then. But I forgot; you don't go to Walter's
Lectures. But I wonder whether you'd admire Laura?"

"If she's black and Spanish you think I should?" He paused. "Is she?"

"No. Brown and stringy rather, and with eyes that open and shut very
quickly.... But I'm very absurd. There's no Law about these things
really. Only, you see, I've no idea of the kind of woman you _do_
admire?"

She said it smilingly, but that did not mean that she was not perfectly
candid and natural about it too. Why not be natural about these things?
Amory knew people who were natural enough about their preferred foods
and clothing and houses; was a woman less than an entree, or a bungalow,
or a summer overcoat? Besides, it was so very much more intrinsically
interesting. Walter Wyron had made a whole Lecture on it--Lecture No.
II, "_Types and Tact_," and Walter had barely touched the fringe of the
subject. Amory wanted to go a little deeper than that. But she also
wanted to get away from those vulgarized words and ready-made
conclusions, and to have each case considered on its merits. Surely it
ought to be possible to say that the presence of a person affected you
pleasantly, or unpleasantly, without sniggering inferences of a
_liaison_ in the one case or of a rupture in the other!

Therefore it was once more just a little irritating that Mr. Strong,
instead of telling her what type he did admire, should merely laugh and
say, "Well--not Mrs. Tasker." If Amory had a criticism at all to make of
Mr. Strong it was this habit of his of negatives, that sometimes almost
justified the nickname Mr. Brimby had given him, of "Stone Wall Strong."
So she dropped one hand from her chin, allowing it to hang loose over
her knee while the other forearm still kept its swan's-neck curve, and
said abruptly, "Well--about the Indian Number. Let's get on."

"Ah, yes," said Mr. Strong. "Let's get on."

"What had we decided?"

"Only Prang's article so far."

"But you say you have your doubts about it?"

Mr. Strong hesitated. "Only about its selling-power," he said with a
little shrug. "We must sell the paper, you see. It's not paying its way
yet."

"Well, I'm sure that's not Mr. Prang's fault," Amory retorted. "He's
practically made the export circulation."

"You mean the Bombay circulation? Yes, I suppose he has. I don't deny
it."

"You can't deny it. Since Prang began to write for us we've done awfully
well in Bombay."

To that too, Mr. Strong assented. Then Amory, after a moment's pause,
spoke quietly. She did not like to think of her editor as jealous of his
own contributors.

"I know you don't like Mr. Prang," she said, looking fixedly at the
asbestos log.

"I!" began Stone Wall Strong. "Why, you know I think he's a first rate
fellow, if only----"

This time, however, Amory really did intend to get it out of him. For
once she would have one of those hung-up sentences completed.

"If only what?" she said, looking up at him.

"Oh, I don't know--as you said a moment ago, there's no 'why' about
these things----"

"But I did give you my impression. You don't give me yours."

"You did, I admit. Yes, I admit you did.... What is it you want to know,
then?"

"Only why you seem so doubtful about Mr. Prang."

"Ah!" said Mr. Strong....

Those who knew Edgar Strong the best said that he was a man who, other
things being equal, would rather go straight than not. Even when the
other things were not quite equal, he still had a mild preference for
straightness. But if other people positively insisted that he should
deviate from straightness, very well; that was their look-out. He had
been a good many things in his time--solicitor's clerk, free-lance
journalist, book-pedlar, election-agent's minion, Vanner, poetic
vagabond, and always an unerring "spotter" of the literary son of the
farming squire the moment he appeared in sight; and the "Novum" was the
softest job he had found yet. If the price of his keeping it was that he
should look its owner's wife long and earnestly in the eyes, as if in
his own there lay immeasurable things, not for him to give but for her
to take if she list, so be it; he would sleep none the less well in his
rent-free bedroom behind the "Novum's" offices afterwards. His
experience of far less comfortable sleeping-quarters had persuaded him
that in this imperfect world a man is entitled to exactly what he can
get.

His eyes, nevertheless, did not seek Amory's. Instead, roving round the
room to see if nothing less would serve (leaving him still with the
fathomless look in reserve for emergencies), they fell on the Benares
tray and the casts. And as they remained there he suddenly frowned.
Amory's own eyes followed his; and suddenly she felt again that little
creeping thrill. A faint colour and warmth, new and pleasurable, came
into her cheeks.

Then with a little rush, her discovery came upon her....

She _had_ got something from Mr. Strong at last!

Her head drooped a little away from him, and the hand that had hung
laxly over her knee dropped gently to the rug. It was a delicious
moment. So all these weeks and weeks Mr. Strong _had_ cared that that
foot, that arm, had been exposed to the gaze of anybody who might have
entered the house! He had not said so; he did not say so now; but that
was it! More, he had cared so much that it had quite distorted his
judgment of Mr. Prang. And all at once Amory remembered something
else--a glance Edgar Strong had given her, neither more nor less
eloquent than the look he was bending on the casts now, one afternoon
when she had lain in the hammock in the garden and Mr. Prang, bending
over her, had ventured to examine a locket about her throat....

So _that_ was at the bottom of his reserve! _That_ was the meaning of
his "buts"!...

Amory did not move. She wished it might last for hours. Mr. Strong had
taken a step towards the casts, but, changing his mind, had turned away
again; and she was astonished to find how full of meaning dozens of his
past gestures became now that she had the key to them. And she knew that
the casts _were_ beautiful. Brucciani would have bought them like a
shot. And she seemed to see Mr. Strong's look, piteous and frowning both
at once, if she should sell them to Brucciani, and Brucciani should
publish them to hang in a hundred studios....

The silence between them continued.

But speak she must, and it would be better to do so before he did; and
by and bye she lifted her head again. But she did not look directly at
him.

"It was very foolish," she murmured with beautiful directness and
simplicity.

Mr. Strong said nothing.

"But for weeks I've been intending to move them."

Mr. Strong shrugged his shoulders. It was as if he said, "Well better
late than never ... but you see, _now_."

"Yes," breathed Amory, softly, but aloud.

The next moment Mr. Strong was himself again. He returned to his station
by the asbestos log.

"Well, there's Prang's article," he said in his business voice. "Am I to
have it set up?"

"Perhaps we'd better see what Cosimo says first," Amory replied.

She did not know which was the greater delicacy in Mr. Strong--the
exquisite tact of the glance he had given at the casts, or the quiet
strength with which he took up the burden of editing the "Novum" again.

THREE SHIPS

A white October mist lay over the Heath, and the smell of burning leaves
came in at the pond-room window of Dorothy Tasker's flat. But the smell
was lost on Dorothy. All her intelligence was for the moment
concentrated in one faculty, the faculty of hearing. She was sure Jackie
had swallowed a safety-pin, and she was anxiously listening for the
click with which it might come unstuck.

"Shall I send for the doctor, m'm?" said Ruth, who stood holding the
doorknob in her aproned hand. She had been called away from her
"brights," and there was a mournful relish of Jackie's plight on her
face.

"No," said Dorothy.... "Oh, I _know_ there were twelve of them, and now
there are only eleven!... _Have_ you put one of these things into your
mouth, Jackie?"

"He put it up his nose, mumsie, like he did some boot-buttons once,"
said Noel cheerfully.

"But he couldn't do that.... _Have_ you swallowed it, Jackie?"

"Mmm," said Jackie resolutely, as who should say that that which his
hand (or in this case his mouth) found to do he did with all his might.

"Oh dear!" sighed Dorothy, leaning back in her chair....

She supposed it was the still white weather that weighed on her spirits;
she hoped so, for if it was not that it was something worse. Even dreary
weather was better than bankruptcy. She had sent her pass-book to the
bank to be balanced; until it should come back she refused to look at
the pile of tradesmen's books that stood on her writing-desk; and
borrowing from her aunt was not borrowing at all, but simply begging,
since Aunt Grace regarded the return of such loans as the last of
affronts.

And (she sighed again) she had been _so_ well-off at the time of her
marriage! Why, she had had well over a thousand a year from Hallowell
and Smith's alone!... But Stan had had a few debts which had had to be
settled, and Stan's knowledge of the style in which things ought to be
done had been rather a drawback on that trip they had taken to the
Riviera, for his ideas of hotels had been a little splendacious, and of
dinners to "a few friends" rather daring; and, with one thing and
another, the problem of how to satisfy champagne tastes on a beer income
had never been really satisfactorily solved by Stan, poor old boy. And
he never, never grumbled at home, not even when the cold beef came on
three evenings together, which was harder on him than it was on most
people. He did what he could to earn, too. It wasn't his fault that the
standard of efficiency in the Army was so impracticably high, nor that
he had been packed off to try his luck in Canada with the disadvantage
of being a remittance-man, nor that, at the age of twenty-seven, when
his father had died, he had had to turn to and compete for this job or
that with a horde of capable youngsters years his juniors and with fewer
hampering decencies. It was his father's fault and Aunt Susan's really,
for having sent him to Marlborough and Sandhurst without being able to
set him properly on his feet afterwards. Such victims of circumstances,
on a rather different level, made husbands who stopped at home and
cleaned the knives and took the babies out in the perambulator. In
Stan's case the natural result had been to make a young man fit only to
join as a ranker or to stand with his back to a mirror in a suspect
card-room.

"Shall I take him away, m'm?" Mrs. Mossop asked--("And prepare his
winding-sheet," her tone seemed to add).

"Yes, do," Dorothy replied, with a glance at Ruth's blackened hands.
"And please make yourself fit to be seen, Ruth. You know you oughtn't to
be doing all that on the very day I let Norah out."

She knew that her rebuke had set Ruth up in the melancholy enjoyment of
resentment for half a week, but she was past caring. Ruth rose an inch
in height at being chidden for the faithful performance of her most
disagreeable duties; she turned; and as she bore the Bits away the
mighty roar into which Jackie broke diminished in volume down the
passage.

Dorothy sighed, that all her troubles should thus crowd on her at once.
Her eyes fell again on the tradesmen's books. It hardly seemed worth
while to pay them, since they would only come in again next week, as
clamourous and urgent as ever. They were thrust through the letterbox
like letters; Dorothy knew very well the thud with which they fell on
the floor; but she could never help running out into the hall when they
came. She had tried the plan of dispensing with books altogether and
paying for everything in cash as she got it, but that had merely meant,
not one large worry a week, but harassing little ones all the week
through.

Oh, why had she squandered, or allowed Stan to squander, those good
round sovereigns of Hallowell and Smith's!----

Still--there is measure in everything--she had not sent her pass-book to
the bank in order to learn whether she had a balance. That would have
been too awful. It was the amount of her margin that she wanted, and
feared, to know. For presently there would be the doctor to pay, and so
many guineas a week at the Nursing Home, and the flat going on just the
same, and poor old Stan pathetically hoping that a casual dinner-table
puff in a Marlborough voice would result in fat new ledger-accounts for
Fortune and Brooks' and magnificent commissions for himself. If only she
could get just a little ahead of her points! But the money went out
just slightly quicker than it came in. Stan carved it as it were in
twopences off the cold beef, the Bits swallowed it in pennorths with
their breadcrumbs and gravy, and directly the strain eased for a little,
down swooped the rent and set everything back again exactly where it had
been three months before.

And the Income Tax people had actually sent Stan a paper, wanting to
know all about his income from lands, hereditaments, etc., and warning
him that his wife's income must be accounted as part of his own!

But it must not be supposed that Dorothy had allowed things to come to
this pass without having had an idea. She had an idea, and one that she
thought a very good one. Nevertheless, an idea is one thing, and the
execution thereof at the proper time quite another. For example, the
proper moment for the execution of this idea of Dorothy's was certainly
now, or at any rate at the Christmas Quarter (supposing she herself was
up and about again by that time and had found a satisfactory sub-tenant
for the flat). But the person against whom her idea was designed--who,
by the way, happened to be her unsuspecting and much-loved aunt, Lady
Tasker--was a very present difficulty. Dorothy knew for a fact that what
would be admirably convenient for herself at Christmas could not
possibly be convenient to her aunt until, at the very earliest, next
summer. That was the crab--the intervening period of nine months. She
knew of no mandragora that would put herself, Stan and her Bits of
Impudence gently to sleep, to wake up again to easier times.

Oh, why had she spent those beautiful thick sovereigns of Hallowell and
Smiths' so recklessly!--

The mist lay flat over the pond outside, making in one corner of it a
horrible scum, from which the swans, seeking their food, lifted
blackened necks. There was never a ripple on the pond-room walls to-day.
Slowly Dorothy rose. Moping was useless; she must do something. She
crossed to her writing-desk and took from one of its drawers a fat file,
concertina-ed like her own accordion-pleated skirts; and she sat down
and opened it fan-wise on her knee. It was full of newspaper-cuttings,
draft "ideas" for advertisements, and similar dreary things. She sighed
again as her listless fingers began to draw them out. She had not
thought at one time that she would ever come to this. By a remarkable
piece of luck and light-heartedness and ingenuity she had started at
Hallowell and Smith's at the top of the tree; the brains of underlings
had been good enough to cudgel for such scrap-stuff as filled her
concertina-file; but that was all changed now. Light come, light go; and
since the lapse of her contracts she had been glad not only to devise
these ignoble lures for the public, but to draw them also. They formed
the pennies-three-farthings that came in while Stan carved the twopences
from the joint. She had thought the good times were going to last for
ever. They hadn't. She now looked enviously up to those who had been her
own subordinates.

With no heart in her task at all, Dorothy set about the drafting of an
advertisement.

She was just beginning to forget about swallowed safety-pins, and poor
luckless Stan, and guineas for her Nursing Home, and the prospect of
presently having seven mouths, big and little, to feed--she was even
beginning to cease to hear the clamour of the Bits in the room along the
passage--when there came a ring at the bell. Her fair head did not move,
but her blue eyes stole abstractedly sideways as Ruth passed the
pond-room door. Then a man's voice sounded, and Dorothy dropped her
pen....

"Mrs. Tasker," she had heard, with the "a" cut very short and two "s's"
in her name....

The next moment Ruth had opened the pond-room door, and, in tones that
plainly said "You needn't think that I've forgotten about just now,
because I haven't," announced: "Mr. Miller."

Now it was curious that Dorothy had just been thinking about Mr. Miller.
Mr. Miller was Hallowells' Publicity Manager, and the time had been when
Dorothy had had Mr. Miller completely in her pocket. She had obtained
that comfortable contract of hers from Mr. Miller, and if during the
latter part of its continuance she had taken her duties somewhat lightly
and her pleasures with enormous gusto, she was not sure that Mr. Miller
had not done something of the same kind. But the firm, which could
excuse itself from a renewal of her own contract, for some reason or
other could not get rid of Mr. Miller; and now here was Mr. Miller
unexpectedly in Dorothy's flat--seeking her, which is far better for
you than when you have to do the seeking. He stood there with his grey
Trilby in his hand and his tailor-made deltoids almost filling the
aperture of the doorway.

"There, now, if I wasn't right!" said Mr. Miller with great
satisfaction, advancing with one hand outstretched. "I fixed it all up
with myself coming along that you'd be around the house. I've had no
luck all the week, and I said to myself as I got out of the el'vator at
Belsize Park, 'It's doo to change.' And here I find you, right on the
spot. I hope this is not an introosion. How are you? And how's Mr.
Stan?"

He shook hands heartily with Dorothy, and looked round for a place in
which to put his hat and stick.

"Why, now, this is comfortable," he went on, drawing up the chair to
which Dorothy pointed. "I like your English fires. They may not have all
the advantages of steam-heat, but they got a look about 'em--the
Home-Idee. And you're looking just about right in health, Mrs. Tasker,
if I may say so. You English women have our N'York ladies whipped when
it comes to complexion, you have for sure. And how's the family----?"

But here Mr. Miller suddenly stopped and looked at Dorothy again. If the
look that came into his eyes had come into those of a young unmarried
woman, Dorothy would have fled there and then. He dropped his head for a
moment as people do who enter a church; then he raised it again.

"If you'll pardon an old married man and the father of three little
goils," Mr. Miller said, his eyes reverently lifted and his voice
suddenly altered, "--but am I right in supposing that ... another little
gift from the storks, as my dear old Mamie--that was my dear old negro
nurse--used to say?" Then, without waiting for the unrequired answer, he
straightened his back and squared his deltoids in a way that would have
made any of Holbein's portraits of Henry the Eighth look like that of a
slender young man. His voice dropped three whole tones, and again he
showed Dorothy the little bald spot on the crown of his head.

"I'm glad. I say I'm glad. I'm vurry glad. I rejoice. And I should like
to shake Mr. Stan by the hand. I should like to shake you by the hand
too, Mrs. Tasker." Then, when he had done so: "It's the Mother-Idee. The
same, old-fashioned Idee, like our own mothers. It makes one feel good.
Reverent. I got no use for a young man but what he shows lats of
reverence for his mother. The old Anglo-Saxon-Idee--reverence for
motherhood.... And when, if an old married man may ask the
question----?"

Dorothy laughed and blushed and told him. Mr. Miller, dropping his voice
yet another tone, told her in return that he knew of no holier place on
oith than the chamber in which the Anglo-Saxon-Idee of veneration for
motherhood was renewed and sustained. And then, after he had said once
more that he rejoiced, there fell a silence.

Dorothy liked Mr. Miller. Once you got over his remarkable aptitude for
sincerities he had an excellent heart. Nevertheless she could not
imagine why he had come. She shuddered as he seemed for a moment to be
once more on the point of removing his shoes at the door of the Mosque
of Motherhood, but apparently he thought better of it. Squaring his
shoulders again, and no doubt greatly fortified by his late exercise, he
said, "Well, I always feel more of a man after I felt the throb of a
fellow-creature's heart. That's so. And now you'll be wondering what's
brought me up here? Well, the fact is, Mrs. Tasker, I'm wurried. I got
wurries. You can see the wurry-map on my face. Hallowells' is wurrying
me. I ain't going to tell you Hallowells' ain't what it was in its pammy
days; it may be, or it may not; mebbe you've heard the talk that's going
around?"

"No," said Dorothy.

"Is that so? Well, there is talk going around. There's a whole push of
people, knocking us all the time. They ain't of much account themselves,
but they knock us. It's a power the inferior mind has. And I say I'm
wurried about it."

Dorothy, in spite of her "No," had heard of the "knocking" of Hallowell
and Smiths', and her heart gave an excited little jump at the thought
that flashed across her mind. Did Hallowells' want her back? The firm
had been launched upon London with every resource of publicity; Dorothy
herself had been the author of its crowning device; and whereas the
motto of older firms had been "Courtesy Costs Nothing," Hallowells' had
vastly improved upon this. Courtesy had, as a matter of fact, cost them
a good deal; but the rewards of the investment had been magnificent. Mr.
Miller had known that if you say to people often enough "See how
courteous I am," you are to all intents and purposes courteous. But what
Mr. Miller had not known had been the precise point at which it is
necessary to begin to build up a strained reputation again.
Commercial credit too, like those joints Stan carved, comes in in
two-pence-halfpennies but goes out in threepences.... And so the
"knocking" had begun. Rumours had got about that Hallowells' was a shop
where you were asked, after a few unsuitable articles had been shown to
you, whether you didn't intend to buy anything, and where you might wait
for ten minutes at a counter while two assistants settled a private
difference behind it. Did Mr. Miller want her help in restoring the
firm's fair name? Did he intend to offer her another contract? Were
there to be more of Hallowells' plump, ringing sovereigns--that she
would know better how to take care of this time? It was with difficulty
that she kept her composure as Mr. Miller continued:

"There's no denying but what inferior minds have that power," he went
sorrowfully on. "They can't build up an enterprise, but they can knock,
and they been good and busy. You haven't heard of it? Well, that's good
as far as it goes, but they been at it for all that. Now I don't want to
knock back at your country, Mrs. Tasker, but it seems to me that's the
English character. You're hostile to the noo. The noo gives you cold
feet. You got a terrific capacity for stopping put. Your King Richard
Core de Lion did things in a certain way, and it ain't struck you yet
that he's been stiff and straight quite a while. And so when you see
something with snap and life to it you start knocking." Mr. Miller spoke
almost bitterly. "But I ain't holding you personally responsible, Mrs.
Tasker. I reckon you're a wonderful woman. Yours is a reel old family,
and if anybody's the right to knock it's you; but _you_ appreciate the
noo. _You_ look at it in the light of history. _You_ got the sense of
world-progress. _You're_ a sort of Lady Core de Lion to-day. I haven't
forgotten the Big Idee you started us off with. And so I come to you,
and tell you, straight and fair, we want you."

Dorothy was tingling with excitement; but she took up a piece of
sewing--the same piece on which she had bent her modest gaze when she
had machinated against her aunt on the afternoon on which Lady Tasker
had come on, weary and thirsty, from The Witan. It was a piece she kept
for such occasions as these. She stitched demurely, and Mr. Miller went
on again:--

"We want you. We want those bright feminine brains of yours, Mrs.
Tasker. And your ladies' intooition. We're stuck. We want another Idee
like the last. And so we come to the department where we got
satisfaction before."

Dorothy spoke slowly. She was glad the pond-room was beautifully
furnished--glad, too, that the hours Ruth spent over her "brights" were
not spent in vain. The porcelain gleamed in her cabinets and the silver
twinkled on her tables. At any rate she did not look poor.

"This is rather a surprise," she said. "I hardly know what to say. I
hadn't thought of taking on another contract."

But here Mr. Miller was prompt enough.

"Well, I don't know that we were thinking of a noo contract exactly.
You're a lady with a good many responsibilities now, and ain't got too
much time for contracts, I guess. No, it ain't a contract. It's an Idee
we want."

Far more quickly than Dorothy's hopes had risen they dropped again at
this. "An Idee:" naturally!... Everybody wanted that. She had not had to
hawk an idea like the last--so simple, so shapely, so beauty-bright. And
she had learned that it is not the ideas, but what follows them, that
pays--the flat and uninspired routine that forms the everyday work of a
lucrative contract. It is the irony of this gipsy life of living by your
wits. You do a stately thing and starve; you follow it up--or somebody
else does--with faint and empty echoes of that thing, and you are
overfed. An Idea--but not a contract; a picking of her brains, but no
permanent help against that tide of tradesman's books that flowed in at
the front door.... And Dorothy knew already that for another reason Mr.
Miller had sought her out in vain. Ideas are _not_ repeated. They visit
us, but we cannot fetch them. And as for echoes of that former
inspiration of hers, no doubt Mr. Miller had thought of all those for
himself and had rejected them.

"I see," she said slowly....

"Well," said Mr. Miller, his worry-map really piteous, "I wish you could
tell me where we've gone wrong. It must be something in the British
character we ain't appreciated, but what, well, that gets me. We been
Imperialistic. There ain't been one of our Monthly House Dinners but
what we've had all the Loyal Toasts, one after the other. There ain't
been a Royal Wedding but what we've had a special window-display, and
christenings the same, and what else you like. We ain't got gay with the
Union Jack nor Rotten Row nor the House of Lords. We've reminded folk it
was your own King George who said 'Wake up, England----!'"

But at this point Mr. Miller's doleful recital was cut short by a second
ring at the bell. Again Ruth's step was heard in the passage outside,
and again Ruth, loftily sulky but omitting no point of her duty, stood
with the door-knob in her hand.

"Mrs. Pratt," she announced; and Amory entered.

Seeing Mr. Miller, however, she backed again. Mr. Miller had risen and
bowed as if he was giving some invisible person a "back" for leapfrog.

"Oh, I do so beg your pardon!" said Amory hurriedly. "I didn't know
you'd anybody here. But--if I could speak to you for just a moment,
Dorothy--it won't take a minute----"

"Please excuse me," said Dorothy to Mr. Miller; and she went out.

She was back again in less than three minutes. Her face had an unusual
pinkness, but her voice was calm. She did not sit down again. Neither
did she extend her hand to Mr. Miller in a too abrupt good-bye.
Nevertheless, that worried man bowed again, and looked round for his hat
and stick.

"I shall have to think over what you've been saying," Dorothy said.
"I've no proposal to make off-hand, you see--and I'm rather afraid that
just at present I shan't be able to come and see you----"

There were signs in Mr. Miller's bearing of another access of reverence.

"So I'll write. Or better still, if it's not too much trouble for you to
come and see me again----? Perhaps I'd better write first.--But you'll
have tea, won't you?"

Mr. Miller put up a refusing hand.--"No, I thank you.--So you'll do your
possible, Mrs. Tasker? That's vurry good of you. I'm wurried, and I rely
on your sharp feminine brains. As for the honorarium, we shan't quarrel
about that. I wish I could have shaken hands with Mr. Stan. There ain't
a happier and prouder moment in a man's life than----"

"Good-bye."

And the father of three little goils of his own took his leave.

No sooner had he gone than Dorothy's brows contracted. She took three
strides across the room and rang for Ruth. Never before had she
realized the inferiority, as a means of expressing temper, of an
electric bell to a hand-rung one or to one of which a yard or two of
wire can be ripped from the wall. Only by mere continuance of pressure
till Ruth came did she obtain even a little relief. To the high resolve
on Ruth's face she paid no attention whatever.

"A parcel will be coming from Mrs. Pratt," she said. "Please see that it
goes back at once."

Ruth's head was heroically high. The late Mr. Mossop had had his faults,
but he had not kept his finger on electric-bell buttons till she came.

"No doubt there's them as would give better satisfaction, m'm," she said
warningly.

But Dorothy rushed on her fate.--"There seems very little satisfaction
anywhere to-day," she answered.

"Then I should wish to give the usual notice," said Ruth.

"Very well," said the reckless mistress.... "Ruth!" (Ruth returned).
"You forgot what I said about always shutting the door quietly."

This time the door close so quietly behind Ruth that Dorothy heard her
outburst into tears on the other side of it.

Second-hand woollies for her Bits!... Of course Amory Pratt had made the
proposal with almost effusive considerateness. No doubt the twins, Corin
and Bonniebell, _had_ outgrown them. Dorothy did not suppose for a
moment that they were _not_ the best of their kind that money could
buy; the Pratts seemed to roll in money. And beyond all dispute the
winter _might_ come any morning now, and the garments _would_ just fit
Jackie. But--her own Bits!... She had had her back to the bedroom window
when the offer had been made; she knew that her sudden flush had not
showed; and her voice had not changed as she had deliberately told her
lie--that she had bought the children's winter outfits only the day
before....

"I'm sure you won't have any difficulty in giving them away," she had
concluded as she had passed to the bedroom door.

"Far less difficulty than you'll find here," she might have added, but
had forborne....

Other children's woollies for her little Jackie!----

What gave sting to the cut was that Jackie sorely needed them; but then
it was not like Amory Pratt, Dorothy thought bitterly, to make a
graceful gift of an unrequired thing. She must blunder into people's
necessities. A gift of a useless Teddy Bear or of a toy that would be
broken in a week Dorothy might not have refused; but mere need!--"Oh!"
Dorothy exclaimed, twisting in her chair with anger....

What a day! What a life! And what a little thing thus to epitomize the
whole hopeless standstill of their circumstances!

And because it was a little thing, it had a power over Dorothy that
twenty greater things would not have had. She was about to call the
precious and disparaged Jackie when she thought better of it. Instead,
she dropped her face into her hands and melted utterly. What Ruth did in
the kitchen she did in the pond-room; and Jackie, who caught the
contagion, filled the passage between with an inconsolable howling.

It was into this house of lamentation that Stan entered at half-past
four.

"Steady, there!" he called to his younger son; and Jackie's bellow
ceased instantaneously.

"Ruth's c'ying, so I c'ied too," he confided solemnly to his father; and
the two entered the pond-room together, there to find Dorothy also in
tears.

"Hallo, what's this?" said Stan. "Jackie, run and tell Ruth to hurry up
with tea.... Head up, Dot--let's have a look at you----"

Perhaps he meant that Dot should have a look at him, for his face shone
with an--alas!--not unwonted excitement. Dorothy had seen that shining
before. It usually meant that he had been let in on the ground floor of
the International Syndicate for the manufacture of pig-spears, or had
secured an option on the world's supply of wooden pips for blackberry
jam, or an agency for a synthesized champagne. And she never dashed the
perennial hopefulness of it. The poor old boy would have been
heartbroken had he been allowed to suppose that he was not, in intent at
any rate, supporting his wife and children.

"What is it, old girl?" he said. "Just feeling low, eh? Never mind. I've
some news for you."

Dorothy summoned what interest she could,--

"Not an agency or anything?" she asked, wiping her eyes.

"Better than that."

"Well, some agencies are very good."

"Not as good as this!"

"Put your arm round me. I've been feeling _so_ wretched!"

"Come and sit here. There. Wretched, eh? Well, would three hundred a
year cheer you up any?"

It would have, very considerably; but Stan's schemes were seldom
estimated to produce a sum less than that.

"Eh?" Stan continued. "Paid weekly or monthly, whichever I like, and a
month's screw to be going on with?"

Suddenly Dorothy straightened herself in his arms. She knew that Stan
was trying to rouse her, but he needn't use a joke with quite so sharp a
barb. She sank back again.

"Don't, dear," she begged. "I know it's stupid of me, but I'm so dull
to-day. You go out somewhere this evening, and I'll go to bed early and
sleep it off. I shall be all right again in the morning."

But from the pocket into which she herself had put four half-crowns that
very morning--all she could spare--Stan drew out a large handful of
silver, with numerous pieces of gold sticking up among it. A glance told
her that Stan was not likely to have backed a winner at any such price
as that. Other people did, but not Stan. She had turned a little pale.

"Tell me, quick, Stan!" she gasped.

"You laughed rather at the Fortune & Brooks idea, didn't you?"

"Oh, don't joke, darling!----"

"Eh?... I say, you're upset. Anything been happening to-day? Look here,
let me get you a drink or something!"

"Do you mean--you've got a job, Stan?"

"Rather!--I say, do let me get you a drink----"

"I shall faint if you don't tell me----"

She probably would....

Stan had got a job. What was it, this job that had enabled Stan to come
home, before he had lifted a finger to earn it, with masses of silver in
his pocket, and the clean quids sticking up out of the lump like almonds
out of a trifle?

--He would have to lift more than a finger before that money was earned.
He would have to hang on wires by his toes, and to swim streams, and to
be knocked down by runaway horses, and to dash into burning houses, and
to fling himself on desperate men, and to ascend into the air in
water-planes and to descend in submarines into the deep. Hydrants would
be turned on him, and sacks of flour poured on him, and hogsheads of
whitewash and bags of soot. Not for his brains, but for his good looks
and steady nerves and his hard physical condition had he been the chosen
one among many. For Stan had joined a Film Producing Company, less as an
actor than as an acrobat. Go and see him this evening. He is as well
worth your hour as many a knighted actor. And the scene from "Quentin
Durward," in which Bonthron is strung up with the rope round his neck,
is not fake. They actually did string Stan up, in the studio near Barnet
that had been a Drill Hall, and came precious near to hanging him into
the bargain.

But he passed lightly over these and other perils as he poured it all
out to Dorothy at tea. Pounds, not perils, were the theme of his song.

"I didn't say anything about it for fear it didn't come off," he said,
"but I've been expecting it for weeks." He swallowed tea and cake at a
rate that must have put his internal economy to as severe a strain as
"Mazeppa" (Historical Film Series, No. XII) afterwards did his bones and
muscles. "I start on Monday, so breakfast at eight, sharp, Dot. 'Lola
Montez.' They've got a ripping little girl as Lola; took her out to tea
and shopping the other day; I'll bring her round." ("No you don't--not
with me sitting here like a Jumping Bean," quoth Dorothy). "Oh, that's
all right--she's getting married herself next month--furnishing her flat
now--I helped her to choose her electric-light fittings--you'd like
her.... _Ain't_ it stunning, Dot!----"

It was stunning. Part of the stunningness of it was that Dorothy, with
an abrupt "Excuse me a moment," was enabled to cross to her desk and to
dash off a note to Harrods. Second-hand woollies for her Bits! Oh no,
not if she knew it!... "Yes, go on, dear," she resumed, returning to the
tea-table again. "No, I don't wish it was something else. If we're poor
we're poor, and the Services are out of the question, and it's just as
good as lots of other jobs.--And oh, that reminds me: I had Mr. Miller
in this afternoon!"...

"And oh!" said Stan ten minutes later; "I forgot, too! I met a chap,
too--forgotten all about it. That fellow I gave a dressing-down about
India to up at the Pratts' there. He stopped me in the street, and what
do you think? It was all I could do not to laugh. He asked me whether I
could put him on to a job! Me, who haven't started myself yet!... I said
I could put him on to a drink if that would do--I had to stand somebody
a drink, just to wet my luck, and I didn't see another soul--and I
fetched it all out of my pocket in a pub in St. Martin's Lane--," he
fetched it all out of his pocket again now, "--fetched it out as if it
was nothing--you should have seen him look at it!--Strong his name
is--didn't catch it that day he was burbling such stuff----"

Dorothy's eyes shone. Dear old Stan! That too pleased her. No doubt the
Pratts would be told that Stan was going about so heavily laden with
money that he had to divide the weight in order not to walk lopsided----

Worn woollies for His Impudence's Bits!----

Rather not! There would be a parcel round from Harrods' to-morrow!

POLICY

Amory would have been far less observant than she was had it not
occurred to her, as she left Dorothy's flat that day, that she had been
hustled out almost unceremoniously. She hoped--she sincerely hoped--that
she did not see the reason. To herself, as to any other person not
absolutely case-hardened by prejudice, the thing that presented itself
to her mind would not have been a reason at all; but these conventional
people were so extraordinary, and in nothing more extraordinary than in
their regulations for receiving callers of the opposite sex. That was
what she meant by the vulgarizing of words and the leaping to ready-made
conclusions. A conventional person coming upon herself and Mr. Strong
closeted together would have his stereotyped explanation; but that was
no reason why anybody clearer-eyed and more open-minded and
generous-hearted should fall into the same degrading supposition. It
would be ridiculous to suppose that there was "anything" between Dorothy
and Mr. Miller. Amory knew that in the past Dorothy had had genuine
business with Mr. Miller. And so now had she herself with Mr. Strong.
And as for Stan's going about in open daylight with a "dark Spanish
type"--a type traditionally wickeder than any other--Amory thought
nothing of that either. Stan had as much right to go about with his
Spanish female as Cosimo had to take Britomart Belchamber to a New Greek
Society matinee or to one of Walter's Lectures. Amory would never have
dreamed of putting a false interpretation on these things.

Nevertheless, her visit _had_ been cut singularly short, and Dorothy
plainly _had_ wanted to be rid of her. Because hearts are kind eyes need
not necessarily be blind. Amory could not conceal from herself that in
magnanimously passing these things over as nothing, she was, after all,
making Dorothy a present of a higher standard than she had any right to.
Judged by her own standards (which was all the judgment she could
strictly have claimed), there was--Amory would not say a fishiness about
the thing--in fact she would not say anything about it at all. The less
said the better. Pushed to its logically absurd conclusion, Dorothy's
standard meant that whenever people of both sexes met they should not be
fewer than three in number. In Amory's saner view, on the other hand,
two, or else a crowd, was far more interesting. Nobody except
misanthropists talked about the repulsion of sex. Very well: if it was
an attraction, it _was_ an attraction. And if it was an attraction to
Amory, it was an attraction to Dorothy also; if to Cosimo, then to Stan
as well. The only difference was that she and Cosimo openly admitted it
and acted upon it, while Stan and Dorothy did not admit it, but probably
acted furtively on it just the same.

It was very well worth the trouble of the call to have her ideas on the
subject so satisfactorily cleared up.

At the end of the path between the ponds she hesitated for a moment,
uncertain whether to keep to the road or to strike across the sodden
Heath. She decided for the Heath. Mr. Strong had said that he might
possibly come in that afternoon to discuss the Indian policy, and she
did not want to keep him waiting.

Then once more she remembered her unceremonious dismissal, and reflected
that after all that had left her with time on her hands. She would take
a turn. It would only bore her to wait in The Witan alone, or, which was
almost the same thing, with Cosimo. The Witan was rather jolly when
there were crowds and crowds of people there; otherwise it was dull.

She turned away to the right, passed the cricket-pitch, found the cycle
track, and wandered down towards the Highgate ponds.

She had reached the model-yacht pond, and was wondering whether she
should extend her walk still further, when she saw ahead of her, sitting
on a bench beneath an ivied stump, two figures deep in conversation. She
recognized them at a glance. They were the figures of Cosimo and
Britomart Belchamber. Britomart was looking absently away over the
pond; Cosimo was whispering in her ear. Another second or two and Amory
would have walked past them within a yard.

Now Amory and Cosimo had married on certain express understandings, of
which a wise and far-sighted anticipation of the various courses that
might be taken in the event of their not getting on very well together
had formed the base. Therefore the little warm flurry she felt suddenly
at her heart could not possibly have been a feeling of liberation. How
could it, when there was nothing to be liberated from? Just as much
liberty as either might wish had been involved in the contract itself,
and a formal announcement of intention on either part was to be
considered a valid release.

And so, in spite of that curious warm tingle, Amory was not one atom
more free, nor one atom less free, to develop (did she wish it) a
relationship with anybody else--Edgar Strong or anybody--than she had
been before. She saw this perfectly clearly. She had talked it all over
with Cosimo scores of times. Why, then, did she tingle? Was it that they
had not talked it over enough?

No. It was because of a certain furtiveness on Cosimo's part. Evidently
he wished to "take action" (if she might use the expression without
being guilty of a vulgarized meaning) _without_ having made his formal
announcement. That she had come upon them so far from The Witan was
evidence of this. They had deliberately chosen a part of the Heath they
had thought it unlikely Amory would visit. They could have
done--whatever they were doing--under her eyes had they wished, but
they had stolen off together instead. It was a breach of the
understanding.

Before they had seen her, she left the path, struck across the grass
behind them, and turned her face homewards. She was far, far too proud
to look back. Certainly it was his duty to have let her know. Never
mind. Since he hadn't....

Yet the tingling persisted, coming and going in quite pleasurable little
shocks. Then all at once she found herself wondering how far Cosimo and
Britomart had gone, or would go. Not that it was any business of hers.
She was not her husband's keeper. It would be futile to try to keep
somebody who evidently didn't want to be kept. It would also take away
the curious subtle pleasure of that thrill.

She was not conscious that she quickened the steps that took her to the
studio, where by this time Edgar Strong probably awaited her.

Most decidedly Cosimo ought to have given her warning----

As for Britomart Belchamber--sly creature--no doubt she had persuaded
him to slink away like that----

Well, there would be time enough to deal with her by and bye----

Amory reached The Witan again.

As she entered the hall a maid was coming out of the dining-room. Amory
called her.

"Has Mr. Strong been in?"

"He's in the studio, m'm," the maid replied.

"Are the children with Miss Belchamber?"

"No, m'm. They're with nurse, m'm."

"Is Miss Belchamber in her room?"

"No, m'm. She's gone out."

"How long ago?"

"About an hour, m'm."

"Is Mr. Pratt in?"

"I think so, m'm. I'll go and inquire."

"Never mind. I'm going upstairs."

Ah! Then they had gone out separately, by pre-arrangement! More slyness!
And this was Cosimo's "pretence" at being Miss Belchamber's devoted
admirer! Of course, if there had been any pretence at all about it, it
would have had to be that he was not her admirer. Very well; they would
see about that, too, later!----

She went quickly to her own room, changed her blouse for a tea-gown, and
then, with that tingling at her heart suddenly warm and crisp again,
descended to the studio.

It was high time (she told herself) that the "Novum's" Indian policy was
definitely settled. Mr. Strong also said so, the moment he had shaken
hands with her and said "Good afternoon." But Mr. Strong spoke
bustlingly, as if the more haste he made the more quickly the job would
be over.

"Now these are the lines we have to choose from," he said....

And he enumerated a variety of articles they had in hand, including Mr.
Prang's.

"Then there's this," he said....

He told Amory about a crisis in the Bombay cotton trade, and of a scare
in the papers that very morning about heavy withdrawals of native
capital from the North Western Banks....

"But I think the best thing of all would be for me to write an article
myself," he said, "and to back it up with a number of Notes. What I
really want cleared up is our precise objective. I want to know what
that's to be."

"We'll have tea in first, and then we shall be undisturbed," said Amory.

"Better wait for Cosimo, hadn't we?"

"He's out," said Amory, passing to the bell.

She sat down on the corner of the sofa, and watched the maid bring in
tea. Mr. Strong, who had placed himself on the footstool and was making
soughing noises by expelling the air from his locked hands, appeared to
be brooding over his forthcoming number. But that quick little tingle of
half an hour before had had a curious after-affect on Amory. How it had
come about she did not know, but the fact remained that she was not,
now, so very sure that even the "Novum" was quite as great a thing as
she had supposed it to be. Or rather, if the "Novum" itself was no less
great, she had, quite newly, if dimly, foreseen herself in a more
majestic role than that of a mere technical _directrice_.

Politics? Yes, it undoubtedly was the Great Game. Strong men fancied
themselves somewhat at it, and conceited themselves, after the fashion
of men, that it was they who wrought this marvel or that. But was it?
Had there not been women so much stronger than they that, doing
apparently nothing, their nothings had been more potent than all the
rest? She began to give her fancy play. For example, there was that
about a face launching a thousand ships. That was an old story, of
course; if a face could launch a thousand ships so many centuries ago,
there was practically no limit to its powers with the British Navy at
its present magnificent pitch of numerical efficiency. But that by the
way. It was the idea that had seized Amory. Say a face--Helen's, she
thought it was--had launched a thousand, or even five hundred ships;
where was the point? Why, surely that that old Greek Lord High Admiral,
whoever he was--(Amory must look him up; chapter and verse would be so
very silencing if she ever had occasion to put all this into
words)--surely he had thought, as all men thought, that he was obeying
no behest but his own. The chances were that he had hardly wasted a
thought on Helen's face as a factor in the launching....

Yet Helen's face had been the real launching force, or rather the brain
behind Helen's face ... but Amory admitted that she was not quite sure
of her ground there. Perhaps she was mixing Helen up with somebody else.
At any rate, if she was wrong about Helen she was not wrong about
Catherine of Russia. Nor about Cleopatra. Nor about the Pompadour. These
had all had brains, far superior to the brains of their men, which they
had used through the medium of their beauty. She knew this because she
had been reading about them quite recently, and could put her finger on
the very page; she had a wonderful memory for the places in books in
which passages occurred.... So there were Catherine the Second, and
Cleopatra, and the Pompadour, even if she had been wrong about Helen.
That was a curious omission of Homer's, by the way--or was it
Virgil?--the omission of all reference to the brain behind. Perhaps it
had seemed so obvious that he took it for granted. But barring that, the
notion of a face launching the ships was very fine. It was the Romantic
Point of View. Hitherto Amory had passed over the Romantic Point of View
rather lightly, but now she rather thought there was a good deal in it.
At any rate that about the face of a woman being the real
launching-force of a whole lot of ships--well, it was an exaggeration,
of course, and in a sense only a poetic way of putting it--but it was
quite a ripping idea.

So if a ship could be launched, apparently, not by a mere material
knocking away of the thingummy, but by the timeless beauty of a face, an
Indian policy ought not to present more difficulties. At all events it
was worth trying. Perhaps "trying" was not exactly the word. These
things happened or they didn't happen. But anybody not entirely stupid
would know what Amory meant.

The maid lighted the little lamp under the water-vessel that kept the
muffins hot and then withdrew. Amory turned languidly to Mr. Strong.

"Would you mind pouring out the tea? I'm so lazy," she said.

She had put her feet up on the sofa, and her hands were clasped behind
her head. The attitude allowed the wide-sleeved tea-gown into which she
had changed to fall away from her upper arm, showing her satiny triceps.
The studio was warm; it might be well to open the window a little; and
Amory, from her sofa, gave the order. It seemed to her that she had not
given orders enough from sofas. She had been doing too much of the work
herself instead of lying at her ease and stilly willing it to be done.
She knew better now. It was much better to take a leaf out of the book
of _les grandes maitresses_. She recognized that she ought to have done
that long ago.

So Mr. Strong brought her tea, and then returned to his footstool again,
where he ate enormous mouthfuls of muffin, spreading anchovy-paste over
them, and drank great gulps of tea. He fairly made a meal of it. But
Amory ate little, and allowed her tea to get cold. The cast which Stan
had coarsely called "the fore-quarter" had been hung up on the wall at
the sofa's end, and her eyes were musingly upon it. The trotter lay out
of sight behind her.

"Well, about that thing of Prang's," said Mr. Strong when he could eat
no more. "Hadn't we better be settling about it?"

"Don't shout across the room," said Amory languidly, and perhaps a
little pettishly. She was wondering what was the matter with her hand
that Mr. Strong had not kissed it when he had said good afternoon. He
had kissed it on a former occasion.

"Head bad?" said Mr. Strong.

"No, my head's all right, but there's no reason we should edit the
'Novum' from the housetops."

"Was I raising my voice? Sorry."

Mr. Strong rose from his footstool and took up a station between the
tea-table and the asbestos log.

Amory was getting rather tired of hearing about that thing of Prang's.
She did not see why Mr. Strong should shuffle about it in the way he
did. The article had been twice "modified," that was to say more or less
altered, and Amory could hardly be expected to go on reading it in its
various forms for ever. What did Mr. Strong want? If he whittled much
more at Mr. Prang's clear statement of a point of view of which the
single virtue was its admitted extremeness, he would be reducing the
"Novum" to the level of mere Liberalism, and they had long ago decided
that, of the Conservative who opposed and the Liberal who killed by
insidious kindnesses, the former was to be preferred as a foe. Besides,
there was an alluring glow about Mr. Prang's way of writing. No doubt
that was part and parcel of the glamour of the East. The Eastern style,
like the Eastern blood, had more sun in it. Keats had put that awfully
well, in the passage about "parched Abyssinia" and "old Tartary the
Fierce," and so had that modern man, who had spoken of Asia as lying
stretched out "in indolent magnificence of bloom." Yes, there was a
funny witchery about Asia. In all sorts of ways they "went it" in Asia.
Bacchus had had a spree there, and it was there--or was that
Egypt?--that Cleopatra or the Queen of Sheba or somebody had smuggled
her satiny self into a roll of carpets and had had herself carried as a
present to King Solomon or Mark Antony or whoever it was. It seemed to
be in the Asian atmosphere, and Mr. Prang's prose style had a smack of
it too. Mr. Strong--his literary style, of course, she meant--might have
been all the better for a touch of that blood-warmth and thrill....

And there were ripping bits of reckless passion in Herodotus too.

But Mr. Strong continued to stand between the tea-table and the asbestos
log, and to let fall irresolute sentences from time to time. Prang, he
said, really was a bit stiff, and he, Mr. Strong, wasn't sure that he
altogether liked certain responsibilities. Not that he had changed his
mind in the least degree. He only doubted whether in the long run it
would pay the "Novum" itself to acquire a reputation for exploiting what
everybody else knew as well as they did, but left severely alone. In
fact, he had assumed, when he had taken the job on, that the work for
which he received only an ordinary working-salary would be conditioned
by what other editors did and received for doing it.... At that Amory
looked up.

"Oh? But I thought that the truth, regardless of consequences, was our
motto?"

"Of course--without fear or favour in a sense--but where there are extra
risks----"

What did this slow-coach of a man mean?----"What risks?" Amory asked
abruptly.

"Well, say risks to Cosimo as proprietor."

"You mean he might lose his money?" she said, with a glance round the
satiny triceps and the apple-bud of an elbow.

"Well--does he _want_ to lose his money?--What I mean is, that we aren't
paying our way--we've scarcely any advertisements, you see----"

"I think that what you mean is that we ought to become Liberals?" There
was a little ring in Amory's voice.

Mr. Strong made no reply.

"Or Fabians, perhaps?"

Still Mr. Strong did not answer.

"Because if you _do_ mean that, I can only say I'm--disappointed in
you!"

Now those who knew Edgar Strong the best knew how exceedingly sensitive
he was to those very words--"I'm disappointed in you." In his large and
varied experience they were invariably the prelude to the sack. And he
very distinctly did not want the sack--not, at any rate, until he had
got something better. Perhaps he reasoned within himself that, of
himself and Prang, he would be the more discreet editor, and so lifted
the question a whole plane morally higher. Perhaps, if it came to the
next worst, he was prepared to accept the foisting of Prang upon him and
to take his chance. Anyway, his face grew very serious, and he reached
for the footstool, drew it close up to Amory's couch, and sat down on
it.

"I wonder," he said slowly, looking earnestly at his folded hands,
"whether you'll put the worst interpretation on what I'm going to say."

Amory waited. She dropped the satiny-white upper arm. Mr. Strong
resumed, more slowly still--

"It's this. We're risking things. Cosimo's risking his money, but he may
be risking more than that. And if he risks it, so do I."

Into Amory's pretty face had come the look of the woman who prefers men
to take risks rather than to talk about them.--"What do you risk?" she
asked in tones that once more chilled Mr. Strong.

"Well, for one thing, a prosecution. Prang's rather a whole-hogger. It's
what I said before--we want to use him, not have him use us."

"Oh?" said Amory with a faint smile. "And can't you manage Mr. Prang?"

There was no doubt at all in Mr. Strong's mind what that meant. "Because
if you can't," it plainly meant, "I dare say we can find somebody who
can." Without any qualification whatever, she really was beginning to be
a little disappointed in him. She wondered how Cleopatra or the Queen of
Sheba would have felt (had such a thing been conceivable) if, when that
carpet had been carried by the Nubians into her lover's presence and
unrolled, Antony or whatever his name was had blushed and turned away,
too faint-hearted to take the gift the gods offered him? Risks!
Weren't--Indian policies--worth a little risk?...

Besides, no doubt Cosimo was still with Britomart Belchamber....

She put her hands behind her head again and gave a little laugh.

Well, (as Edgar Strong himself might have put it in the days when his
conversation had been slangier than it was now), it was up to him to
make good pretty quickly or else to say good-bye to the editorship of a
rag that at least did one bit of good in the world--paid Edgar Strong
six pounds a week. And if it must be done it must, that was all. Damn
it!...

Perhaps the satiny upper arm decided his next action. Once before he had
made its plaster facsimile serve his turn, and on the whole he would
have preferred to be able to do so again; but even had that object not
been out of reach on the wall and its original not eighteen inches away
at the sofa's end, three hundred pounds a year in jeopardy must be made
surer than that. He would have given a month's screw could Cosimo have
come in at that moment. He actually did give a quick glance in the
direction of the door....

But no help came.

Damn it----!

The next moment he had kissed that satiny surface, and then, gloomily,
and as one who shoulders the consequences of an inevitable act, stalked
away and stood in the favourite attitude of Mr. Brimby's heroes under
great stress of emotion--with his head deeply bowed and his back to
Amory. There fell between them a silence so profound that either became
conscious at the same moment of the soft falling of rain on the studio
roof.

Then, after a full minute and a half, Mr. Strong, still without turning,
walked to the table on which his hat lay. Always without looking at
Amory, he moved towards the door.

"Good-bye," he said over his shoulder.

There was the note of a knell in his tone. He meant good-bye for ever.
All in a moment Amory knew that on the morrow Cosimo would receive Edgar
Strong's formal resignation from the "Novum's" editorial chair, and
that, though Edgar might retain his hold on the paper until his
successor had been found, he would never come to The Witan any more. He
had called Mr. Prang a whole-hogger, but in Love he himself appeared to
be rather a whole-hogger. He had all but told her that to see her again
would mean ... she trembled. The alternative was not to see her again.
His whole action had said, more plainly than any words could say, "After
that--all or nothing."

She had not moved. She hardly knew the voice for her own in which she
said, still without turning her head, "Wait--a minute----"

Mr. Strong waited. The minute for which she asked passed.

"One moment----," murmured Amory again.

At last Mr. Strong lifted his head.--"There's nothing to say," he said.

"I'm thinking," Amory replied in a low voice.

"Really nothing."

"Give me just a minute----"

For she was thinking that it was her face, nothing else, that had
launched him thus to the door. For a moment she felt compunction for
its tyranny. Poor fellow, what else had he been able to do?... Yet what,
between letting him go and bidding him stay, was she herself to do? At
his touch her heart had swelled--been constricted--either--both; even
had she not known that she was a pretty woman, now at any rate she had
put it to the proof; and the chances seemed real enough that if he
turned and looked at her now, he must give a cry, stride across the
studio floor, and take her in his arms. Dared she provoke him?...

The moment she asked herself whether she dared she did dare. Not to have
dared would to have been to be inferior to those great and splendid and
reckless ones who had turned their eyes on their lovers and had
whispered, "Antony--Louis--I am here!" If she courted less danger than
she knew, her daring remained the same. And the room itself backed her
up. So many doctrines were enunciated in that studio, the burden of one
and all of which was "Why not?" The atmosphere was charged with
permissions ... perhaps for him too. He was at the door now. It was only
the turning of a key....

Amory's low-thrilled voice called his name across the studio.

"Edgar----"

But he had thought no less quickly than she. He had turned. Shrewdly he
guessed that she meant nothing; so much the better--damn it! There was
something female about Edgar Strong; he knew more about some things than
a young man ought to know; and in an instant he had found the "line" he
meant to take. It was the "line" of honour rooted in dishonour--the
"line" of Cosimo his friend--the "line" of black treachery to the hand
that fed him with muffins and anchovy paste--or, failing these, the
all-or-nothing "line."... But on the whole he would a little rather go
straight than not....

Nor did he hesitate. Amory had turned on the sofa. "Edgar!" she had
called softly again. He swung round. The savagery of his reply--there
seemed to Amory to be no other word to describe it--almost frightened
her.

"Do you know what you're doing?" he broke out. "Haven't you done enough
already? What do you suppose I'm made of?"

The moment he had said it he saw that he had made no mistake. It would
not be necessary to go the length of turning the key. He glared at her
for a moment; then he spoke again, less savagely, but no less curtly.

"You called me back to say something," he said. "What is it?"

Instinctively Amory had covered her face with her hands. It was
fearfully sweet and dangerous. Flattery could hardly have gone further
than that tortured cry, "What do you think I'm made of?" Her heart was
thumping--thump, thump, thump, thump. A lesser woman would have taken
refuge in evasions, but not she--not she, with Cosimo carrying on with
Britomart, and Dorothy Tasker no doubt whispering to her Otis or Wilbur
or whatever her American's name might be, and Stan perhaps deep in an
intrigue with his Spanish female at that very moment. No, she had
provoked him, and he had now every right to cry, not "Have you read
'_The Tragic Comedians_'?" but "Do you know what you're doing?"... And
he was speaking again now.

"Because," he was saying quietly, "if _that's_ it ... I must know. I
must have a little time. There will be things to settle. I don't quite
know how it happened; I suddenly saw you--and did it. Anyway, it's
done--or begun.... But I won't stab Cosimo in the back.... It will have
to be the Continent, I suppose. Paris. There's a little hotel I know in
the Boulevard Montparnasse. It's not very luxurious, but it's cheap and
fairly clean. Seven francs a day, but it would come rather less for the
two of us. And you wouldn't have to spend much on dress in the Quartier.
Or there's Montmartre. Or some of those out-of-the-way seaside places. I
should like to take you to the sea first, and then to a town----"

He stopped, and began to walk up and down the studio.

Amory was suddenly pale. She had not thought of this. She had thought
that perhaps Mr. Strong might give a cry, rush across the studio, and
take her in his arms; but of this cold and almost passionless prevision
of details she had not dreamed. And yet that was magnificent too. Edgar
wasted no time in dalliance when there was planning to be done. There
would be time enough for softer delights when the whole of the Latin
Quarter lay spread out before them in indolent magnificence of bloom. He
was terrifying and superb. Such a man not manage Mr. Prang! Why, here he
was, ready to bear her off that very night at a word!

Paris--Montmartre--the Quartier!

It was Romance with a vengeance!

Then at a thought she grew paler still. The children! What about Corin
and Bonniebell? It didn't matter so much about Cosimo; it would serve
him right; but what about the twins? Were they also to be included in
the seven francs a day? And wouldn't it matter how they dressed either
in the Quarter? Or did Edgar propose that they should be left behind in
Cosimo's keeping, with Britomart Belchamber for a stepmother?

Edgar had reached the door again now. He was not hurrying her, but there
was a look on his face that seemed to say that all she needed was a hat
and a rug for the steamer.

Such a very different thing from a carpet to roll round her----

She had risen unsteadily from the sofa. She crossed the floor and stood
before Edgar, looking earnestly up into his blue eyes. She moistened her
lips.

"What's happened----" she began in a whisper....

He interrupted her only to make the slightest of forbidding gestures
with his hand; her own hands had moved, as if she would have put them on
his shoulders. And she saw that he was quite right. At the touch of her
his control would certainly have broken down. She went on, appealingly
and almost voicelessly.

"What's happened--had to happen, hadn't it?" she whispered. "_You_ felt
it sweeping us away too--didn't you?... But need we say any more about
it to-night?... I want to think, Edgar. We must both think.
There's--there's a lot to think about--and talk over. We mustn't be too
rash. It _would_ be rash, wouldn't it? Look at me, Edgar----"

"Oh--I must go----," he said with an impatience that he had not to
assume.

"But look at me," she begged. "I shan't sleep a wink to-night. I shall
think about it all night. It will be lovely--but torturing--dear!--But
you'll sleep, I expect...." She pouted this last.

"I'm going away," he announced abruptly.

"Oh!" she cried, startled.... "But you'll come in to-morrow?"

"I shall go away for a few days. Perhaps longer."

"But--but--we haven't settled about the paper!----"

He was grim.--"You don't suppose I can think about the paper _now_, do
you?"

"No, no--of course not--but it _must_ be done to-day, Edgar! Or
to-morrow at the very latest!... Can't we _try_ to put this on one side,
just for an hour?"

He shook his head before the impossibility....

And that was how it came about that the Indian policy of the "Novum" was
left in the hands of Mr. Suwarree Prang.

Part II

THE PIGEON PAIR

Amory had been at a great deal of trouble to gather all the opinions she
could get about the education of her twins, Corin and Bonniebell; but it
was not true, as an unkind visitor who had been once only to The Witan
had said, that they were everybody's children. Just because Amory had
taken Katie Deedes' advice and had had their hair chopped off short at
the nape like a Boutet de Monvel drawing--and had not disdained to
accept the spelling-books which Dickie Lemesurier had given them (books
in which the difficult abstraction of the letter "A" was visualized for
their young eyes as "Little Brown Brother," "B" as "Tabby Cat," and so
on)--and had listened to Mr. Brimby when he had said what a good thing
it would be to devote an hour on Friday afternoons to the study of
Altruism and Camaraderie--and, in a word, had not been too proud and
egotistical to make use of a good suggestion wherever she found
it--because she had done these things, it did not at all follow that she
had shirked her duties. If she did not influence them directly, having
other things to do, she influenced those who did influence them, which
came to the same thing. She influenced the Wyrons, for example, and
nobody could say that the Wyrons had not made a particularly careful
study of children. They had, and Walter had founded at least two
Lectures directly on the twins and their education.

But the Wyrons, who had submitted to the indignity of marriage for the
sake of the race, laboured and lectured under an obvious disadvantage;
they had no children of their own. And so Amory had to fill up the gaps
in their experience for herself. Still, it was wonderful how frequently
the Wyrons' excogitations and the things Amory had found out for herself
coincided. They were in absolute accord, for example, about the promise
of the immediate future and the hope that lay in the generation to come.
The Past was dead and damned; the Present at best was an ignoble
compromise; but the Morrow was to be bright and shining.

"Walter and I," Laura sometimes said sadly, "aren't anything to brag
about. There is much of the base in us. Our lives aren't what they
should be. We're in the grip of inherited instincts too. We strive for
the best, but the worst's sometimes too much for us. It's like Moses
seeing the Promised Land from afar. We're just in the position of Moses.
But these young Aarons----"

Amory thought that very modest and dignified of poor old Laura. She
frequently thought of her as 'poor old Laura,' but of course she didn't
mean her actual age, which was only two years more than Amory's own. And
that was very good, if a little sad, about Moses. The Wyrons did look
forth over a Canaan they weren't very likely ever to tread.

Lately--that is to say since that secret and tremendous moment between
herself and Edgar Strong in the studio--Amory had fallen into the habit
of musing long over the sight of the twins at lessons, at play, or at
that more enlightened combination that makes lessons play and play
lessons. Sometimes Mr. Brimby, the novelist, had come up to her as she
had mused and had asked her what she was thinking about.

"Your little Pigeon Pair, eh?" he had said. "Ah, the sweetness; ah,
lucky mother! Grey books have to be the children of some of us; ah, me;
yours is a pleasanter path!"

Then he would fondle the little round topiary trees of their heads.
Amory was almost as sorry for Mr. Brimby as she was for Laura. His books
sold only moderately well, and she had more than once thought she would
like the "Novum" to serialize one of them--the one with the little boy
rather like Corin and the little girl rather like Bonniebell in it--if
Mr. Brimby didn't want too much money for it.

Edgar Strong, on the other hand, never fondled the children, and Amory's
heart told her why. How could he be expected to do anything but hate
those poor innocents who had come between him and his desire? He must
have realized that only the twins had frustrated that flight to Paris.
Of course he was polite about it; he said that he was not very fond of
children at all; but Amory was not deceived. She was, in a way,
flattered that he did not fondle them. It was such an eloquent
abstention. But it would have been more eloquent still had he come to
The Witan and not-fondled them oftener.

Therefore it was that Amory looked on Corin and Bonniebell as the
precious repositories of her own relinquished joys, and heirs to a
happier life than she herself had known. She dreamed over them and their
future. Laura Wyron was quite right: by the time they had grown up the
fogs of cowardice and prejudice and self-seeking would have disappeared
for ever. Perhaps even by that time, as in Heaven, there would be no
more marrying nor giving in marriage. Things would have adjusted
themselves out of the rarer and sweeter and more liberal atmosphere.
Corin, grown to be twenty, would one day meet with some mite who was
still in her cradle or not yet born, and the two would look at one
another with amazement and delight, and the Ideal Love would be born in
their eyes, and Corin would recite a few of those brave and pure and
unashamed things out of "Leaves of Grass" to her, and--well, and there
they would be.... And Bonniebell, too, would do the same, on a Spring
morning very likely, simply clad, cool and without immodest
blushes--yes, she too would see somebody, and she would say, gladly and
simply, "I am here" (for there would be no reason, then, why she should
wait for the youth to speak first), and--well, and there they would be
too. And it would be Exogamy, or whatever the word was that Walter used.
Either would go forth from the family on the appointed day--or perhaps
only Corin would go, and Bonniebell remain behind--but anyway, one, if
not both of them would go forth, and rove the morning-flushed hills,
alone and free and singing and on the look-out for somebody, and they
would look just like pictures of young Greeks, and nobody would laugh,
as they did at the poor lady who walked in Greek robes down the
Strand....

And Amory herself? Alas! She would be left with the tribe. She would be
old then--say fifty-something on the eleventh of October. And Edgar
would be old too. They would have to recognize that _their_ youth had
been spent in the night-time of ignorance and suspicion. _They_ would
only be able to think of those spirited young things quoting "Leaves of
Grass" to one another and wondering what had happened to them....

No wonder Amory was sometimes pensive....

Mr. Wilkinson, the Labour Member, had been to all intents and purposes
asked not to fondle the twins. He was a tall spare man with a great bush
of pepper-and-salt hair, a Yorkshire accent, and an eye that hardly
rested on any single object long enough to get more than a fleeting
visual impression of it. He wrote on the first and third weeks of the
month the "Novum's" column of "Military Notes," and on the alternate
weeks filled the same column with officially inspired "Trade Union
Echoes." Between these two activities of Mr. Wilkinson's there was a
connexion. He, in common with everybody else at The Witan, was loud in
decrying the jobberies and vested interests of Departments, with the War
Office placed foremost in the shock of his wrath. But the Trade Unions
were another matter, and never a billet-creating measure came before
Parliament but he strove vehemently to have its wheels cogged in with
those of the existing Trade Union machine. That is to say, that while in
theory he was for democratic competitive examination, in practice he
found something to be said for jobbery, could the fitting Trade Unionist
but be found. He was, moreover, a firebrand by temperament, and this is
where the connexion between the "Military Matters" and the "Echoes"
appears. Trade Unionists he declared, ought to learn to shoot. The other
side, with their cant about "Law and Order," never hesitated to call out
the regular troops; therefore, until the Army itself should have been
won over by means of the leaflets that were disseminated for the
purpose, they ought in the event of a strike to be prepared to throw up
barricades, to shoot from cellar-windows, and to throw down
chimney-stacks from the housetops. Capitalist-employed troops would not
destroy more property than they need; in a crooked-streeted town the
advantage of long-range fire would be gone; and Mr. Wilkinson was
prepared to demonstrate that a town defended on his lines could hold
out, in the event of Industrial War pushed to an extreme, until it was
starved into surrender.--These arguments, by the way, had impressed Mr.
Prang profoundly.

Now (to come back to the twins) on Corin's fourth birthday Mr.
Wilkinson, moved by these considerations, had given him a wooden gun,
and in doing so had committed a double error in Amory's eyes. His first
mistake had been to suppose that even if, under the present lamentable
(but nevertheless existing) conditions of militarism, Corin should ever
become a soldier at all, he would be the uncommissioned bearer of a gun
and not the commissioned bearer of a sword. And his second mistake had
been like unto it, namely, to think that, in the case of a proletariat
uprising say in Cardiff or York, Corin would not similarly have held
some post of weight and responsibility on the other side. Corin shoot up
through the street-trap of a coal-hole or pot somebody from behind a
chimney-stack!... But Amory admitted that it must be difficult for Mr.
Wilkinson to shake off the effects of his upbringing. That upbringing
had been very different from, say, Mr. Brimby's. Mr. Brimby had been at
Oxford, and in nobly stooping to help the oppressed brought as it were a
fragrant whiff of graciousness and culture with him. Mr. Wilkinson was a
nobody. He came from the stratum of need, and, when it came to fondling
the twins, must not think himself a Brimby.... Therefore, Amory had had
to ask him to take the gun back (a deprivation which had provoked a
mighty outcry from Corin), and to give him, if he must give him
something, a Nature book instead.

Katie Deedes and Dickie Lemesurier were both permitted to fondle the
twins, though in somewhat different measure. This difference of measure
did not mean that either Katie or Dickie suffered from a chronic cold
that the twins might have contracted. Here again the case was almost as
complicated as the case of Mr. Wilkinson. Cases had a way of being
complicated at The Witan. It was this:--

Both of these ladies, as Amory had assured Mr. Brimby, were "quite all
right." She meant socially. No such difference was to be found between
them in this respect as that which yawned between Mr. Brimby and Mr.
Wilkinson. Indeed as far as Dickie was concerned, Amory had given a
little apologetic laugh at the idea of her having to place and appraise
a Lemesurier of Bath at all. The two girls had equally to work for their
living, and--but perhaps it was here that the difference came in. There
are jobs and jobs. It was a question of tone. Dickie, running the
Suffrage Book Shop, enjoyed something of the glamour of Letters; but
Katie, as manageress of the Eden Restaurant, was, after all, only a
caterer. It was not Amory's fault that Romance had pronounced
arbitrarily and a little harshly on the relative dignity of these
occupations. She could not help it that books are books and superior,
while baked beans are only baked beans, necessary, but not to be talked
about. If Dickie had, by her calling, a shade more consideration than
was strictly her due, while Katie, by hers, was slightly shorn of
something to which she would otherwise have been entitled, well, it was
not Amory who had arranged it so.

But between books and baked beans the twins did not hesitate for an
instant. They saw from no point of view but their unromantic own.

Dickie, overhauling the remainder stock at the Suffrage Shop, was able
to bring them a book from time to time; but Katie, whose days were spent
in a really interesting place full of things to eat, brought them
sweetened Proteids, and cold roasted chestnuts, and sugared Filbertine,
and sometimes a pot of the Eden Non-Neuritic Honey for tea. And because
the flesh was stronger in them than Amory thought it ought to be (at any
rate until the day should come when they must leave the tribe with a
copy of "Leaves of Grass" in their hands), they adored Katie and thought
very much less of Dickie.

Now this belly-guided preference was a thing to be checked in them; and
one day Amory had asked Katie (quite nicely and gently) whether she
would mind _not_ bringing the children things that spoiled their
appetites, not to speak of their tempers when they clamoured for these
comestibles at times when they were not to be had. Then, one afternoon
in the nursery, Amory actually had to repeat her request. Half an hour
later, when the children had been brought down into the studio for their
after-tea hour, she learned that Katie had left the house. It was Corin
himself who informed her of this.

"Auntie Katie was crying," he said. "About the vertisements," he added.

"_Ad_-vertisements, dear," Amory corrected him. "Say _ad_-vertisements,
not vertisements."

"_Ad_-vertisements," said Corin sulkily. "But--" and he cheered up
again, "--she _was_, mother."

"Nonsense," said Amory. "And you're not to say 'Auntie' to Katie. It
isn't true. Your Auntie is your father's or your mother's sister, and we
haven't any.... And now you've played enough. Say good-night, both of
you, and take Auntie Dickie's book, and ask Miss Belchamber to read you
the story of the Robin and her Darling Eggs, and then you must have your
baths and go to bed."

"I want the tale about Robin Hood, that Mr. Strong once told me," Corin
demurred.

"No, you must have the one about the dear Dickie Bird, who had a wing
shot off by a cruel man one day, and had to hide her head under the
other one, so that when her Darling Eggs were hatched out the poor
little birds were all born with crooked necks--you remember what I told
you about the fortress in a horrible War, when the poor mothers were all
so frightened that all the little boys and girls were born lame--it's
the same thing--"

"Were there guns, that went bang?" Corin demanded. He had forgotten that
the story contained this really interesting detail.

"Yes."

"Great big ones?" Corin's eyes were wide open.

"Very big. It was very cruel and anti-social."

But Corin's momentary interest waned again.--"I want Robin Hood," he
said sullenly.

"Now you're being naughty, and I shall have to send you to bed without
any nice reading at all."

"I want Robin Hood." The tone was ominous....

"And I want some chestnuts," Bonniebell chimed in, her face also
puckering....

And so Amory, who had threatened to send them bookless to bed, must keep
her word. It is very wrong to tell falsehoods to children. She dismissed
them, and they went draggingly out, their Boutet de Monvel hair and
fringed _eponge_ costumes giving them the appearance of two luckless
pawns that had been pushed off the board in some game of chess they did
not understand.

Amory thought it very foolish of Katie to take on in this way. She might
have known that her advertisements had not been refused without good
reason. Amory had fully intended to explain all about it to Katie, but
she really had had so many things to do. Nor ought it to have needed
explaining. Surely Katie could have seen for herself that Dickie's
Bookshop List, with its names of Finot and Forel and Mill and the rest,
was a distinction and an embellishment to the paper, while her own
Filbertines and Protolaxatives were a positive disfigurement. The proper
place for these was, not in the columns of the "Novum," but in the
"Please take One" box at the Eden's door.... But if Katie intended to
sulk and cry about it, well, so much the worse.... (To jump forward a
little: Katie did elect to sulk. Or rather, she did worse. She was so
ill-advised as to go behind Amory's back and to speak to Cosimo himself
about the advertisements. With that Katie's goose--or perhaps one should
say her Anserine--was cooked. Amory did not allow that kind of thing.
She certainly did not intend to explain anything after that. It was
plain as a pikestaff that Katie was jealous of Dickie. Amory was
bitterly disappointed in Katie. Of course she would not forbid her the
house; she was still free to come to The Witan whenever she liked;
but--somehow Katie only came once more. She found herself treated so
very, very kindly.... So she gulped down a sob, fondled the twins once
more, and left).

Miss Britomart Belchamber saw enough of the twins not to wish to fondle
them very much. Amory was not yet absolutely sure that she fondled
Cosimo instead, but she was welcome to do so if she could find any
satisfaction in it. Cosimo fondled the twins to a foolish extreme. Mr.
Prang could never get near enough to them to fondle them. Both Corin and
Bonniebell displayed a most powerful interest in Mr. Prang, and would
have stood stock-still gazing at him for an hour had they been
permitted; but the moment he approached them they fled bellowing.

And in addition to these various fondlings there were casual fondlings
from time to time whenever the more favoured of the "Novum's"
contributors were asked to tea.

But the Wyrons remained, so to speak, the _ex-officio_ fondlers, and
perhaps childless Laura felt a real need to fondle at her heart. It was
she who first asked Amory whether she hadn't noticed that, while Mr.
Brimby and Dickie frequently fondled the twins separately, more
frequently still they did so together.

"No!" Amory exclaimed. "I hadn't noticed!"

"Walter thinks they would be a perfect pair," Laura mused....

THE 'VERT

Stan saw very little in the scheme that Dorothy darkly meditated against
her aunt. He seldom saw much in Dorothy's schemes. Perhaps she did not
make quite enough fuss about them, but went on so quietly maturing them
that her income seemed to be merely something that happened in some not
fully explained but quite natural order of events. Stan thought it
rather a lucky chance that the money usually had come in when it was
wanted, that was all.

But of his own job he had quite a different conception. _That_ took
thought. This appeared plainly now that he was able to dismiss his own
past failures with a light and almost derisive laugh.

"I don't know whatever made me think there was anything in them," he
said complacently one night within about ten days of Christmas. He had
put on his slippers and his pipe, and was drowsily stretching himself
after a particularly hard "comic film" day, in the course of which he
had been required to fall through a number of ceilings, bringing the
furniture with him in his downward flight. He had come home, had had a
shampoo and a hot bath, and the last traces of the bags of flour and
the sacks of soot had disappeared. "I don't think now they'd ever have
come to very much."

"Hush a moment," said Dorothy, listening, her needle arrested half-way
through the heel of one of his socks.... "All right. I thought I heard
him--Yes?"

She could face young girls now. The third Bit had turned out to be yet
another boy.

"I mean," Stan burbled comfortably, "there wouldn't have been the money
in them I thought there would. Now take those salmon-flies, Dot. Of
course I can tie 'em in a way. But what I mean is, it's a limited
market. Not like the boot-trade, I mean, or soap, or films. Everybody
wears boots and sees films. There's more scope, more demand. But
everybody doesn't carry a salmon-rod. Comparatively few people do. And
the same with big-game shooting. Or deerstalking. Everybody can't afford
'em."

"No, dear," said Dorothy, her eyes downcast.

"Then there was Fortune and Brooks," Stan continued with a great air of
discovery. "_I_ see their game now. You see it too, don't you?--They
just wanted orders. New accounts. That's what they wanted. If I could
have put 'em on to a chap who'd have spent say five hundred a year on
Chutney and things--well, what I mean is, where would they be without
customers like that?"

"Nowhere, dear," said the dutiful Dorothy.

"Exactly. Nowhere. That's what I was leading up to. They wouldn't be
anywhere. They just wanted to be put on to these things. And it's just
struck me how _I_ should have looked, going out to dinner somewhere,
strange house very likely, and I'd said to somebody I'd perhaps met for
the first time, 'Don't think much of these salted almonds; our hostess
ought to try the F. and B. Brand, a Hundred Gold Medals, and see that
the blessed coupon isn't broken.'--Eh? See what I mean?"

"I was never very keen on the idea," Dorothy admitted gravely.

"No, and I'm blessed if I see why I was, now," Stan conceded
cheerfully....

She loved this change in him which a real job with real money had
brought about. Poor old darling, she thought, it must have been pretty
rotten for him before, borrowing half-crowns from her in the morning,
which he would spend with an affected indifference on drinks and cab
fares in the evening. And he _should_ speak with a new authority if he
wished. Not for worlds would she have smiled at His Impudence's new air
of being master in his own house. He _should_ be a Sultan if he
liked--provided he didn't want more than one wife.

Moreover, his bringing in of money had been a relief so great that even
yet she had hardly got out of the habit of reckoning on her own earnings
only. It had taken her weeks to realize that now the twopences came in
just a little more quickly than they went out, and that she could
actually afford herself the luxury of keeping Mr. Miller waiting for his
Idea, or even of not giving it to him at all. She really had no Idea to
give him. She was entirely wrapped up now in her plot against Lady
Tasker.

That plot, summarized from several conversations with Stan, was as
follows:--

"You see, there's the Brear, with all that land, Aunt Grace's very own.
The Cromwell Gardens lease is up in June, and it's all very well for
auntie to say she doesn't hate London, but she does. She spends half a
rent, with one and another of them, in travelling backwards and
forwards, and she's getting old, too.--Then there's us. We can't go on
living here, and the Tonys will be home just as Tim's leave's up, and
they're sure to leave their Bits behind. Very well. Now the Tims and the
Tonys can't afford to pay much, but they can afford something, and I
think they ought to pay. They're sure to want those boys to go into the
Army, and they'd _have_ to pay for that anyway.--So there ought to be a
properly-managed Hostel sort of place, paying its way, and a fund
accumulating, and Aunt Gracie at the head of it, poor old dear, but
somebody to do the work for her.--I don't see why we shouldn't clear out
that old billiard-table that nobody ever uses, and throw that and the
gun-room into one, and make that the schoolroom, and have a proper
person down--a sort of private preparatory school for Sandhurst and
Woolwich, and the money put by to help with the fees afterwards. It
would be much easier if we all clubbed together. And I should jolly well
make Aunt Eliza give us at least a thousand pounds--selfish old thing."

"Frightful rows there'd be," Stan usually commented, thinking less of
Dorothy's plan than of his own last trick-tumble. "Like putting brothers
into the same regiment; always a mistake. And we're all rather good at
rows you know."

"Well, they're our _own_ rows anyway. We keep 'em to ourselves. And we
_do_ all mean pretty much the same thing when all's said. I'm going to
work it all out anyway, and then tackle Aunt Grace.... _I_ shall manage
it, of course."

She did not add that her Lennards and Taskers and Woodgates would sink
their private squabbles precisely in proportion as the outside attacks
on their common belief rendered a closing-up of the ranks necessary. But
she _had_ been to The Witan and had kept her eyes open there, and knew
that there were plenty of other Witans about. If stupid Parliament, with
its votes and what not, couldn't think of anything to do about it, that
was no reason why she should not do something, and make stingy old Aunt
Eliza pay for the training of her Bits into the bargain.

She had not seen Amory since that day when the episode of the winter
woollies had made her angry, for, though Amory had called once at the
Nursing Home soon after the birth of the third Bit, Dorothy had really
not felt equal to the hair-raising tale of the twins all over again, and
had sent a message down to her by the nurse. There was this difference
between this tragic recital of Amory's and the fervour with which Ruth
Mossop always hugged to her breast the thought of the worst that could
happen--that Ruth _had_ known brutality, and so might be forgiven for
getting "a little of her own back"; but Amory had known one hardish
twelvemonths perhaps, a good many years ago and when she had been quite
able to bear it, and had since magnified that period of discomfort by a
good many diameters. Amory, Dorothy considered, didn't really know she
was born. She was unfeignedly sorry for that. Whatever measure of
contempt was in her she kept for Cosimo.

For she considered that Cosimo was at the bottom of all the trouble. If
Stan, at his most impecunious and happy-go-lucky, could still stalk
about the house saying "Dot, I won't have this," or "Look here, Dorothy,
that has got to stop," it seemed to her that Cosimo, with never a care
on his mind that was not his own manufacture, might several times have
prevented Amory from making rather a fool of herself. But it seemed to
Dorothy that kind of man was springing up all over the place nowadays.
Mr. Brimby was another of them. Dorothy had read one of Mr. Brimby's
books--"_The Source_," and hadn't liked it. She had thought it terribly
dismal. In it a pretty and rich young widow, who might almost have been
Amory herself, went slumming, and spent a lot of money in starting a
sort of Model Pawn Shop, and by and by there came a mysterious
falling-off in her income, and she went to see her lawyer about it, and
learned, of course, that her source of income was that very slum in
which she had stooped to labour so angelically.... Dorothy didn't know
very much about pawnshops, but then she didn't believe that Mr. Brimby
did either; and if her interest in them ever should become really keen,
she didn't think she should go to Oxford for information about them. And
Mr. Brimby himself seemed to feel this "crab," as Stan would have called
it, for after "_The Source_" he had written a Preface for a book by a
real and genuine tramp.... And it had been Amory who had recommended
"_The Source_" to Dorothy. She had said that it just showed, that with
vision and thought and heart and no previous experience ("no prejudice"
had been her exact words), there need be none of these dreadful grimy
establishments, with their horrible underbred assistants who refused a
poor woman half a crown on her mattress and made a joke about it, but
airy and hygienic rooms instead, with rounded corners so that the dust
could be swept away in two minutes (leaving a balance of at least
twenty-eight minutes in which the sweeper might improve himself), and
really courtly-mannered attendants, full of half crowns and pity and
Oxford voice, who would give everybody twice as much as they asked for
and a tear into the bargain.

And Amory knew just as much about real pawnshops as did Dorothy and Mr.
Brimby.

For the life of her Dorothy could not make out what all these people
were up to.

And--though this was better now that Stan was earning--the thought of
the money that was being squandered at The Witan had sometimes made her
ready to cry. For at the Nursing Home she had had one other visitor, and
this visitor had opened her eyes to the appalling rate at which Cosimo's
inheritance must be going. This visitor had been Katie Deedes. Katie
too, was an old fellow-student of Dorothy's; it had not taken Dorothy
long to see that Katie was full of a grievance; and then it had all come
out. There had been some sort of a row. It had been simply and solely
because Katie ran a Food Shop. Amory thought that _infra dig_. And just
because Katie had given the children a few chestnuts Amory had
practically said so.

"_I_ shan't go there again," Katie had said, trying on Dorothy's account
to keep down her tears. "_I_ didn't marry a man with lots of money, and
turn him round my finger, and make him write my _Life and Works_, and
then snub my old friends! And none of the people who go there are really
what she thinks they are. _She_ thinks they go to see _her_, but Mr.
Brimby only goes because Dickie does, and because he wants to sell the
'Novum' something or other, and Mr. Strong of course has to go, and Mr.
Wilkinson goes because he wants Cosimo to stop the 'Novum' and start
something else with him as editor, and Laura goes because they get
things printed about Walter's Lectures, and I don't know what those
Indians are doing there at all, and anyway _I've_ been for the last
time! I'm just as good as she is, and I should like to come and see you
instead, Dorothy, and of course I won't bring your babies chestnuts if
you don't want.... But I'm frightfully selfish; I'm tiring you out....
May an A B C girl come to see you?"

And Katie had since been. There is no social reason why the manager of a
Vegetarian Restaurant may not visit the house of a film acrobat.

As it happened, Katie came in that very night when the weary breadwinner
was painstakingly explaining to his thoughtful spouse his reasons for
doubting whether he would ever have got very rich had he remained one of
Fortune and Brooks' well-dressed drummers. Katie had a round face and
puzzled but affectionate eyes, and Stan was just beginning to school his
own eyes

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