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Gray youth: The story of a very modern courtship and a very modern marriage

by Oliver Onions · English · Gutenberg #45682 · 910,489 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Gray youth: The story of a very modern courtship and a very modern marriage

Author: Oliver Onions


        
Release date: May 18, 2014 [eBook #45682]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GRAY YOUTH: THE STORY OF A VERY MODERN COURTSHIP AND A VERY MODERN MARRIAGE ***

  GRAY YOUTH

  OLIVER ONIONS




  NOVELS BY OLIVER ONIONS

  IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE EVIDENCE
  THE DEBIT ACCOUNT
  THE STORY OF LOUIE
  GRAY YOUTH

  GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
  NEW YORK




  GRAY YOUTH

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


  BY

  OLIVER ONIONS

  Author of "In Accordance with the Evidence,"
  "The Debit Account."


  GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
  NEW YORK

  _Publishers in America for Hodder & Stoughton_




  Copyright, 1913,
  BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

  Copyright, 1914,
  BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY




  TO
  MARY STEWART




PUBLISHER'S NOTE


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




CONTENTS


BOOK ONE: A VERY MODERN COURTSHIP--THE TWO KISSES

PART I

  CHAPTER                               PAGE
      ARGUMENT                            11
    I CHEYNE WALK                         18
   II THE SURPRISE PARTY                  33
  III THE FASHION STUDIO                  52
   IV THE MCGRATH                         67
    V POUNDS AND SHILLINGS                83
   VI WOMAN'S WHOLE EXISTENCE             99
  VII THE VOICE THAT BREATHED O'ER EDEN  120

PART II

    I PENCE                              142
   II A DAMSEL ERRANT                    160
  III "BUSINESS AS USUAL"                176
   IV "IL FAUT QU' UNE PORTE--"          191
    V BOND AND FREE                      215

PART III

    I THE LEAGUE                         243
   II "BARRAGE"                          263
  III EPITHALAMIUM                       287
      ENTR' ACTE                         314


BOOK TWO: A VERY MODERN MARRIAGE--A CROOKED MILE

PART I

  CHAPTER                               PAGE
    I THE WITAN                          321
   II THE POND-ROOM                      337
  III THE "NOVUM"                        352
   IV THE STONE WALL                     369
    V THREE SHIPS                        393
   VI POLICY                             414

PART II

    I THE PIGEON PAIR                    435
   II THE 'VERT                          447
  III THE IMPERIALISTS                   463
   IV THE OUTSIDERS                      485
    V "HOUSE FULL"                       503
   VI THE SOUL STORM                     524

PART III

    I LITMUS                             553
   II BY THE WAY                         568
  III DE TROP                            588
   IV GRAY YOUTH                         598
    V TAILPIECE                          620




BOOK ONE

A VERY MODERN COURTSHIP




PART I

ARGUMENT


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




I

CHEYNE WALK


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

  MISS DOROTHY LENNARD
    MISS AMORY TOWERS

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

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

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

"Amory!" she called loudly. "Where are you?"

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

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

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

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

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

She moved to the window. "I haven't touched your things," she said.

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

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

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

"Have you heard about Aunt Jerry?"

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

"She's going to be married."

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

"No!... Oh, my dear, _do_ tell me, quick."

"Mr. Massey, at the boarding-house."

"Mr.----? _Not_ the safety-valve?" she cried.

"Yes."

"My--_dear_!... But he's forty if he's a day," Dorothy exclaimed.

"He's forty-three. Aunt Jerry's thirty-eight."

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

"Write if you like. They're getting married in July. I call it----"

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

"Why," said Dorothy, checked in her glee, "what's the matter?"

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

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

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

"I must write to her at once," she said. "In July--so soon! I _am_
glad! I _do_ hope they'll be happy!... And what'll you do? Go on living
at the boarding-house?"

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

"Aunt Jerry paid the bills there," she said.

"Do you mean that you'll go and live with them when they're married?"
Dorothy asked.

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

"Well, what will you do?" Dorothy asked again.

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

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

"Oh," cried Dorothy at once, struck with the idea, "that'll be jolly!"

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

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

But Dorothy caught the tone in which she said it.

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

"H'm! If I ever do! Don't forget it's been put off three times already."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Dorothy only laughed.

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

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

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

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

"It's awfully good of you--but you know I simply shouldn't know how to
begin," she said. "I think perhaps I'd better stick to my own job."

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

"I'm afraid not."

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

"I say, Amory, you are plucky!" she exclaimed.

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

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

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

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

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

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




II

THE SURPRISE PARTY


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

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

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

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

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

"You know how you can get your place back again--after July," she said
demurely.

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

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

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

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

"No," said Amory.

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

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

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

"Almost the same," said Amory.

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

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

"Yes, I've a letter to write."

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

But Amory fled.

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

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

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

"What, dear?" she asked amiably.

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

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

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

But again Amory turned away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"George--or Uncle George----" said Mr. Massey gently.

"--Uncle George--and I do hope you won't think me horrid--but I thought
of living in my studio----"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A little," said Amory.

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

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

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

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

"Causes 'eaps o' fun and roars o' laughter!" Mr. Beeton, of the
cycle-works, cried.

"Don't go 'ome wifaht it!----"

"One penny!----"

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

"Here, let's have a look--where do you get 'em?"

"_Oh_, you wretches!" pouted Mrs. Deschamps.

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

"Mis-tairr----Ooell-come!" he announced.

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

"Now, now, now, now, now--what's all this about?" Mr. Wellcome cried
with mock severity.

Acclamations broke forth.

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

"Bravo!" shouted Mr. Geake. "It's old Wellcome!"

"Come in out o' the wet!"

"Welcome, Wellcome!"

"Hooray!"

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

They cheered him again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Steady ... _there_!" He passed an exquisitely filled glass to Mr.
Rainbow. "Warm it in your hands a minute first--this way--smell it--and
now roll it slowly round the inside o' your mouth!----"

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

"_Mmmmmm!_" he murmured ecstatically, lips closed, nostrils gently
sniffing, eyes fondling the glass.

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

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

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

And so said all the rest.




III

THE FASHION STUDIO


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No ladies with one foot on a chair for the _Daily Spec_, like the one
you began this morning," Miss Umpleby remarked.

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

"Just so that we can turn the stuff out quicker!" somebody else joined
in. "'Holiday's' a good name for it, I _don't_ think!"

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

Hilda Jeyes threw away the core of her apple. "You needn't growl,
anyway, Umpy. You are engaged."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They had borne Dorothy off to a teashop to lunch.

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

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

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

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

"I'm on," Walter Wyron had cried eagerly.

"You could fetch your guitar, couldn't you, Laura?"

"And Amory hasn't heard Walter's new recitation----"

"Good. We'll come."

"Rather!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'll unpack the bananas," she said, as Dorothy laid the broom aside.

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

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

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

"Here they come!" she cried, clapping her hands.

And she ran down the stairs to meet them.




IV

THE MCGRATH


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

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

"Well, here we are----" they announced themselves.

"Donkey's years since we've seen you, Amory----"

"How are you?"

"How's Life and Work?"

"This is Bielby, Amory ... don't suppose you know him ... we just
brought him along----"

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

"Chuck your things down ... mind Laura's guitar----"

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

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

"No?"

"Positively sinful to spoil this effect!----"

"Pull the chairs up round the fire--the floor'll do for me----"

"Me too----"

"I'll lean against your knees, Dorothy----"

"Oh, now I've left my handkerchief in my pocket! Lend me yours,
Cosimo----"

"Well, Amory----!"

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

"I say--Amory's hair!----" Walter Wyron broke rapturously out, as Amory
settled into her place.

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

"Suppose so--but _isn't_ it Venetian!----"

"Just put that green plate with the oranges in her lap----"

"Oh ... magnificent!"

It did indeed make an astonishing glow.

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

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

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

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

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

Cosimo started dramatically. "_No!_"

Amory nodded. She could always rely on Cosimo.

"You don't say so! Oh, _do_ tell me! Do you think----" a short pause,
"--he's worthy of her?"

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

"_Do_ tell me!" Cosimo implored....

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

"At least tell me whether he's 'in' or 'out'!" he begged.

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

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

"And Mrs. 'Ill----" Amory rippled on to Mr. Bielby----

"Oh yes--tell him about Mrs. 'Ill and the Creek!" they cried.

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

"But the hens are the best, Amory--tell him about the hens----" they
prompted.

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

"Oh, but about 'Ill--he hasn't heard about 'Ill----"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh no--carnations for Dickie, and just green leaves for Amory----"

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

"Or green grapes," Walter Wyron suggested, peering also.

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

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

"How's that? Wait--just a minute--it wants just one touch--there!" he
said, drawing back.

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

"Oh--green leaves, most decidedly!" cried Walter Wyron with conviction.
"Amory, you really _must_ paint yourself so--none of us could do
it--_what_ a sonnet Rossetti would have written!"

"_Or_ Swinburne----"

"_Or_ Baudelaire----!"

"_Or_ Verlaine!"

Rapt they gazed for some moments longer....

"Green leaves for Amory, then, and carnations for Dickie.... What's
Dorothy?"

"Oh, Dot's a tea-rose----"

"Periwinkle, to go with her eyes----"

"'_Pervenche_' they always call it in the Catalogues, don't they, Dot?
Must have superior terms for Catalogues!"

"And amethyst earrings----"

"No, pearls----"

"I say amethyst!"

"I say pearls!"

"Pooh! Pearls are obviously Laura's wear!"

"Laura! My dear chap! Why, what were emeralds made for if they weren't
made for Laura?..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I say, Laura! Mr. Jowett's still just the same as ever, Mr. Bielby
says," she said.

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

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

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

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

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

"Why, he didn't think tremendously of Amory herself!" said Katie Deedes
indignantly.

"And still," Laura remarked with dreamy irony, "I suppose we _ought_
to hide our abashed heads really--but somehow or other we go on
painting----"

"--still survive----"

"--bear up----"

"--quite happy in our ignorance----"

"Curiously blind all the world must be except Jowett----"

"Rather dreadful to know you're the only wise man left----"

"Funny old stick!... But it's only a pose really----"

"That exactly describes it----"

"Certainly the immortelle for Jowett!"...

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

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

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

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

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

    "'And she tied a piece of ribbon round his bonnie, bonnie waist,
    To let the ladies know he was married,'"

Laura sang....

"Oh, lovely!" Amory murmured, her golden eyes closed.

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

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

"We walk, I suppose?" Cosimo said to Amory.

"Rather!" said Amory.

They turned their faces towards Shepherd's Bush.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But I'm worried about her, Cosimo----"

"Of course you are," Cosimo replied promptly. "That's what I always
find so fine about you. The stronger _always_ worries about the weaker.
It seems to be a Law----"

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

"Well, _isn't_ it? Just look at it, now...."

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

She continued her walk with Cosimo.




V

POUNDS AND SHILLINGS


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"In that case I suppose there's no hurry," she said, plunging into
dejection once more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A hundred pounds! Amory thought....

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

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

A hundred pounds, now!----

Almost precipitately Amory accepted.

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

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

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

"What is it?" she cried breathlessly. "Not Cosimo----?"

"How Cosimo?" Amory asked, staring a little.

"I mean, I thought--I thought perhaps he'd proposed----"

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

And she told her.

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

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

Amory did so.

"And he's sending for the pictures to-morrow?"

"Yes, but you don't understand; this isn't the price of the pictures."

"And he doesn't say when the Show will be?"

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

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

But Dorothy hardly seemed to hear.

"And they've got thirty pictures?" she asked presently.

"Twenty-eight."

"And can you exhibit new ones anywhere else?"

"They'll take the new ones too, at the same rate."

"But can you exhibit them anywhere else if you want?"

"Not for two years."

"Then," said Dorothy slowly, "I don't think I'd sign the contract,
Amory."

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

"Well, if it's as you say, it seems to me that they just muzzle you for
two years."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You mean you're accepting that offer?"

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

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

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

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

On the next day but one she signed her contract.

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

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

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

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

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

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

An hour later Amory's pecuniary circumstances stood as follows:--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




VI

WOMAN'S WHOLE EXISTENCE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"_Doesn't_ it sound like the year of the Great Exhibition!" he chuckled
when Amory had told him.

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

"There's only one word for it really--'prurient,'" Cosimo opined.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I was wondering, Cosimo, why--why you don't marry Dorothy."

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, just at present I'm having enough of marriage to last me for
some time to come.... Cosimo," she added, in impressive tones, "Aunt
Jerry's--_awful_!"

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

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

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

"You think it's that?"

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

"Dorothy says she'd rather have boys, too," Amory mused.

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

("Here's a piece that wants a stitch too.) But oh, Cosimo, isn't that
going rather too far? Dorothy--and Jellies----!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




VII

THE VOICE THAT BREATHED O'ER EDEN


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

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

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

"It _sounded_ like one, Amory...."

"It _was_ one, Cosimo...."

"You are sure?..."

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

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

"You _don't_ mean...."

Amory had clapped her hands.

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

"All trying to marry you and me, Amory?"

"Yes, Cosimo."

"And I shall be asked to the wedding as--er--one of the family?"

"Quite, if I know anything about auntie."

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

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

"You _promise_ me he shall say that?" said Cosimo incredulously.

"Oh, you don't know the atmosphere I've had to keep my art alive in!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The cake, the cake!" everybody shouted; and one of Bunters' waiters
handed Aunt Jerry a knife.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But you lost your bet, Amory--he _didn't_ say, 'May all your troubles
be little ones!'"

"But he showed us the baby's legs."

"I admit he did that. That was rather beyond rubies."

"And he handed the toothpicks round."

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

"I thought perhaps you were disappointed," Amory remarked.

"Good heavens, no! I wouldn't have missed it for worlds! (But, of
course, your aunt was charming.)... _Isn't_ Mr. Massey fond of the
police sergeant!"

"Sickly sentiment, I call it," said Amory abruptly.

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

"Eh?... Oh yes, it is more," said Amory.

"More?... Rather! Why, take it in art...."

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

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

"A little."

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




PART II




I

PENCE


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

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

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

Overfed animal!...

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

Wasn't it dishonest? she had cried hotly to herself any time this past
month. If it wasn't, she would be glad if somebody would tell her
what honesty was! And Mr. Dix in his most odious and soothing voice,
had said that she really mustn't talk like that. "Dishonest?" he had
repeated. Why, Miss Towers talked as if Croziers' had anything to
gain by deliberately suppressing her wor

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