PART II

I

THE PIGEON PAIR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No wonder Amory was sometimes pensive....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

THE 'VERT

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

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

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

"I don't think now they'd ever have come to very much."

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

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

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

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

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

"Nowhere, dear," said the dutiful Dorothy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As it happened, Katie came in that very night when the weary breadwinner was painstakingly explaining to his thoughtful spouse his reasons for doubting whether he would ever have got very rich had he remained one of Fortune and Brooks' well-dressed drummers. Katie had a round face and puzzled but affectionate eyes, and Stan was just beginning to school his own eyes not to rest with too open an interest on her Greenaway frocks and pancake hats. Katie for her part was intensely self-conscious in Stan's presence. She felt that when he wasn't looking at her clothes he was, expressly, _not_-looking at them, and that was worse.... But she couldn't have worn a hobble skirt and an aigrette at the "Eden."... Stan had told Dorothy that when he knew Katie better he intended to get out of her the remaining gruesome and Blue-Beard's-Chamber details which the hoof and the forequarter seemed to him to promise.

"Poor little darlings!" Dorothy exclaimed compassionately by and by--Katie had been relating some anecdote in which Corin and Bonniebell had played a part. "I _do_ think it's wrong to dress children ridiculously! The other day _I_ saw a little girl--she must have been quite six or seven--and _she'd_ knickers like a little boy, and long golden hair all down her back! What _is_ the good of pretending that girls are boys?"

"Awful rot," Stan remarked with a mighty stretch. "I say, I'm off to bed; I shall be yawning in Miss Deedes' face if I don't. Is there any arnica in the house, Dot?... Good night----"

"Good night," said Katie; and as the door closed behind the master of the house she settled more comfortably in her chair. "Now that he's stopped not-looking at me we can have a good talk," her gesture seemed to say; "how _does_ he expect I can get any other clothes till I've saved the money?"...

They did talk. They talked of the old days at the McGrath, and who'd married who, and who hadn't married who after all, and, in this connection, of Laura Beamish and Walter Wyron, whom they had both known.... And it just showed how little glory and fame were really worth in the world. For Dorothy, who had been living in London all this time, had not heard as much as a whisper of that memorable revolt of the Wyrons against the Marriage Service, and, though she did know vaguely that Walter lectured, had not the ghost of an idea of what his lectures were about. She had been too busy minding her own petty and private and selfish affairs. Katie couldn't believe it. She thought Dorothy was joking.

"You've never heard of Walter's Lecture on '_Heads or Tails in the Trying Time_,' nor his '_Address on the Chromosome_'?" she gasped....

"No; do tell me. What is a Chromosome?"

"A Chromosome? Why, it's a--it's a--well, you know when you've a cell--or a nucleus--or a gland or something--but it isn't a gland--it's the--but you _do_ astonish me, Dorothy!"

"But surely you're joking about Walter and Laura?" Dorothy exclaimed in her turn.

"Indeed I'm not! Why, I thought _every_body knew!..."

"(It's all right--he won't come in again). But _why_ did they pretend not to be married?" Dorothy asked in amazement.

"I don't know--I mean I forget for the moment--it seemed perfectly clear the way Walter explained it--you ought to go and hear him----"

"But what difference could being married--I mean not being married--make?"

"Ah!" said Katie, with satisfaction at having found her bearings again. "Walter's got a whole Lecture on that. It always thrills everybody. Amory thinks it's almost his best--after the '_Synthetic Protoplasm_' one, of course--that's admitted by everybody to be quite _the_ best!"[1]

[1] I have been charged with the invention of these facetiæ. Here is the Synthetic Protoplasm idea:--

"The dream of creating offspring without the concurrence of woman has always haunted the imagination of the human race. The miraculous advances which the chemical synthesis has accomplished in these latter days seem to justify the boldest hopes, but we are still far from the creation of living protoplasm. The experiences of Loeb or of Delage are undoubtedly very confounding. But in order to produce life these scientists were obliged, nevertheless, to have recourse to beings already organized. Thousands of centuries undoubtedly separate us from any possibility of realizing the most magnificent and most disconcerting dream ever engendered in the human brain. In the meantime, as the Torch of Life must be transmitted to the succeeding generations, woman will continue gloriously to fulfil her character of mother."--"Problems of the Sexes," Jean Finot; 12_s._ 6_d._ net; p. 352.

Lightly worked up and chattily treated, this theme, as Katie said, drew quiet smiles of appreciation from every cultured audience which Walter addressed.

O. O.

"Proto ... but I thought those were a kind of oats!" said poor Dorothy, utterly bewildered.

"Oats!" cried Katie in a sort of whispered shriek. "Why, it's--it's--but I don't know even how to _begin_ to explain it! Do you mean to say you haven't read about these things?"

"No," murmured Dorothy, abashed.

"Not Monod, nor Ellen Key, nor Sebastian Faure, nor Malom!----"

"N-o." Dorothy felt horribly ashamed of herself.

"But--but--those _lovely_ little boys of yours!----"

She gazed wide-eyed at the disconcerted Dorothy....

* * * * *

It was the humiliating truth: Dorothy had never heard of the existence of a single one of these writers and leaders of thought. She had borne Noel in black ignorance of what they had had to say about the Torch of the Race, and Jackie and the third Bit for all the world as if they had never set pen to paper. Monod had not held her hand, nor Faure been asked for his imprimatur; Key had hymned Love superfluously, and the Synthesists, equally superfluously, its supersession. For a moment she anxiously hoped that it was all right, and then, as Katie went on, the marvel of it all overwhelmed her again.

The dictum that desirable children could be born only _out_ of wedlock! That stupendous suggestion of Walter's to millionaires who did not know what to do with their money, that, for the improvement of the Race, they should endow with a thousand pounds every poor little come-by-chance that weighed eleven pounds at birth! That other proposal, that twenty years could straightway be added to woman's life and beauty by a mere influencing of her thoughts about the Chromosome--whatever it was!... Poor uncultured Dorothy did not know whether she was on her head or her heels. She had never dreamed, until Katie told her, that before marrying Stan she ought to have gone to the insect-world, or to the world of molluscs and crustacæ, to learn how _they_ maintained the integrity of their own highest type--whether by pulling their wings off after the flight, or devouring their husbands, or--or--or what! She had heard of the moral lessons that can be learned of the ant, but it had not struck her that she and Stan might, by means of a little more study and care, have lifted up the economy of their little flat to the level of the marvellously-organized domesticity you see when you kick over a stone.

But Katie's hesitations and great gaps of confessed ignorance gave her a little more courage. Katie was at pains to explain that all that she herself knew about it all was that these things were what they _said_, and Dorothy must go to Walter and the books for the rest.

"They're all very expensive books, and I may not really have understood them," she said wistfully. "They must be awfully deep and so on if they're so dear--twelve and fifteen and twenty shillings! But I did try so hard, and sometimes it seemed quite reasonable and plain, especially when the print was nice and big.... Close print always seems so frightfully learned.... And I know I've explained it badly; I haven't Walter's gift of putting things. Amory has, of course. When she and Walter have a really good set-to it makes one feel positively _abject_ about one's ignorance. I doubt if Cosimo can always _quite_ follow them, and I'm quite sure Mr. Strong can't--I know he's only hedging when he says, 'Ah, yes, have you read Fabre on the Ant or Maeterlinck on the Bee?'--and I believe he just glances at the review books that come to the "Novum" instead of really studying them, as Walter and Amory do. And it's very funny about Mr. Strong," she rattled artlessly on. "Sometimes I've thought that it isn't just that Amory doesn't know what they all go to The Witan for, but that everybody else _does_ know. They all seem to want it to themselves. Of course if Mr. Wilkinson wants Cosimo to stop the "Novum," and to start something else for him, it's only natural that he and Mr. Strong should be a little jealous of one another; but Dickie and Mr. Brimby are jealous of the Wyrons, and I suppose I was jealous of Dickie too--and everybody seems jealous of everybody, and Amory of Cosimo, and Amory's always interfering between Britomart Belchamber and the twins' lessons, and that _can't_ be a very good thing for discipline, but Britomart's like me in being rather stupid, and I wish I'd her screw--she gets nearly twice as much as I do. The only people who don't seem jealous of anybody are those Indians. They're _always_ affable. I suppose it's rather nice for them, so far from their own country, having a house to go to...."

But here Dorothy's humility and self-distrust ended. The moment it came to India, she shared her aunt's deplorable narrow-mindedness and propensity to make a virtue of her intolerance. It seemed to her that it was one thing for the Tims and Tonys, in India, to have to employ a native interpreter (and to be pretty severely rooked by him) when they had their Urdu Higher Proficiency to pass, but quite another for these same natives to come over here, and to learn our law and language, and our excellent national professions, and our somewhat mitigated ways of living up to them. No, she was not one whit better than her hide-bound old aunt, and she did not intend to have too practical a brotherly love taught at that meditated foundation at the Brear....

She became silent as she thought of that foundation again, and presently Katie rose.

"I suppose I couldn't see him in his cot?" she said wistfully.

Dorothy smiled. Katie meant the youngest Bit.

"Well ... I'm afraid he's in _our_ room, you see...," she said.

Katie had been thinking of The Witan. She coloured a little.

"Sorry," she murmured; and then she broke out emphatically.

"I _like_ coming to see you, Dorothy. I don't feel so--such a _fool_ when I'm with you.... And do tell me where you got that frock, and how much it was; I _must_ have another one as soon as I can raise the money! I do wish I could make what Britomart Belchamber makes! Two-twenty a year! Think of that!... But of course Prince Eadmond teachers do come expensive----"

More and more it was coming to seem to Dorothy that the whole thing was terrifically expensive.

III

THE IMPERIALISTS

They were great believers in the Empire, they on the "Novum." Indeed, they were the only true Imperialists, since they recognized that ideas, and not actions, were by far and away the most potent instruments in the betterment of mankind. Everybody who was anybody knew that, a mere sporadic outbreak here and there (such as the one in Manchuria) notwithstanding, war had been virtually impossible ever since the publication of M. Bloch's book declaring it to be so. What, they asked, _was_ war, more than an unfortunate miscalculation on the part of the lamb that happened to lie down with the lion? And what made the miscalculation so unfortunate? Why, surely the possession by the lion of teeth and claws. Draw his teeth and cut his claws, and the two would slumber peacefully together. So with the British lion. He only fought because he had things ready to fight with. Philosophically, his aggressions were not much more than a kind of sportive manifestation of the joy of life, that happened, rather inconsequentially, to take the form of the joy of death. Take away the ships and guns, then, and everything would be all right.

These views on the Real Empire were in no way incompatible with Mr. Wilkinson's desire to see all Trade Unionists armed. For a war at home, about shorter hours and higher wages, would at any rate be a war between equals in race. It was wars between unequals that had made of the Old Empire so hideous a thing. Amory herself had more than once stated this rather well.

"I call it cowardice," she had said. "Every fine instinct in us tells us to stick up for the weaker side. It makes my blood boil! Think of those gentle and dusky millions, all being, to put it in a word, bullied--just bullied! We all know the kind of man who goes abroad--the conventional 'adventurer.' (I like 'adventurer!') He's just a common bully. He drinks disgustingly, and swears, and kicks people who don't get out of his way--but he's always careful to have a revolver in his pocket for fear they should hit him back!... And he makes a tremendous fuss about his white women, but when it comes to their black or brown ones ... well, anyway, _I_ think he's a brute, and we want a better class of man than _that_ for our readers!"

And that was briefly why, at the "Novum," they tried to reduce armaments at home, and gave at least moral encouragement to the other side whenever there was a dust-up abroad.

But it had been some time ago that Amory had said all this, and her attitude since then had undergone certain changes. One of these changes had been her acquisition of the Romantic Point of View; another had been that suspended state of affairs between herself and Mr. Strong. The first of these curtailed a good deal of the philosophy in which Mr. Strong always seemed anxious to enwrap the subject (in order, as far as Amory could see, to avoid action). It also made a little more of the position of women, white, black or brown, and especially when rolled up in carpets, in Imperial affairs. And the second, that hung-up relation between Edgar Strong and herself, had left her constantly wondering what would have happened had she taken Mr. Strong at his word and fled to Paris with him, and exactly where they stood since she had not done so.

For naturally, things could hardly have been expected to be the same after that. Since Edgar had ceased to come quite so frequently to The Witan, Amory had thought the whole situation carefully over and had come to her conclusion. Perhaps the histories of _les grandes maitresses_ and the writings of Key had helped her; or, more likely, Key in Sweden (or wherever it was) and herself in England had arrived at the same conclusion by independent paths. That conclusion, stated in three words, was the Genius of Love.

It was perfectly simple. Why had Amory Towers, the painter of that picture ("Barrage") so enthusiastically acclaimed by the whole of Feminist England, now for so long ceased to paint? What had become of the Genius that had brought that picture into being? It is certain that Genius cannot be stifled. Deny it one opportunity and it will break out somewhere else--in another art, in politics, in leadership in one form or another, or it may be even in crime.

Even so, Amory was conscious, her own Genius had refused to be suppressed. It had found another outlet in politics, directed in a recumbent attitude from a sofa.

Yet that had landed her straightway in a dilemma--the dilemma of Edgar and the twins, of Paris on seven francs a day and the comforts Cosimo allowed her, of a deed that was to have put even that of the Wyrons into the shade and a mere settling down to the prospect of seeing Edgar when it pleased him to put in an appearance.

She had not seen this protean property of Genius just at first. That could only have been because she had not examined herself sufficiently. She had been introspective, but not introspective enough.

And lest she should be mistaken in the mighty changes that were going on within herself, at first she had tried the painting again. Her tubes were dry and her brushes hard, but she had got new ones, and one after another she had taken up her old half-finished canvases again. A single glance at them had filled her with astonishment at the leagues of progress, mental and emotional, that she had made since then. She had laughed almost insultingly at those former attempts. That large canvas on the "_Triumph of Humane Government_" was positively frigid! And Edgar had liked it!... Well, that only showed what a power she now had over Edgar if she only cared to use it. If he had liked that chilly piece of classicism, he would stand dumb before the canvas that every faculty in her was now straining to paint. She began to think that canvas out....

It must be Eastern, of course; nay, it must be The East--tremendously voluptuous and so on. She would paint it over the "_Triumph_." It should be bathed in a sunrise, rabidly yellow (they had no time for decaying mellowness in those vast and kindling lands to which Amory's inner eye was turned)--and of course there ought to be a many-breasted what-was-her-name in it, the goddess (rather rank, perhaps, but that was the idea, a smack at effete occidental politeness). And there ought to be a two-breasted figure as well, perhaps with a cord or something in her hand, hauling up the curtain of night, or at any rate showing in some way or other that her superb beauty was actually responsible for the yellow sunrise....

And above all, she must get _herself_ into it--the whole of herself--all that tremendous continent that Cosimo had not had, that her children had not had, that her former painting had left unexpressed, that politics had not brought out of her....

The result of that experiment was remarkable. Two days later she had thrown the painting aside again. It was a ghastly failure. But only for a moment did that depress her; the next moment she had seen further. She was a Genius; she knew it--felt it; she was so sure about it that she would never have dreamed of arguing about it; she had such thoughts sometimes.... And Genius could never be suppressed. Very well; the Eastern canvas was a total failure; she admitted it. Ergo, her Genius was for something else than painting.

That was all she had wanted to know.

For what, then? No doubt Edgar Strong, who had enlightened her about herself before, would be able to enlighten her again now. And if he would not come to see her, she must go and see him. But already she saw the answer shining brightly ahead. She must pant, not paint; live, not limn. Her Genius was, after all, for Love.

True, at the thought of those offices in Charing Cross Road she had an instinctive shrinking. Their shabbiness rather took the shine out of the voluptuousnesses she had tried, and failed, to get upon her canvas. But perhaps there was a fitness in that too. Genius, whether in Art or in Love, is usually poor. If she could be splendid there she could be so anywhere. No doubt heaps and heaps of grand passions had transfigured grimy garrets, and had made of them perfectly ripping backgrounds....

So on an afternoon in mid-January Amory put on her new velvet costume of glaucous sea-holly blue and her new mushroom-white hat, and went down to the "Novum's" offices in a taxi. It seemed to her that she got there horribly quickly. Her heart was beating rapidly, and already she had partly persuaded herself that if Edgar wasn't in it might perhaps be just as well, as she had half-promised the twins to have tea with them in the nursery soon, and anyway she could come again next week. Or she might leave Edgar a note to come up to The Witan. There were familiar and supporting influences at The Witan. But here she felt dreadfully defenceless.... She reached her destination. Slowly she passed through the basement-room with the sandwich-boards, ascended the dark stairs, and walked along the upper corridor that was hung with the specimens of poster-art.

Edgar was in. He was sitting at his roll-top desk, with his feet thrust into the unimaginable litter of papers that covered it. He appeared to be dozing over the "Times," and had not drunk the cup of tea that stood at his elbow with a sodden biscuit and a couple of lumps of sugar awash in the saucer.--Without turning his head he said "Hallo," almost as if he expected somebody else. "Did you bring me some cigarettes in?" he added, still not turning. And this was a relief to Amory's thumping heart. She could begin with a little joke.

"No," she said. "I didn't know you wanted any."

There was no counterfeit about the start Mr. Strong gave. So swiftly did he pluck his feet away from the desk that twenty sheets of paper planed down to the floor, bringing the cup of tea with them in their fall.

But Mr. Strong paid no attention to the breakage and mess. He was on his feet, looking at Amory. He looked, but he had never a word to say. And she stood looking at him--charming in her glaucous blue, the glint of rich red that peeped from under the new white hat, and her slightly frightened smile.

"Haven't you any?" she said archly.

At that Mr. Strong found his tongue.

"Excuse me just a moment," he muttered, striding past her and picking up something from his desk as he went. "Sit down, won't you?" Then he opened the door by which Amory had entered, did something behind it, and returned, closing the door again. "Only so that we shan't be disturbed," he said. "They go into the other office when they see the notice.--I wasn't expecting you."

Nor did he, Amory thought, show any great joy at her appearance. On the contrary, he had fixed a look very like a glare on her. Then he walked to the hearth. A big fire burned there behind a wire guard, and within the iron kerb stood the kettle he had boiled to make tea. He put his elbows on the mantelpiece and turned his back to her. Again it was Mr. Brimby's sorrowing Oxford attitude. Amory had moved towards his swivel chair and had sat down. Her heart beat a little agitatedly. He remembered!...

He spoke without any beating about the bush,--"Ought you to have done this?" he said over his shoulder.

She fiddled with her gloves.--"To have done what?" she asked nervously.

"To have come here," came in muffled tones back. It was evident that he was having to hold himself in.

Then suddenly he wheeled round. This time there was no doubt about it--it was a glare, and a resolute one.

But he had not been able to think of any new line. It was the one he had used before. He made it a little more menacing, that was all.

"I'm only flesh and blood--," he said quickly, his hands ever so slightly clenching and unclenching and his throat apparently swallowing something.

Her heart was beating quickly enough now.--"But--but--," she stammered,--"if you only mean my coming here--I've been here lots of times before----"

He wasted few words on that.

"Not since----" he rapped out. He was surveying her sternly now.

"But--but--," she faltered again, "--it's only me, Edgar--I _am_ connected with the paper, you know--that is to say my husband is----"

"That's true," he groaned.

"And--and--I should have come before--I've been intending to come--but I've been so busy----"

But that also he brushed aside for the little it was worth. "_Must_ you compromise yourself like this?" he demanded. "Don't you see? I'm not made of wood, and I suppose your eyes are open too. Prang may be here at any moment. He'll see that notice on the door and wait ... and then he'll see you go out. You oughtn't to have come," he continued gloomily. "Why did you, Amory?"

Once more she quailed before the blue mica of his eye. Her words came now a bit at a time. The victory was his.

"Only to--to see--how the paper was going on--and to--to talk things over--," she said.

"Oh!" He nodded. "Very well."

He strode forward from the mantelpiece and approached the desk at which she sat.

"I suppose Cosimo wants to know; very well. As a matter of fact I'm rather glad you've come. Look here----"

He grabbed a newspaper from the desk and thrust it almost roughly into her hands.

"Read that," he said, stabbing the paper with his finger.

The part in which he stabbed it was so unbrokenly set that it must have struck Katie Deedes as overwhelmingly learned.--"There you are--read that!" he ordered her.

Then, striding back to the mantelpiece, he stood watching her as if he had paid for a seat in a playhouse and had found standing-room only.

Amory supposed that it must be something in that close and grey-looking oblong that was at the bottom of his imperious curtness. She was sure of this when, before she had read half a dozen lines, he cut it with a sharp "Well? I suppose you see what it means to us?"

"Just a moment," she said bewilderedly; "you always did read quicker than I can----"

"Quicker!--" he said. "Just run your eye down it. That ought to tell you."

She did so, and a few capitals caught her eye.

"Do you mean this about the North-West Banks?" she asked diffidently.

"Do I mean----! Well, yes. Rather."

"I do wish you'd explain it to me. It seems rather hard."

But he did not approach and point out particular passages. Instead he seemed to know that leaden oblong by heart. He gave a short laugh.

"Hard? It's hard enough on the depositors out there!... They've been withdrawing again, and of course the Banks have had to realize."

"Yes, I saw that bit," said Amory.

"A forced realization," Mr. Strong continued. "Depreciation in values, of course. And it's spreading."

It sounded to Amory rather like smallpox, but, "I suppose that's the Monsoon?" she hazarded.

"Partly, of course. Not altogether. There's the rupee too, of course. At present that's at about one and twopence, but then there are these bi-metallists.... So until we know what's going to happen, it seems to me we're bound hand and foot."

Amory was awed.--"What--what do you think will happen?" she asked.

Edgar gave a shrug.--"Well--when a Bank begins paying out in pennies it's as well to prepare for the worst, you know."

"Are--are they doing that?" Amory asked in a whisper. "Really? And is that the bi-metallists' doing--or is it the Home Government? Do explain it to me so that I can visualize it. You know I always understand things better when I can visualize them. That's because I'm an artist.--Does it mean that there are long strings of natives, with baskets and things on their heads to put the pennies in, all waiting at the Banks, like people in the theatre-queues?"

"I dare say. I suppose they have to carry the pennies somehow. But I'm afraid I can't tell you more than's in the papers."

Amory's face assumed an expression of contempt. On the papers she was quite pat.

"The papers! And how much of the truth can we get from the capitalist press, I should like to know! Why, it's a commonplace among us--one is almost ashamed to say it again--that the 'Times' is always wrong! We have _no_ Imperialist papers really; only Jingo ones. Is there _no_ way of finding out what this--crisis--is really about?"

This was quite an easy one for Mr. Strong. Many times in the past, when pressed thus by his proprietor's wife for small, but exact, details, he had wished that he had known even as much about them as seemed to be known by that smart young man who had once come to The Witan in a morning coat and had told Edgar Strong that he didn't know what he was talking about. But he had long since found a way out of these trifling difficulties. Lift the issue high enough, and it is true of most things that one man's opinion is as good as another's; and they lifted issues quite toweringly high on the "Novum." Therefore in self-defence Mr. Strong flapped (so to speak) his wings, gave a struggle, cleared the earth, and was away in the empyrean of the New Imperialism.

"The 'Times' always wrong. Yes. We've got to stick firmly to that," he said. "But don't you see, that very fact makes it in its way quite a useful guide. It's the next best thing to being always right, like us; we can depend on its being wrong. We've only got to contradict it, and then ask ourselves why we do so. There's usually a reason.... So there is in this--er--crisis. Of course you know their argument--that a lot of these young native doctors and lawyers come over here, and stop long enough to pick up the latest wrinkles in swindling--the civilized improvements so to speak--and then go back and start these wildcat schemes, Banks and so on, and there's a smash. I think that's a fair statement of their case.--But what's ours? Why, simply that what they're really doing is to give the Home Government a perfectly beautiful opportunity of living up to its own humane professions.... But we know what that means," he added sadly.

"You mean that it just shows," said Amory eagerly, "that we aren't humane at all really? In fact, that England's a humbug?"

Mr. Strong smiled. He too, in a sense, was paying out in pennies, and so far quite satisfactorily.

"Well ... take this very crisis," he returned. "Oughtn't there to be a grant, without a moment's loss of time, from the Imperial Exchequer? I'm speaking from quite the lowest point of view--the mere point of view of expediency if you like. Very well. Suppose one or two natives _are_ scoundrels: what about it? Are matters any better because we know that? Don't the poverty and distress exist just the same? And isn't that precisely our opportunity, if only we had a statesman capable of seeing it?... Look here: We've only got to go to them and say, 'We are full of pity and help; here are a lot of--er--lakhs; lakhs of rupees; rupee one and twopence: you may have been foolish, but it isn't for us to cast the first stone; it's the conditions that are wrong; go and get something to eat, and don't forget your real friends by and by.'--Isn't that just the way to bind them to us? By their gratitude, eh? Isn't getting their gratitude better than blowing them from the muzzles of guns, eh? And isn't that the real Empire, of which we all dream? Eh?..."

He warmed up to it, while keeping one ear open for anybody who might come along the passage; and when he found himself running down he grabbed the newspaper again. He doubled it back, refolded it, and again thrust it under Amory's nose.... There! That put it all in a nutshell, he said! The figures spoke for themselves. The Home Government, he said, knew all about it all the time, but of course they came from that hopeless slough of ineptitude that humorists were pleased to call the "governing classes," and that was why they dragged such red herrings across the path of true progress as--well, as the Suffrage, say.... What! Hadn't Amory heard that all this agitation for the Suffrage was secretly fomented by the Government itself? Oh, come, she must know that! Why, of course it was! The Government knew dashed well what they were doing, too! It was a moral certainty that there was somebody behind the scenes actually planning half these outrages! Why? Why, simply because it got 'em popular sympathy when a Minister had his windows smashed or a paper of pepper thrown in his face. They were only too glad to have pepper thrown in their faces, because everybody said what a shame it was, and forgot all about what fools they'd been making of themselves, and when a real--er--crisis came, like this one, people scarcely noticed it.... But potty little intellects like Brimby's and Wilkinson's didn't see as deep as that. It was only Edgar Strong and Amory who saw as deep as that. That was why they, Edgar and Amory, were where they were--leaders of thought, not subordinates....

"Just look rather carefully at those figures," he concluded....

Nevertheless, lofty as these flights were, they had a little lost their thrill for Amory. She had heard them so very, very often. She had trembled in the taxi in vain if _this_ was all that her stealthy coming to the "Novum's" offices meant. Nor had she put on her new sea-holly velvet to be told, however eloquently, that Wilkinson and Brimby were minor lights when compared with Edgar and herself, and that the "Times" was always wrong. Perhaps the figures that Edgar had thrust under her nose as if he had been clapping a muzzle on her meant something to the right person, but they meant nothing to Amory, and she didn't pretend they did. They were man's business; woman's was "visualizing." The two businesses, when you came to think of it, _were_ separate and distinct. Whoever heard of a man wrapping himself up in a carpet and being carried by Nubians into his mistress's presence? Whoever heard of a man's face launching as much as an upriver punt, let alone fleets and fleets of full-sized ships? And whoever heard of the compelling beauty of a man's eyes, as he lay on a sofa with one satiny upper-arm upraised, simply making--making--a woman come and kiss him?... It was ridiculous. Amory saw now. Even Joan of Arc must have put on her armour, not so much because of all the chopping and banging of maces and things (which must have been very noisy), but more with the idea of _inspiring_.... Yes, inspiring: that was it. There _was_ a difference. Why, even physically women and men were not the same, and mentally they were just as different. For example, Amory herself wouldn't have liked to blow anybody from the mouth of a gun, but she wasn't sure sometimes that Edgar wouldn't positively enjoy it. He had that hard eye, and square head, and capacity for figures....

She wasn't sure that her heart didn't go out to him all the more because of that puzzle of noughts and dots and rupees he had thrust into her hands....

And so, as he continued (so to speak) to gain time by paying in pennies, and to keep an ear disengaged for the passage, it came about that Edgar Strong actually overshot himself. The more technical and masculine he became, the more Amory felt that it was fitting and feminine in her not to bother with these things at all, but just to go on inspiring. She still kept her eyes bent over the column of figures, but she was visualizing again. She was visualizing the Channel steamer, and the Latin Quarter, and satiny upper-arms. And the taxi-tremor had returned....

Suddenly she looked softly yet daringly up. She felt that she must be Indian--yet not too Indian.

"And then there's suttee," she said in a low voice.

"Eh?" said Strong. He seemed to scent danger. "Abolished," he said shortly.

But here Amory was actually able to tell Edgar Strong something. She happened to have been reading about suttee in a feminist paper only a day or two before. No doubt Edgar read nothing but figures and grey oblongs.

"Oh, no," she said softly but with a knowledge of her ground. "That is, I know it's prohibited, but there was a case only a little while ago. I read it in the 'Vaward.' And it was awful, but splendid, too. She was a young widow, and I'm sure she had a lovely face, because she'd such a noble soul.--Don't you think they often go together?"

But Edgar did not reply. He had walked to a little shelf full of reference books and books for review, and was turning over pages.

"And the whole village was there," Amory continued, "and she walked to the pyre herself, and said good-bye to all her relatives, and then----"

Edgar shut his book with a slap.--"Abolished in 1829," he said. "It's a criminal offence under the Code."

Amory smiled tenderly. Abolished!... Dear, fellow, to think that in such matters he should imagine that his offences and Codes could make any difference! Of course the "Vaward" had made a mere Suffrage argument out of the thing, but to Amory it had just showed how cruel and magnificent and voluptuous and grim the East could be when it really tried.... And then all at once Amory thought, not of any particular poem she had ever read, but what a ripping thing it would be to be able to write poetry, and to say all those things that would have been rather silly in prose, and to put heaps of gorgeous images in, like the many-breasted what-was-her-name, and Thingummy--what-did-they-call-him--the god with all those arms. And there would be carpets and things too, and limbs, not plaster ones, but flesh and blood ones, as Edgar said his own were, and--and--and oh, stacks of material! The rhymes might be a bit hard, of course, and perhaps after all it might be better to leave poetry to somebody else, and to concentrate all her energies on inspiring, as Beatrice inspired Dante, and Laura Petrarch, and that other woman Camoens, and Jenny Rossetti, and Vittoria Colonna Michael Angelo. She might even inspire Edgar to write poetry. And she would be careful to keep the verses out of Cosimo's way....

"Abolished!" she smiled in gay yet mournful mockery, and also with a touch both of reproach and of disdain in her look.... "Oh well, I suppose men think so...."

But at this he rounded just as suddenly on her as he had done when he had told her that she ought not to have come to the office. Perhaps he felt that he was losing ground again. You may be sure that Edgar Strong, actor, had never had to work as hard for his money as he had to work that afternoon.

"Amory!" he called imperiously. "I tell you it won't do--not at this juncture! I'd just begun to find a kind of drug in my work; I've locked myself up here; and now you come and undo it all again with a look! I see we must have this out. Let me think."

He began to pace the floor.

When he did speak again, his phrases came in detached jerks. He kept looking sharply up and then digging his chin into his red tie again.

"It was different before," he said. "It might have been all right before. We were free then--in a way. It was different in every way.... (Mind your dress in that tea).... But we can't do anything now. Not at present. There's this crisis. That's suddenly sprung upon us. There's got to be somebody at the wheel--the 'Novum's' wheel, I mean. I hate talking about my duty, but you've read the 'Times' there. The 'Times' is always wrong, and if we desert our posts the whole game's up--U. P. Prang's no good here. Prang can't be trusted at a pinch. And Wilkinson's no better. Neither of 'em any good in an emergency. Weak man at bottom, Wilkinson--the weakness of violence--effeminate, like these, strongword poets. We can't rely on Wilkinson and Prang. And who is there left? Eh?"

But he did not wait for an answer.

"Starving thousands, and no Imperial Grant." His voice grew passionate. "Imperial Grant must be pressed for without delay. What's to happen to the Real Empire if you and I put our private joys first? Eh? Answer me.... There they are, paying in pennies--and us dallying here.... No. Dash it all, no. May be good enough for some of these tame males, but it's a bit below a man. I won't--not now. Not at present. It would be selfish. They've trusted me, and----," a shrug. "No. That's flat. I see _my_ nights being spent over figures and telegrams and all that sort of thing for some time to come.... Don't think I've forgotten. I understand perfectly. I suppose that sooner or later it _will_ have to be the Continent and so on--but not until this job's settled. Not till then. Everything else--everything--has got to stand down. You do see, don't you, Amory? I hope you do."

As he had talked there had come over Amory a sense of what his love must be if nothing but his relentless sense of duty could frustrate it even for a day. And that was more thrilling than all the rest put together. It lifted their whole relation exactly where she had tried to put it without knowing how to put it there--into the regions of the heroic. Not that Edgar put on any frills about it. On the contrary. He was simple and plain and straight. And how perfectly right he was! Naturally, since the "Times" and its servile following of the capitalist Press would not help, Edgar had to all intents and purposes the whole of India to carry on his shoulders. It was exactly like that jolly thing of Lovelace's, about somebody not loving somebody so much if he didn't love Honour more. He did love her so much, and he had as much as said that there would be plenty of time to talk about the Continent later. Besides, his dear, rough, unaffected way of calling this heroic work his "job!" It was just as if one of those knights of old had called slaying dragons and delivering the oppressed his "job!"

Amory was exalted as she had never been exalted. She turned to him where he stood on the hearth, and laved him with a fond and exultant look.

"I see," she said bravely. "I was wretchedly selfish. But remember, won't you, when you're fighting this great battle against all those odds, and saying all those lovely things to the Indians, and getting their confidence, and just showing all those other people how stupid they are, that _I_ didn't stop you, dear! I know it would be beastly of me to stop you! I shouldn't be worthy of you.... But I think you ought to appoint a Committee or something, and have the meetings reported in the 'Novum,' and I'm sure Cosimo wouldn't grudge the money. Oh, how I wish I could help!----"

But he did not say, as she had half hoped he would say, that she did help, by inspiring. Instead, he held out his hand. As she took it in both of hers she wondered what she ought to do with it. If it had been his foot, and he had been the old-fashioned sort of knight, she could have fastened a spur on it. Or she might have belted a sword about her waist. But to have filled his fountain-pen, which was his real weapon, would have been rather stupid.... He was leading her, ever so sympathetically, to the door. He opened it, took from it the notice that had kept Mr. Prang away, and stood with her on the landing.

"Good-bye," she said.

He glanced over his shoulder, and then almost hurt her hands, he gripped them so hard.

"Good-bye," he said, his eyes looking into hers. "You _do_ understand, don't you, Amory?"

"Yes, Edgar."

Even then he seemed loth to part from her. He accompanied her to the top of the stairs.--"You'll let me know when you're coming again, won't, you?" he asked.

"Yes. Good-bye."

And she tore herself away.

At the first turning of the stairs Amory stood aside to allow a rather untidy young woman to pass. This young woman had a long bare neck that reminded Amory of an artist's model, and her hands were thrust into the fore-pockets of a brown knitted coat. She was whistling, but she stopped when she saw Amory.

"Do you know whether Mr. Dickinson, the poster artist, is up here?" she asked.

"The next floor, I think," Amory replied.

"Thanks," said the girl, and passed up.

IV

THE OUTSIDERS

"No, not this week," Dorothy said. "Dot wrote a fortnight ago. This one's from Mollie. (You remember Mollie, Katie? She came to that funny little place we had on Cheyne Walk once, but of course she was only about twelve then. She's nearly nineteen now, and so tall! They've just gone to Kohat).--Shall I read it, auntie?"

And she read:--

"'I'm afraid I wrote you a hatefully skimpy letter last time--,'" h'm, we can skip that; here's where they started: "'It was the beastliest journey that I ever made. To begin with, we were the eighteenth tonga that day, so we got tired and wretched ponies; we had one pair for fifteen miles and couldn't get another pair for love or money. We left Murree at two o'clock and got to Pindi at nine. The dust was ghastly. Mercifully Baba slept like a lump in our arms from five till nine, so he was all right. We had from nine till one to wait in Pindi Station, and had dinner, and Baba had a wash and clean-up and a bottle, and we got on board the train and off. Baba's cot, etc.; and we settled down for the night. Nurse and Baba and Mary and I were in one carriage and Jim next door. I slept beautifully till one o'clock, and then I woke and stayed awake. The bumping was terrific, and it made me so angry to look down on the others and see them fast asleep! I had an upper berth. Baba slept from eleven-thirty till six-thirty! So we had no trouble at all with him----

"Well, and so they got to Kohat. (I hope this isn't boring you, Katie.)"

"'It was most beautifully cool and fresh, and we had the mess tonga and drove to the bungalow. The flowering shrubs here would delight Auntie Grace. I've fallen in love with a bush of hibiscus in the compound, but find it won't live in water, but droops directly one picks it. The trees are mostly the palmy kind, and so green, and the ranges of hills behind are exactly like the Red Sea ranges. The outside of our bungalow is covered with purple convolvulus, and the verandah goes practically all round it. Jim's room is just like him--heads he's shot, study, dressing-room, and workshop, all in one, and it's quite the fullest room in the house. Beyond that there's my room, looking out over the Sinai Range----'

"Then there are the drawing and dining-rooms----"

"'The curtains are a pale terra-cotta pink over the door and dark green in the bay-windows, with white net in front. The drawing-room is all green. The durrie (that's the carpet) is green, with a darker border, and the sofa and chairs and mantelpiece-cover and the screen behind the sofa all green. There's another bay-window, with far curtains of green and the near ones chintz, an awfully pretty cream spotted net with a green hem let in. That makes three lots, two in the window itself and a third on a pole where the arch comes into the room. Then over the three doors there are chintz curtains, cream, with a big pattern of pink and green and blue, just like Harrods' catalogue----'

"Can't you _see_ it all!--H'm, h'm!... Then on the Sunday morning they got the mess tonga and went out to Dhoda, with butterfly-nets, and Jim went fishing--h'm, h'm--and she says--

"'It's just like the Old Testament; I shouldn't have been in the least surprised to meet Abraham and Jacob. It's the flatness of it, and the flocks and herds. There are women with pitchers on their heads, and a man was making scores of bricks with mud and straw--exactly like the pictures of the Children of Israel in "_Line upon Line_." And about a hundred horses and mules and donkeys and carts all stopped at midday, because it was so hot, and it was just what I'd always imagined Jacob doing. But inside cantonments it isn't a bit Biblical, but rather too civilized, etc.'

("Isn't Katie patient, listening to all this, auntie!")

"'But you can't go far afield at Kohat. At Murree you could always get a three or four mile walk round Pindi Point, but here it's just to the Club and back. We go to the Central Godown and the Fancy Godown to shop. The Central is groceries, and the Fancy toothpowder, Scrubb's Ammonia, etc. On Saturday they were afraid Captain Horrocks had smallpox, and so we all got vaccinated, but now that we've all taken beautifully it seems it isn't smallpox after all, and we've all got swelled arms, but Captain Horrocks is off the sick-list to-morrow. Colonel Wade is smaller than ever. Mrs. Wade is coming out by the "Rewa." Mrs. Beecher came to tea on Sunday----'

("Is that _our_ Mrs. Beecher, when Uncle Dick was at Chatham, auntie?")--

"'--and I forgot to say that Dot's parrots stood the journey awfully well, but they've got at the loquat trees and destroyed all the young shoots. Jim saw us safely in and is now off on his Indus trip. The 56th are going in March, and the 53rd come instead. I'm sure the new baby's a little darling; what are you going to call him?----'

"And so on. I _do_ think she writes such good letters. Now let's have yours, Aunt Grace (and that really _will_ be the end, Katie)."

And Lady Tasker's letters also were "put in."

* * * * *

It was a Sunday afternoon, at Cromwell Gardens. Stan was away with his film company for the week-end, and Dorothy had got Katie to stay with her during his absence and had proposed a call on Lady Tasker. They had brought the third Bit with them, and he now slept in one of the cots upstairs. Lady Tasker sat with her crochet at the great first-floor window that looked over its balcony out along the Brompton Road. On the left stretched the long and grey and red and niched and statued façade of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the failing of the western flush was leaving the sky chill and sharp as steel and the wide traffic-polished road almost of the same colour. Inside the lofty room was the still glow of a perfect "toasting-fire," and Lady Tasker had just asked Katie to be so good as to put more coal on before it sank too low.

Katie Deedes had made no scruple whatever about changing her coat in more senses of the words than one. She had bought a navy-blue costume and a new toque (with a wing in it), and since then had got into the way of expressing her doubts whether Britomart Belchamber's hockey legs and Dawn of Freedom eye were in the truest sense feminine. Nay, that is altogether to understate the change in Katie. She had now no doubt about these things whatever. As Saul became Paul, so Katie now not only reviled that which she had cast off, but was even prepared, like the Apostle at Antioch, to withstand the older Peters of Imperialism to their faces, did she detect the least sign of temporizing in them. And this treason had involved the final giving-way of every one of her old associates. She was all for guns and grim measures; and while she looked fondly on Boy Scouts in the streets and talked about "the thin end of the wedge of Conscription," she scowled on the dusky-skinned sojourners within London's gates, and advocated wholesale deportations.

And in all this Katie Deedes was only returning to her own fold, though her people were not soldiers, but lawyers. For the matter of that, her father's cousin was a very august personage indeed, for whose comfort, when he travelled, highly-placed railway officials made themselves personally responsible, and whose solemn progress to Assize was snapshotted for the illustrated papers and thrown on five hundred cinema screens. In the past Katie had been privileged to call this kingpost of the Law "Uncle Joe."...

And then Mr. Strong had got hold of her....

And after Mr. Strong, Mr. Wilkinson....

And according to Mr. Wilkinson, the most ferocious of the hanging-judges had been a beaming humanitarian by comparison with Sir Joseph. Mr. Wilkinson had the whole of Sir Joseph's career at his fingers' ends: the So-and-So judgment--this or that flagrant summing up--the other deliberate and wicked misdirection to the jury. Sir Joseph's heart was black, his law bunkum, and he had only got where he was by self-advertisement and picking the brains of men a hundred times fitter for heaven than himself....

Therefore Katie, hearing this horrible tale, had quailed, and had straightway given away this devil who was the sinister glory of her house. She had agreed that he was a man whom anybody might righteously have shot on sight, and had gathered her Greenaway garments about her whenever she had passed within a mile of Sir Joseph's door....

But now he was "Uncle Joe" again, and--well, it must have been rather funny. For Katie's impressionable conscience had given her no rest day or night until she had sought Uncle Joe out and had made a clean breast of it all before him. Katie had fancied she had seen something like a twinkle in those sinful old eyes, but (this was when she mentioned the name of the "Novum") the twinkle had vanished again. Oh, yes, Sir Joseph, had heard of the "Novum." Didn't a Mr. Prang write for it?...

And thereupon Katie had given Mr. Prang away too....

But in the end Sir Joseph had forgiven her, and had told her that she had better not be either a revolutionary, nor yet the kind of Conservative that is only a revolutionary turned inside-out, but just a good little girl, and had asked her how she was getting on, and why she hadn't been to see her Aunt Anne, and whether she would like some tickets for a Needlework Exhibition; and now she was just beginning to forget that he had ever been anything but "Uncle Joe," who had given her toys at Christmas, and Sunday tickets for the Zoo whenever she had wanted to go there on that particularly crowded day.

Dorothy had had something of this in her mind when she had brought Katie to Cromwell Gardens that Sunday afternoon. From Katie's new attitude to her own Ludlow project was not so far as it seemed. If she could lead the zealous 'vert to such promising general topics as Boy Scouts, Compulsory Service, and the preparation of boys for the Army (topics that Katie constantly brought forward by denunciation of their opposites), her scheme would certainly not suffer, and might even be advanced.

And, as it happened, no sooner had Dorothy tucked her last letter back into its envelope than Katie broke out--earnestly, proselytizingly, and very prettily on the stump.

"There you are!" she exclaimed. "That's all _exactly_ what I mean! Why, any one of those letters ought to be enough to convince anybody! Here are all these stupid people at home, ready to believe everything a native tells them, going on as they do, and hardly one of them's ever set foot out of England in his life! Of course the Indians know exactly what _they_ want, but don't you see, Dorothy--," very patiently she explained it for fear Dorothy should not see, "--don't you see that it's all so much a matter of course to Mollie and those that they can actually write whole letters about window-curtains! I _love_ that about the window-curtains! It's all such an old story to _them_! They _know_, you see, and haven't got to be talking about it all the time in order to persuade themselves! There it _is_!--But these other people don't know anything at all. They don't even see what a perfect answer window-curtains are to them! They go on and on and on--you _do_ see what I mean, Dorothy?----"

"Yes, dear," said Dorothy, mildly thinking of the great number of people there were in the world who would take no end of trouble to explain things to her. "Go on."

And Katie continued to urge upon her friend the argument that those know most about a country who know most about it.

Katie had got to the stage of being almost sure that she remembered Mollie's coming into the studio in Cheyne Walk one day, when Lady Tasker, who had not spoken, suddenly looked up from her crochet and said, "Look, Dorothy--that's the girl I was speaking about--coming along past the Museum there."

Dorothy rose and walked to the window.--"Where?" she said.

"Passing the policeman now."

Dorothy gave a sudden exclamation.--"Why," she exclaimed, "--come here, Katie, quick--it's Amory Towers!--It is Amory, isn't it?"

Katie had run to the window, too. The two women stood watching the figure in the mushroom-white hat and the glaucous blue velvet that idled forlornly along the pavement.

"Do you mean Mrs. Pratt?" said Lady Tasker, putting up her glass again. "Are you quite sure?"

* * * * *

Once before in her life, in the days before her marriage, Amory Towers had done the same thing that she was doing now. Then, seeking something, perhaps a refuge from herself, she had walked the streets until she was ready to drop with fatigue, watching faces passing, passing, for ever passing, and slowly gathering from them a hypnotic stupor. Sometimes, for hour after hour, she had seen nothing but eyes--eyes various in shape and colour as the pebbles on a beach, sometimes looking into hers, sometimes looking past her, sometimes tipped with arrow-heads of white as they turned, sometimes only to be seen under their lids as a finger-nail is seen within the finger of a glove. And at other times, weary of her fellow-beings and ceasing to look any more at them, she had seen nothing but doors and windows, or fan-lights, or the numbers of houses, or window-boxes, or the patterns of railings, or the serried shapes of chimneys against the sky. She had been looking, and yet not looking, for Cosimo Pratt then; she was looking, and yet not looking, for Edgar Strong now. Had she met him she had nothing new to say to him; she only knew that he had taken weak possession of her mind. She was looking for him in South Kensington because he had once told her, when asked suddenly, that he lived in Sydney Street, S. W., and frequently walked to the Indian section of the Imperial Institute in order to penetrate into the real soul of a people through its art; and she was not looking for him, because one day she had remembered that he had said before that he lived in South Kentish Town--which was rather like South Kensington, but not the same--and something deep down within her told her that the other was a lie.

But yet her feet dragged her to the quarter, as to other quarters, and she talked to herself as she walked. She told herself that her husband did not understand her, and that it would be romantic and silencing did she take a lover to her arms; and she could have wept that, of all the flagrant splendours of which she dreamed, London's grey should remain her only share. And she knew that the attendants of the Imperial Institute had begun to look at her. Once she had spoken to one of them, but when she had thought of asking him whether he knew a Mr. Strong who came there to study Indian Art, her heart had suddenly failed her, and the question had stayed unspoken. Nevertheless, she had feared that the man had guessed her thought, and must be taking stock of her face against some contingency (to visualize which passed the heavy time on) that had a Divorce Court in it, and hotel porters and chambermaids who gave evidence, and the Channel boat, and two forsaken children, and grimy raptures in the Latin Quarter, and its hectic cafés at night....

And so she walked, feeling herself special and strange and frightened and half-resolved; and thrice in as many weeks Lady Tasker, sitting with her crochet at her window, had seen her pass, but had not been able to believe that this was the woman, with a husband and children, on whom she had once called at that house with the secretive privet hedge away in Hampstead.

* * * * *

"It _is_ Amory!" Dorothy exclaimed. "Is she coming here?"

Lady Tasker spoke reflectively.--"I don't know. I don't think so. But--will you fetch her in? I should like to see her."

"If you like, auntie," said Dorothy, though a little reluctantly.

But Lady Tasker seemed to change her mind. She laid down her crochet and rose.

"No, never mind," she said. "I'll fetch her myself."

And the old lady of seventy passed slowly out of the room, and Katie and Dorothy moved away from the window.

Lady Tasker was back again in five minutes, but no Amory came with her. She walked back to her chair, moved it, and took up her work again.--"Switch the table light on," she said.

"Was it Amory?" Dorothy ventured to ask after a silence.

"Yes," Lady Tasker replied.

"And wouldn't she come in?"

"She said she was hurrying back home."

That raised a question so plain that Dorothy thought it tactful to make rather a fuss about finding some album or other that should convince Katie that she really had met the Mollie who had written the letter about the window-curtains. Lady Tasker's needle was dancing rather more quickly than usual. Dorothy found her album, switched on another light, and told Katie to make room for her on her chair.

Amory, dawdling like that, and then, when spoken to, to have the face to say that she was hurrying back home!----

It was some minutes later that Lady Tasker said off-handedly, "Has she any children besides those twins?"

"Amory?" Dorothy replied, looking up from the album. "No."

"How old is she?" Lady Tasker asked.

"Thirty-two, isn't she, Katie?"

"About that."

"Is she very--athletic?" Lady Tasker next wanted to know.

"Not at all, I should say."

"I mean she doesn't go in for marathon races or Channel swimming or anything of that kind?"

"Amory? No," said Dorothy, puzzled.

"And you're sure of her age?" the old lady persisted.

"Well--she may only be thirty-one."

"I don't mean is she younger. Is she _older_ than that?"

"No--I know by my own age."

"H'm!" said Lady Tasker; and again her needle danced....

Dorothy was explaining to Katie that Mollie was fair, about her own colour, but of course the hair never came out right in a photograph, when Lady Tasker suddenly began a further series of questions.

"Dorothy----"

"Yes?"

"Did she--develop--early?"

"Who--Amory? I don't know. Did she, Katie? Of course she was quite the cleverest girl at the McGrath."

"Ah!... What did she do at the McGrath?"

"Why, painted. You're awfully mysterious, auntie! It was soon after she left the McGrath that she painted 'Barrage'--you've heard of her feminist picture that made such a stir!"

"Ah, yes. Yes. I didn't see it, but I did hear about it. I don't know anything about art.--Had she any affair before she married young Pratt?"

"No. I'm sure of that. I knew her so well." Dorothy was quite confident on that point, and Katie agreed. Lady Tasker's questions continued.

And then, suddenly, into this apparently aimless catechism the word "doctor" came. Dorothy gave a start.

"Aunt Grace!... Do you mean Amory's ill?" she cried.

Lady Tasker did not look up from her crochet.--"Ill?" she said. "I've no reason to suppose so. I didn't say she was ill. There's no illness about it.... By the way, I don't think I've asked how Stan is."

But for the curiously persistent questions, Dorothy might have seized the opportunity to hint that Stan was made for something more nationally useful than getting himself black and blue by stopping runaway horses for the film or running the risk of double pneumonia by being fished out of the sea on a January day--which was the form his bread-winning was taking on that particular week-end. But the Ludlow design was for the moment forgotten. She would have liked to ask her aunt straight out what she really meant, but feared to be rude. So she turned to the album again, and again Katie, turning from turban to staff-cap and from staff-cap to pith helmet, urged that _those_ were the people who really knew what they were talking about--surely Dorothy saw _that_!----

Then, in the middle of Dorothy's bewilderment, once more the questions.... About that painting of her friend's, Lady Tasker wanted to know: did Mrs. Pratt get any real satisfaction out of it?--Any emotional satisfaction?--Was she entirely wrapped up in it?--Or was it just a sort of hitting at the air?--Did it exhaust her to no purpose, or was it really worth something when it was done?----

"If Dorothy doesn't know, surely you do, Katie."

Katie coloured a little.--"I liked 'Barrage' awfully at the time," she confessed, "but--," and she cheered up again, "--I _hate_ it now."

"But did her work--what's the expression?--fill her life?"

Here Dorothy answered for Katie.--"I think she rather liked the fame part of it," she said slowly.

"Does she paint now?"

"Very little, I think, Lady Tasker."

"Has her children to look after, I suppose?"

"Well--she has both a nurse and a governess----"

"They're quite well off, aren't they? I seem to remember that Pratt came into quite a lot."

"They seem to spend a great deal."

"But that's only a small house of theirs?"

"Oh, yes, they're rather proud of that. They don't spend their money selfishly. It goes to the Cause, you see."

"What Cause?" Lady Tasker asked abruptly.

This was Katie's cue....

She ceased, and Lady Tasker muttered something. It sounded rather like "H'm! Too much money and not enough to do!" but neither of her companions was near enough to be quite sure.

And thereupon the questions stopped.

But a surmise of their drift had begun to dawn glimmeringly upon Dorothy. She ceased to hear the exposition of Imperialism's real needs into which Katie presently launched, and fell into a meditation. And of that meditation this was about the length and breadth:--

Until the law should allow a man to have more wives than one (if then), of course only one woman in the world could be perfectly happy--the woman who had Stan. That conviction came first, and last, and ran throughout her meditation. And of what Dorothy might compassionately have called secondary happinesses she had hitherto not thought very much. She had merely thanked her stars that she had not married a man like Cosimo, had once or twice rather resented Amory's well-meant but left-handed kindnesses, and that had been the extent of her concern about the Pratt household. But first Katie, and now her aunt, had set her wondering hard enough about that household now.

What, she asked herself, had the Pratts married on? What discoveries had they made in one another, what resources found within themselves? Apart from their talks and books and meetings and "interests" and that full pack of their theories, what _was_ their marriage? Thrown alone together for an hour, did they fret? Did their yawning cease when the bell rang and a caller was admitted? Did even the same succession of callers become stale and a bore, so that strangers had to be sought to provide a stimulus? And did they call these and half a hundred other forms of mutual boredom by the rather resounding names that blabbing Katie had repeated to her--"wider interests," "the broad outlook," "the breaking down of personal insularity," and the rest?

And for once Dorothy dropped her excusatory attitude towards her friend. She dropped it so completely that by and by she found herself wondering whether Amory would have married Cosimo had he been a poor man. She was aware that, stated in that way, it sounded hideous; nor did she quite mean that perhaps Amory had married Cosimo simply and solely because he _had_ not been poor; no doubt Amory had assumed other things to be equal that as a matter of fact had unfortunately proved to be not equal at all; but she _did_ doubt now whether Amory had not missed that something, that something made of so many things, that caused her own heart suddenly to gush out to the absent Stan. The thought frightened her a little. Had Amory married and had babies--all, as it were, beside the mark?...

Dorothy did not know.

But an obscurer hint still had seemed to lie behind her aunt's persistent questions. "Was Amory ill?" she herself had asked in alarm when that unexpected word "doctor" had been quietly dropped; and "Ill? I didn't say she was ill; there's no illness about it," Lady Tasker had replied. No illness about what? Apparently about something Lady Tasker saw, or thought she saw, in Amory.... An old lady whose years had earned her the right to sit comfortably in her chair had gone so far as to descend the stairs and go out into the street to have a closer look at a young one: why? Why ask "Is she a Channel swimmer?" and "Is her painting a mere hitting of the air?" Why this insistence on some satisfaction for labour, as if without that satisfaction the labour wreaked on the labourer some sort of revenge? What sort of a revenge? And why on Amory?

Yes, Dorothy would have liked to ask her aunt a good many questions....

She did not know that Lady Tasker could not have answered them. She did not know that the whole world is waiting for precisely those replies. She did not know that the data of a great experiment have not yet begun to be gathered together. She did not know that, while she and Stan would never see the results of that experiment, little Noel and the other Bits, and Corin and Bonniebell might. She only knew that her aunt was a wise and experienced woman, with an appetite for life and all belonging to it that only grew the stronger as her remaining years drew in, and that apparently Lady Tasker found something to question, if not to fear.

"Is she a Channel swimmer? Does she get any emotional satisfaction out of what she does?"

They were oddly precise questions....

Much less odd was that homely summing-up of Lady Tasker's: "Too much money, and not enough to do."...

Dorothy had often thought that herself.

V

"HOUSE FULL"

The gate in the privet hedge of The Witan had had little rest all the afternoon. It was a Sunday, the one following that on which Lady Tasker had issued bareheaded from her door, had crossed the road, and had caused Amory to start half out of her skin by suddenly speaking to her. The Wyrons had come in the morning; they had been expressly asked to lunch; but it was known that Dickie Lemesurier was coming in afterwards to discuss an advertisement, and if Dickie came the chances were that Mr. Brimby would not be very long after her. As a matter of fact Dickie and Mr. Brimby had encountered one another outside and had arrived together at a little after three, bringing three young men, friends of Mr. Brimby's still at Oxford, with them. These young men wore Norfolk jackets, gold-pinned polo-collars, black brogues and turned-up trousers; and apparently they had hesitated to take Cosimo at his word about "spreading themselves about anywhere," for they stood shoulder to shoulder in the studio, and when one turned to look at a picture or other object on the wall, all did so. Then, not many minutes later, Mr. Wilkinson had entered, in his double-breasted blue reefer, bringing with him a stunted, bow-legged man who did not carry, but looked as if he ought to have carried, a miner's lamp; and by half-past four, of The Witan's habitués, only Mr. Prang and Edgar Strong were lacking. But Edgar was coming. It had been found impossible, or at any rate Amory had decided that it was impossible, to discuss the question of Dickie's advertisement without him. But he was very late.

When Britomart Belchamber came in simultaneously with the tea and the twins at a little before five, the studio was full. The asbestos log purred softly, and Mr. Brimby's three Oxford friends, glad perhaps of something to do, walked here and there, each of them with a plate of bread and butter in either hand, not realizing that at The Witan the beautiful Chinese rule of politeness was always observed--"When the stranger is in your melon-patch, be a little inattentive." Had Dickie Lemesurier and Laura Wyron eaten half the white and brown that was presented to them, they must have been seriously unwell. It was Cosimo, grey-collared and with a claret-coloured velvet waistcoat showing under his slackly-buttoned tweed jacket, who gave the young men the friendly hint, "Everybody helps themselves here, my dear fellows." Then the Norfolk jackets came together again, and presently their owners turned with one accord to examine the hock and the top-side that hung on the wall over the sofa.

Not so much a blending of voices as an incessant racket of emphatic and independent pronouncements filled the studio. Walter Wyron had fastened upon the man who looked as if he ought to have carried a miner's lamp, and his forefinger was wagging like a gauge-needle as he explained that one of his Lectures had been misrepresented, and that he had _never_ taken up the position that a kind of Saturnalia should be definitely state-established. He admitted, nevertheless, that the question of such an establishment ought to be considered, like any other question, on its merits, and that after that the argument should be followed whithersoever it led.--Dickie Lemesurier, excessively animated, and with the whites showing dancingly all round her pupils, was talking Césanne and Van Gogh to Laura, and declaring that something was "quite the" something or other.--Mr. Brimby's hand was fondling Bonniebell's head while he deprecated the high degree of precision of the modern rifle to Mr. Wilkinson. "If only it wasn't so ruthlessly logical!" he was sighing. "If only it was subject to the slight organic accident, to those beautiful adaptations of give-and-take that make judgment harsh, and teach us that we ought never to condemn!"--Corin, drawn by the word "gun," was demanding to be told whether that was the gun that had been taken away from him.--And Britomart Belchamber, indifferent alike to the glances of the Oxford men and their trepidation in her presence, stood like a caryatid under a wall-bracket with an ivy-green replica of Bastianini's Dante upon it.

"No, no, not for a moment, my dear sir!" Walter shouted to the man who looked like (and was) a miner. "That is to ignore the context. I admit I used the less-known Pompeian friezes as a rough illustration of what I meant--but I did _not_ suggest that Waring & Gillow's should put them on the market! What I did say was that we moderns must work out our damnation on the same lines that the ancients did. Read your Nietzsche, my good fellow, and see what _he_ says about the practical serviceability of Excess! I contend that a kind of general _oubliance_, say for three weeks in the year, to which everybody without exception would have to conform (so that we shouldn't have the superior person bringing things up against us afterwards)----"

"Ah doan't see how ye could mak' fowk----," the miner began, in an accent that for a moment seemed to blast a hole clean through the racket. But the hole closed up again.

"Ah, at present you don't," Walter cried. "The spade-work isn't done yet. We need more education. But every new and great idea----"

But here an outburst from Mr. Wilkinson to Mr. Brimby drowned Walter's voice. Mr. Wilkinson raised his clenched fist, but only for emphasis, and not in order to strike Mr. Brimby.

"Stuff and nonsense! There you go, Brimby, trimming again. We've heard all that: 'A great deal to be said on both sides,'"--(Mr. Wilkinson all but mimicked Mr Brimby). "There isn't--not if you're going to do anything! There's only one side. You've got to shoot or be shot. I'm a shooter. Give me five hundred real men and plenty of barricade stuff----"

"Oh, oh, oh, my dear friend!" Mr. Brimby protested. "Why, if your principles were universally applied----"

"Who said anything about applying 'em universally? Hang your universal applications! I'm talking about the Industrial Revolution. I'll tell you what's the matter with you, Brimby: you don't like the sight of blood. I'm not blaming you. Some men are like that. But it's in every page of your writing. You've got a bloodless style. I don't mind admitting that I liked some of your earlier work, while there still seemed a chance of your making up your mind some day----"

But here Mr. Wilkinson in his turn was drowned, this time by an incredulous laugh from Cosimo, who had joined Dickie and Laura.

"Van Gogh says _that_?" his voice mounted high. "Really? You're sure he wasn't joking? Ha ha, ha ha!... But it's rather pathetic really. One would think Amory'd never painted 'Barrage,' nor the 'White Slave,' nor that--," he pointed to the unfinished canvas of "The Triumph of Humane Government" on the wall. "By Jove, I must make an Appendix of that!... Here--Walter!--Have you told him, Dickie?--Walter!----"

But Walter was now at deadly grips with the man who had forgotten his miner's lamp.

"I tell you I never used Saturnalia in that sense at all!----"

But the miner stood his ground.

"Happen ye didn't, but I'll ask ye one question: Have ye ever been to Blackpool of a August Bank Holiday?----"

"My good man, you talk as if I proposed to do something with the stroke of a pen, to-morrow, before the world's ready for it----"

"Have ye ever been to Blackpool of a Bank Holiday?"

"What on earth has Blackpool to do with it?----"

"Well, we'll say Owdham Wakes week at t' Isle o' Man--Douglas----"

"Pooh! You've got hold of the wrong idea altogether! Do you know what Saturnalia _means_?----"

"I know there's a man on Douglas Head, at twelve o'clock i' t' day, wi' t' sun shining, going round wi' a stick an' prodding 'em up an' telling 'em to break away----"

"I shouldn't have thought anybody could have been so _incredibly_ slow to grasp an idea--!" cried Walter, his hands aloft.

"Have--you--ever--been--to--Blackpool--when--t' Wakes--is on?"

Then Cosimo called again--

"Walter! I say! Come here!... Dickie's just told me something that makes the '_Life and Work_' _rather_ necessary, I think!----"

And Walter turned his back on the miner and joined his wife and Dickie and Cosimo.

Anybody who wasn't anybody might have supposed the noise to be a series of wrangles, but of course it wasn't so at all really. Issues far too weighty hung in the balance. It is all very well for people whose mental range is limited by _matinées_ and Brooklands and the newest car to talk in pleasant and unimpassioned voices, but what was going to happen to Art unless Cosimo hurled himself and the '_Life and Work_' against this heretic Van Gogh, and what was to become of England if Walter allowed a pig-headed man who could say nothing but "Blackpool Pier, Blackpool Pier," to shout him down, and what would happen to Civilization if Mr. Wilkinson did not, figuratively speaking, take hold of the dilettante Brimby and shake him as a terrier shakes a rat? No: there would be time enough for empty politenesses when the battle was won.

In the meantime, a mere nobody might have thought they were merely excessively rude to one another.

Then began fresh combinations and permutations of the talk. Mr. Wilkinson, whose square-cut pilot jacket somehow added to the truculence of his appearance, planted himself firmly for conversation before Dickie Lemesurier; the miner, whose head at a little distance appeared bald, but on a closer view was seen to be covered with football-cropped and plush-like bristles, nudged Cosimo's hip, to attract his attention: and Walter Wyron sprang forward with a welcoming "Hallo, Kaffinger!" as the door opened and two young McGrath students were added to the crowd. For a minute no one voice preponderated in the racket; it was--

"Hallo, Raff! Thought you weren't coming!"

"I want a gun!" (This from Corin.)

"My dear Corin" (this from Bonniebell), "Miss Belchamber's told you over and over again guns are anti-social----"

"Anybody smoking? Well, I know they don't mind----"

"But, Miss Lemesurier, where a speaker reaches only a hundred or two, the written word----"

"Ah, but the personal, magnetic thrill----" (This was in Dickie's rather deep voice.)

Then Walter, to somebody else, not the miner--

"I should have thought _anybody_ would have known that when I said Saturnalia I meant----"

"Where's Amory?"

"Sweet, in those little tunics!----"

"A subsidy from the State, of course----"

Then the miner, but not to Walter--

"I' t' daylight, proddin' 'em up wi' a stick--to say nowt o' Port Skillian bathin'-place of a fine Sunda'----"

"That hoary old lie, that Socialism means sharing----"

"Oh, at any artists' colourman's----"

"No; it will probably be published privately----"

"Van Gogh----"

"Oh, you're _entirely_ wrong!----"

And then, in the middle of a sudden and mysterious lull, the man who had come without his safety-lamp was heard addressing Cosimo again:--

"Well, what about t' new paaper? Owt settled yet?... Nay, ye needn't look; Wilkinson telled me; it's all right; nowt 'at's said 'll go beyond these fower walls. Wilkinson's gotten a rare list together, names an' right, I can tell ye! But t' way I look at it is this----"

Cosimo looked blank.

"But, my dear--I'm afraid I didn't catch your name----," he said.

"Crabtree--Eli Crabtree. This is t' point I want to mak', mister. Ye see, I can't put things grammar; but there's lots about 'at can; so I thowt we'd get a sec'etary, an' I'd sit an' smoke whol' my thowts come, and then I'd tell him t' tale. Ye see, ye want to go slap into t' middle o' t' lives o' t' people. Now comin' up o' t' tram-top I bethowt me of a champion series: '_Back to Back Houses I've Known_.' I'll bet a crahn that wi' somb'dy to put it grammar for me----"

"My dear Crabtree, I'm afraid, don't you know, that there's been some mistake----"

And at this point, everybody becoming conscious at the same moment that they were listening, a fresh wave of sound flowed over the assembly; and presently Mr. Wilkinson was seen to take Cosimo aside and to be making the gestures of a man who is explaining some ridiculous mistake.

Then once more:--

"I beg your pardon--I thought you were Mrs. Pratt----"

"Put grammar--straight to fowk's hearts--sinks and slopstones an' all t' lot----"

"No, Balliol----"

"But listen, Pratt, the way the mistake arose----"

"Ellen Key, of course----"

"The 'Times!'--As if the 'Times' wasn't _always_ wrong!----"

"There's a raucousness about her paint----"

"The Caxton Hall, at eight--do come!----"

"But we authors are so afraid of sentiment nowadays!----"

"Bombay, I think--or else Hyderabad----"

"Oh, he talks like a fool!----"

"Raff! Come here and recite '_The King is Duller_'----"

"But Love _is_ Law!----"

"Suspend our judgments until we've heard the other side----"

"Only water--but they couldn't break her spirit--she was out again in three days----"

And again there came an unexpected lull.

This time it was broken by, perhaps not the loudest, but certainly the most travelling voice yet--the voice of the caryatid beneath the bracket with the bust upon it. Miss Belchamber was dressed in a sleeveless surcoat chess-boarded with large black and white squares; the skirt beneath it was of dark blue linen; and there were beards of leather on her large brown brogues. One of the young Oxford men, greatly daring, had approached her and asked her a question. She turned slowly; she gave the young man the equal-soul-to-equal-soul look; and then the apparatus of perfect voice-production was set in motion. Easily and powerfully the air came from her magnificent chest, up the splendid six-inch main of her throat, rang upon the hard anterior portion of her palate, and was cut, as it were, to its proper length and shaped into perfect enunciation by her red tongue and beautiful white teeth.

"What?" she said.

The undergraduate fell a little back.

"Only--I only asked if you'd been to many theatres lately."

"Not any."

"Oh!... I--I suppose you know everybody here?"

"Yes."

"Do point them out to me!"

"That's Walter Wyron. That's Mrs. Wyron. That's Miss Lemesurier. I don't know who the little man is. That's Mr. Wilkinson. My name's Belchamber."

"Oh--I say--I mean, thanks awfully. We've heard of them all, of course," the unhappy young man faltered.

"What?"

"All distinguished names, I mean."

"Of course."

"Rather!----"

And again everybody listened, became conscious of the fact, and broke out anew.

But where all this time was Amory?

Demonstrably, exactly where she ought to have been--in her bedroom. She was too dispirited to be accessible to the rational talk of others; she did not feel that she had energy enough to be a source of illumination herself; surely, then, merely because a lot of people, invited and uninvited, chose to come to The Witan, she need not put herself out to go and look after them. They might call themselves her "guests" if they liked; Amory didn't care what form of words they employed; the underlying reality remained--that she was intensely bored, and too fundamentally polite to bore others by going down. Perhaps she would go down when Edgar came. She had left word that she was to be informed of his arrival. But he was very late.

Nevertheless, she knew that he would come. Lately she had grown a little more perspicacious about that. It had dawned on her that, everything else apart, she had some sort of hold on him through the "Novum," and there had been a trace of command in her summons that he was pretty sure not to disregard. No doubt he would try to get away again almost directly, but she had arranged about that. She intended to keep him to supper. Also the Wyrons. And Britomart Belchamber too would be there. And of course Cosimo.

She moved restlessly between her narrow bed and the window, now polishing her nails, now glancing at her hair in the glass. From the window she could see over the privet hedge and down the road, but there was no sign of Edgar yet. She looked at herself again in the glass, without favour, and then sat down on the edge of her bed again.

Her meeting with Lady Tasker the week before had greatly unsettled her. Very stupidly, she had quite forgotten that Lady Tasker lived in Cromwell Gardens. She would have thought nothing at all of the meeting had Lady Tasker had a hat on her head and gloves on her hands; she would have set that down as an ordinary street-encounter; but Dorothy's aunt had evidently seen her from some window, perhaps not for the first time, and, if not for the first, very likely for the third or fourth or fifth. In a word, Amory felt that she had been caught.

And, as she had been thinking of Edgar Strong at the moment when the old lady's voice had startled her so, it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that her start had seemed remarkable. Lady Tasker was so very sharp.

At all events, even Edgar was not going to have everything all his own way.

For she was sure now that she had the hold of the "Novum" on him, and that that hold was not altogether the single-minded devotion to his duty he had made it out to be on that day when she had last gone to the office. Not that she thought too unkindly of him on that account. The labourer, even in the field of Imperial Politics, is still worthy of his hire, and poor Edgar, like the rest of the world, had to make the best compromise he could between what he would have liked to do and what circumstances actually permitted him to do. Of course he would be anxious to keep his job. If he didn't keep it a worse man would get it, and India would be no better off, but probably worse. She sighed that all work should be subject to compromises of this kind. Edgar, in a word, was no longer a hero to her, but, by his very weakness, something a little nearer and dearer still.

But for all that she had not hesitated to use her "pull" in order to get him to The Witan that day.

She saw him as she advanced to the glass again. He was nearly a quarter of a mile down the road. She found a little secret delight in watching his approach when he was unconscious of her watching. His figure was still very small, and she indulged herself with a fancy, closing her eyes for a moment in order to do so. Suppose he had been, not approaching, but going away--then when she opened her eyes again he would look smaller still.... She opened them, and experienced a little thrill at seeing him nearer and plainer. She could distinguish the red spot of his tie. Now he turned his head to look at some people who passed. Now he stepped off the pavement to make room for somebody. Now he was on the pavement again--now hidden by a tree--now once more disclosed, and quite near----

She straightened herself, gave a last look into the glass, and descended.

She met him in the hall. They shook hands, but did not speak. There was no need for him to ask whether anybody had come; the babble of noise could be plainly heard through the closed studio door. They walked along the passage, descended the two steps into the garden, and reached the studio.

Strong opened the door, and--

"_Ha, ha, ha!_ I shall tell them that at the Nursery!----"

"No--just living together----"

"Corin!--Corin!----"

"The eighteenth, at the Little Theatre----"

Then the voice of Mr. Crabtree vociferating to his friend Mr. Wilkinson.

"I thowt ye telled me 'at Pratt knew all about it----"

"One day in the High, just opposite Queens----"

"Not know the '_Internationale_'!--Debout, les damnés de la terre----!"

Next, sonorously, Miss Belchamber.

"Yes, I dance 'Rufty Tufty' and 'Catching of Quails'----"

"But my good chap, don't you see that the Referendum----"

"Oh, throw it down anywhere--on the hearth----"

"Really, the bosh he talks----"

"The Minority Report----"

"Corin!----"

"Plato----"

"Prang----"

Then, before anybody had had time to notice the entry of Amory and Edgar Strong, an extraordinary, not to say a regrettable thing occurred.

Mr. Eli Crabtree had spent the last twenty minutes in going deliberately from one person to another, often thrusting himself unceremoniously between two people already engaged in conversation, and in subjecting them to questionings that had become less and less reticent the further he had passed round the room. And it appeared that this collier who had forgotten his Davy had yet another lamp with him--the lamp of his own narrow intelligence and inalienable, if worthless, experience. By the help of that darkness within him that he mistook for light, he had added inference to inference and conclusion to conclusion. Cosimo--Wilkinson--Walter Wyron--Brimby--the Balliol men--the young students of the McGrath--he had missed not one of them; but none knew the portent of his tour of the studio until he had reached the hearth again. Then he was seen to be standing with his hands behind him, as if calmly summing them up.

"By--Gow!" he said half to himself, his football-cropped head moving this way and that and his eyes blinking rapidly as he sought somebody to address.

Then, all in a moment, he ceased his attempt to single out one more than another, and was addressing them in the lump, for all the world as if he had been allowed the entrée of the house, not as a high and memorable privilege and in order that he might learn something he had never suspected before, but as if, finding himself there, _he_ might as well tell _them_ a thing or two while he was about it. And though his astonishment at what he had seen might well have rendered him dumb, his good temper did not for an instant forsake him.

"By--Gow!" he said again. "But this is a menagerie, an' reight!"

The instantaneous dead silence and turn of every head might have disconcerted a prophet, but they made not the slightest impression on Mr. Crabtree.

"It _is_ a menagerie!" he continued superbly. "Ding, if onnybody'd told me I wadn't ha' believed 'em!--Let's see how monny of ye there is----"

And calmly he began to count them.

"Fowerteen--fifteen--sixteen countin' them two 'at's just come in an' leavin' out t' barns. Sixteen of ye, grown men an' women, an' not a single one of ye knows ye're born! Nay, it's cappin'!--Him wi' his Salmagundys or whativver he calls 'em, an' niver been on Douglas Head!--T' maister here, 'at doesn't know what a back-to-back is, I'se warrant!--An' yon chap--," Mr. Crabtree's forefinger was straight as a pistol between Mr. Brimby's eyes, "--'at says there's a deeal to be said o' both sides an'll be having his pocket'-ankercher out in a minute!--An' these young men thro' t' Collidge!--Nay, if it doesn't beat all! I ne'er thowt to live to see t' day!----"

And he made a T-t-t-ing with his tongue on his palate, while his sharp little eyes looked on them all with amusement and pity.

Out of the silence of consternation that had fallen on the studio Walter Wyron was the first to come. He nudged Cosimo, as if to warn him not to spoil everything, and then, with his hands deep in the pockets of his knickers and an anticipatory relish on his face, said "I say, old chap--make us a speech, won't you?"

But if Walter thought to take a rise out of Mr. Crabtree he was quite, quite mistaken. With good-natured truculence the collier turned on him also.

"A speech?" he said. "Well, I wasn't at t' back o' t' door when t' speechifyin'-powers was given out; it wadn't be t' first time I'd made a speech, nut by a mugfull. Mony's t' time they've put Eali Crabtree o' t' table i' t' 'Arabian Horse' at Aberford an' called on him for a speech. I'd sooner mak' a speech nor have a quart o' ale teamed down my collar, an' that's all t' choice there is when t' lads begins to get lively!... I don't suppose onny o' ye's ever been i' t' 'Arabian Horse'? We owt to come, of a oppenin'-time of a Sunda' morning. Ye'd see a bit o' life. Happen ye might ha' to get at t' back o' t' door--if they started slinging pints about, that is--but it's all love, and ye've got to do summat wi' it when ye can't sup onny more. I should like to have him 'at talks about t' Paraphernalia there; it 'ld oppen his eyes a bit! An' him 'at wor reciting about t' King an' all--t' little bastard i' t' corner there----"

At this word, used in so familiar and cheerful a sense, Laura Wyron stiffened and turned her back; but Walter still hoped for his "rise."

"Go on," he said; "give us some more, old chap."

The child of nature needed no urging.

"Ay, as much as ivver ye like," he said accommodatingly. "But I wish I'd browt my voice jewjewbes. Ay, I willn't be t' only one 'at isn't talking! T' rest on ye talks--ding, it's like a lamb's tail, waggin' all day and nowt done at neet--so we mud as weel all be friendly-like! Talk! Ay, let's have a talk! Here ye all are, all wi' your fine voices an' fine clothes, an' ivvery one o' ye wi' t' conveeanience i' t' house, I don't doubt, an' I'll bet a gallon there isn't one o' ye's ivver done a hands-turn i' your lives! Nay, ye're waur nor my Aunt Kate! Come down to Aberford an' I'll show ye summat! Come--it's a invitaation--I'll see it doesn't cost ye nowt! T' lads is all working, all but t' youngest, an' we're nooan wi' out! No, we're nooan wi'out at our house! I'll interdewce ye to t' missis, an' ye can help her to peel t' potates, an' ye can go down i' t' cage if ye like! Come, an' I'll kill a pig, just for love. Come of a Sunda' dinnertime, when t' beef's hot. Wilkinson knows what I mean; he knows t' life; he reckons not to when he's wi' his fine friends, but Wilkie's had to lie i' bed while his shirt was being mended afore to-day!... Nay, the hengments!" He broke into a jovial laugh. "Ye know nowt about it, an' ye nivver will! These 'ere young pistills fro' t' Collidge--what are they maalakin' at? It doesn't tak' five thousand pound a year to learn a lad not to write a mucky word on a wall!" (Here Dickie Lemesurier turned her back on the speaker).... "They want to get back to their Collidges. T' gap's ower wide. They'll get lost o' t' road. Same as him 'at wrote t' book about t' pop-shop----," again Mr. Crabtree's forefinger was levelled between Mr. Brimby's eyes. "Brimbyin' about, an' they don't know a black puddin' from a Penny Duck! Has he ivver had to creep up again t' chimley-wall to keep himself warm i' bed, or to pull t' kitchen blinds down while he washed himself of a Saturda' afternooin? But ye can all come an' see if ye like. We've had to tew for it, but we're nooan wi'out now. An' I'll show ye a bit o' sport too. We all have we'r whippets, an' we can clock t' pigeons in, an' see what sort of a bat these young maisters can mak' at knurr-an'-spell--eighteen-and-a-half score my youngest lad does! Ay, we enjoy we'rsens! An' there's quoits an' all. Eighteen yards is my distance if onnybody wants to laake for a beast's-heart supper! Come--ding it, t' lot o' ye come! We can sleep fower o' ye, wed 'uns, heads to tails, if ye don't mind all being i' t' little cham'er----"

By this time Mr. Crabtree was having to struggle to keep his audience. Mr. Brimby too had turned away, and Mr. Wilkinson, and even Miss Belchamber had spoken several words of her own accord to the young Balliol boy. The tide of sound began to rise again, so that once more Mr. Crabtree's voice was only one among many. Then Walter started forward with an "Ah, Amory!" and "Hallo, Strong!" Mr. Raffinger of the McGrath exclaimed....

"Perseverance Row, fower doors from t' 'Arabian Horse'----", Mr. Crabtree bawled hospitably through the hubbub....

"Oh, you _must_ see it--the New Greek Society, on the seventeenth----"

"But I say--what _is_ 'Catching of Quails,' Miss Belchamber----?"

"Mr. Wilkinson brought him, I think----"

"Fellow of All Souls, wasn't he?----"

Then that genial Aberford man again:

"I tell ye t' gap's ower wide, young man--ye'll get lost o' t' road----"

"No, the children take her name----"

"Got a match, old fellow?----"

"Rot, my dear chap!----"

"But what _is_ condonation if that isn't?----"

"Oh, the ordinary brainless Army type----"

"I read it in the German----"

"They gained time by paying in pennies----"

"In Père Lachaise----"

"Well, we can talk about it at suppertime----"

"But with cheaper Divorce----"

"One an' all--whenivver ye like--Eali Crabtree, Perseverance Row, Aberford, fower doors from t' 'Arabian Horse'----"

"Nietzsche----"

"Finot----"

"Weininger----"

"Wadham----"

"Aberford----"

"Rufty Tufty----"

VI

THE SOUL STORM

"I--_say_!----"

"_Wasn't_ he priceless!----"

"You got his address, Cosimo? I _must_ cultivate him!----"

"Pure delight!----"

"You had come in, hadn't you, Amory?----"

"He _shot_ Brimby!----"

"To all intents and purposes--with his finger----"

"Can you do his accent, Walter?----"

"I will in a week, or perish----"

"His bath in the kitchen!----"

"T' wed 'uns can sleep i' t' little chamber----"

"No--he didn't sound the 'b' in 'chamber,' and there were at least three 'a's' in it----"

"'T' little chaaam'er'----"

"No, you haven't quite got it----"

"Give me a little time----"

The party had dwindled to six--Cosimo and Amory, the Wyrons, and Britomart Belchamber and Mr. Strong. They were still in the studio, but they were only waiting for the supper-gong to ring. Cigarette ends were thickly strewn about the asbestos log. The bandying of short ecstatic phrases had been between Walter and his wife, with Cosimo a little less rapturously intervening; the subject of them was, of course, Mr. Crabtree. To his general harangue Mr. Crabtree had added, before leaving, more particular words of advice, making a second tour of the studio for the purpose; and he had distinguished Walter above all the rest by inviting him, not merely to the house four doors from the "Arabian Horse," but to spend a warm afternoon with him on Douglas Head also.

But the Wyrons had these raptures pretty much to themselves. Perhaps Cosimo was thinking of Mr. Wilkinson, of some new paper of which he had never heard, and of the assumption that he, apparently, was to find the money for it. Miss Belchamber was rarely rapturous, so that her silence was nothing out of the way. Edgar Strong could be rapturous when he chose, but he evidently didn't choose now. And Amory had far too much on her mind.

Her original idea in asking the Wyrons to stay to supper had been that they, as acknowledged experts in the subject that perplexed her, would be the proper people to keep the ring while the four persons immediately concerned talked the whole situation quietly and reasonably and thoroughly out. But she was rather inclined now to think again before submitting her case to them. It would be so much better, if the case must be submitted to anybody, that Cosimo should do it. Then she herself would be able to shape her course in the light of anything that might turn up. Nothing, she had to admit, had turned up yet, and Amory was not sure that in that very fact there did not lie a sufficient cause for resentment. Had Cosimo pleaded a passion for Britomart Belchamber he would have had Passion's excuse. Lacking Passion, it could only be concluded that he was bored with Amory herself.

And that amounted to an insult....

The booming of the gong, however, cut short her brooding. They passed to the dining-room. Britomart and Walter sat with their backs to the tall black dresser with the willow pattern stretching up almost to the ceiling; Laura and Edgar took the German chairs that had their backs to the copper-hooded fireplace; and Cosimo and Amory occupied either end of the highly polished clothless table. This absence of cloth, by the way, gave a church-like appearance to the flames of the candles in the spidery brass sticks that had each of them a ring at the top to lift it up by; the preponderance of black oak and dull black frames on the walls further added to the effect of gloom; and the putting down of the little green pipkins of soup and the moving of the green-handled knives and round-bowled spoons made little knockings from time to time.

Again Walter and Laura, with not too much help from Cosimo, sustained the weight of the conversation; and it was not until Amory asked a question in a tone from which rapture was markedly absent that they sponged, as it were, the priceless memory of Mr. Crabtree from their minds. Amory's question had been about Walter's new Lecture, still in course of preparation, on "_Post-Dated Passion_"; and Walter cursorily ran over its heads for the general benefit.

"I admit I got the idea from Balzac," he said between mouthfuls (whenever they came to The Witan the Wyrons supped almost as heartily as did Edgar Strong himself). "'Comment l'amour revient aux vieillards,' you know. But of course that hasn't any earthy interest for anybody. 'Aux vieilles' it ought to be. Then--well, then you've simply got 'em."

"Why not 'vieillards?'" Amory asked, not very genially.

"I say, Cosimo, I'll have another cutlet if I may.--Why not 'vieillards?' Quite obvious. Men aren't the interest. I've tried men, and you can ask Laura how the bookings went.--But 'vieilles' and I've got 'em. Really, Amory, you're getting quite dull if you don't see that! I'll explain. You see, I've already got the younger ones, like Brit here--shove the claret along, Brit--but the others, of forty or fifty say, well, they've all had their affairs--or if they haven't better still--and it's merely a question of touching the right chord. Regrets, time they've lost, fatal words 'Too late' and so on--it's simply _made_ for me! Touch the chord and they do the rest for themselves. They probably won't hear half of it for sobbing.--Of course I shall probably have to modify my style a bit--not quite so--what shall I say----"

"Jaunty," his wife suggested, "--in the best sense, I mean----"

"Hm--that's not quite the word--but never mind. It's a great field. Certainly women, not men, are the draw."

Amory made a rather petulant objection, and the argument lasted some minutes. In the end Walter triumphantly gained his first point, that women and not men were the "draw" in the box-office sense; and also his second one, namely, that not the Britomarts, but the older women, who would put their hearts into his hands and pay him for exploiting their helplessness and ache and tenderness and regret, and never suspect that they were being practised upon, were "simply made for him...." "What do you think of my title?" he asked.

And the title was discussed.

Amory was beginning to find Walter just a little grasping. She wished that after all she had not asked the Wyrons to stay to supper. Formerly she had thought that marriage-escapade of theirs big and heroic (that too, by the way, had been in the Latin Quarter, and probably on seven francs a day); but now she was less sure about that. Quite apart from the inapplicability of the Wyrons' experience to her own case, she now wondered whether theirs had in fact been experience at all. Now that she came to think of it, they had taken no risks. They _had_ been married, and in the last event could always turn round on their critics and silence them with that fact....

Nor was she quite so ready now to lay even the souls of Britomart and Cosimo on the dissecting-table for the sake of seeing Walter exercise his professional skill upon them. This was not so much that she wanted to spare Cosimo and Britomart as that she did not want to give Walter a gratification. She was inclined to think that if Walter couldn't be a little more careful about contradicting her he might find his advertisement omitted from the "Novum" one week, as Katie Deedes' had been omitted, and where would he be then? The way in which he had just said that she was "getting quite dull" had been next door to a rudeness....

But she had to admit that she felt dull. Edgar, who sat next to her, did not speak, and Cosimo, who faced her, was apparently still brooding on people who planned the spending of his money without thinking it necessary to consult him first. She was tired of the whole of the circumstances of her life. Paris on seven francs a day could hardly be much worse. Nor, if she could but shake off her lethargy, need that sum be fixed as low as seven francs. For she had lately remembered an arrangement made between herself and Cosimo before she had ever consented to become engaged to him. It was a long time since either of them had spoken of this arrangement--so long that Cosimo would have been almost within his rights had he maintained that the circumstances had so altered as to make it no longer binding; but there it was, or had been, and it had never been expressly revoked. It was the arrangement by which they had set apart a fund to insure themselves, either or both of them, against any evils that might arise from incompatibility. Amory had no idea how the matter now stood. She didn't suppose for a moment that Cosimo had actually set a sum by each week or month; but, hard and fast or loose and fluid, he must have made, or be still ready to make, some provision. It was an inherent part of the contract that a solemn affirmation, with reason shown (spiritual, not mere legal reason) by either one or the other, should constitute a sufficient claim on this fund.

Therefore Paris need not necessarily be the worst penury.

But, for all her new inclination to leave the Wyrons out of it, she still thought it a prudent idea to carry the fight (not that there would be any fight--that was only a low way of expressing the high reasonableness that always prevailed at The Witan) to Cosimo and Britomart, rather than to have it centre about Edgar and herself. Walter's eyes were mainly on the box-office nowadays. The original virtue of that fine protest of theirs was--there was no use in denying it--gone. He spread his Lectures frankly now as a net. Well, that was only one net more among the many nets of which she was becoming conscious. Edgar too, poor boy, was compelled to regard even the "Novum" as in some manner a net. Mr. Brimby, Amory more than guessed, had nets to spread. Mr. Wilkinson, in his own way, was out for a catch; and Dickie fished at the Suffrage Shop; and Katie had fished at the Eden; and the only one who didn't fish was Mr. Prang, who wrote his articles about India for nothing, just to be practising his English.

All these nets were spread for somebody's money--a good deal of it Cosimo's. It had been the same, though perhaps not quite so bad, at Ludlow. That experiment on the country-side had been alarmingly costly. And all this did not include the dozens and dozens of nets of narrower mesh. The "Novum" might gulp down money by the hundred, but the lesser things were hardly less formidable in the sum of them--subscriptions, contributions, gifts, loans, investments, shares in the Eden and the Book Shop, mortgages, second mortgages, subsidies, sums to "tide over," backings, guarantees, losses cut, more good money sent to bring back the bad, fresh means of spending devised by somebody or other almost every day. It had begun to weary even Amory. The people who came to The Witan became rather curiously better-dressed the longer their visiting continued; but the things they professed to hold dear appeared very little further advanced. All that first brightness and promise had gone. Amory's interest had gone. She wanted to escape from it all, and to go away with Edgar appeared once more to be the readiest way out.

But, though she might now wish to keep Walter Wyron out of it all, that did not necessarily mean that Walter would be kept out. This _ex-officio_ specialist on the (preferably female) heart, this professional rectifier of unfortunate marriages, had not done a number of years' platform-work without having discovered the peculiar beauties of the _argumentum ad hominem_, and it was one of his practices to enforce his arguments with "Take the case of Brit here"--or "Let's get down to the concrete: suppose Amory--" And these descents to the particular had always a curiously accusatory effect. Walter, interrupting Amory's meditation, broke into one of them now.

"But my dear chap,"--this was to Cosimo, "--I can't imagine what's come over all of you to-night! First Amory, now you! You're usually quicker than this! Let's take a case.--Brit here----"

One sterno-mastoid majestically turned the caryatid's head. Again Miss Belchamber's grand thorax worked as if somebody had put a penny into the slot.

"What?" she said.

"Quiet, Brit; I'm only using you as an illustration.--Suppose Brit here was to develop a passion for somebody--Cosimo, say; yes, Cosimo'll do capitally; awfully good instance of the cant that's commonly talked about 'treachery' and 'under his own roof' and all the rest of it--as if a roof wasn't a roof and it hadn't got to be under somebody's--unless they went out on the Heath!--Well, suppose it was to happen to Cosimo and Brit; what then? We're civilized, I hope. We're a little above the animals, I venture to think. Amory wouldn't fly at Brit's eyes, and Brit's father wouldn't come round with a razor to cut Cosimo's throat. In fact----"

"My fa-ther al-ways uses a safety-razor," said Miss Belchamber with a reminiscent air.

"Don't interrupt, Brit.--I was going to say that the world's got past all that. Nor Brit wouldn't fly at Amory, nor Cosimo kick the old josser out of the house--though we should be much more ready to condone that part of it if they did--if it was only to get quits with the past a bit----"

"My fa-ther's forty-five," Miss Belchamber announced, as the interesting result of an interesting mental process of computation. "Next June," she added.

"More interruptions from the back of the hall.--In fact, I'm not sure that _wouldn't_ be entirely defensible--Brit going for Amory and Cosimo kicking the old dodderer out, I mean. That's the justification of the _crime passionel_. It's the Will to Live. And by Live I mean Love. It's the old saying, that kissing lips have no conscience. Or Jove laughs at lovers' oaths. Quite right. It's the New Greek Spirit. But for all that we're modern and rational about these things. If Strong here wanted to take Laura from me I should simply say, 'All you've got to do, my dear chap, is to table your reasons, and if they're stronger than mine you take her.' See?"

At that Edgar Strong, like Britomart, looked up. He spoke for the first time.--"What's that you're saying?" he asked.

"I don't suppose you'd want her, but suppose you did...."

Mr. Strong dropped his eyes to his plate again.--"Ah, yes," he said. "Ellen Key's got something about that." And he relapsed into silence again.

It sounded to Amory idiotic. Walter was so evidently "trying" it on them in order to see how it would go down with an audience afterwards. She wouldn't have scratched Britomart's eyes out for Cosimo,--but she coloured a little, and bit her lip, at the thought that somebody might want to come between herself and Edgar.... But perhaps that was what Walter meant--real affinities, as distinct from the ordinary vapid assumptions about marriages being made in Heaven. If so, she agreed with him--not that she was much fonder of him on that account. She wished he would keep his personalities for Cosimo and Britomart, and leave herself and Edgar alone.--Walter went on.

"And then, when you've got your New Greek Certificate, so to speak, it's plainly the duty of everybody else, not to put obstacles in your way and to threaten you with razors and cutting off supplies, but to sink their personal feelings and to do everything they can to help you. And without snivelling either. I shouldn't snivel, I hope, if anybody took Laura, and she wouldn't if anybody took me----"

Here Laura interposed softly.--"I don't want any one to take you, dear," she said.

Walter turned sharply.

"Eh?... Now you've put me off my argument.... What was I saying?... Haven't I told you you must _never_ do that, Laura?... No, it's quite gone.... You see...."

Laura murmured that she was very sorry....

"No, it's gone," said Walter, almost cheerfully, as if not sorry that for once the worth of what he had been about to say should be measured by the sense of loss. "So since Laura wishes it I'll shut up."

He passed up his plate for a second helping of trifle.

By this time Amory was perhaps rather glad that she had had the Wyrons after all. That about people not putting obstacles in the way was quite neat. "A plain duty," he had said. She hoped Cosimo'd heard that, and would remember it when she raised the subject of the fund. And so far was she herself from putting obstacles in _his_ way that, although she could have sent Britomart Belchamber packing with her wages at any moment, she had not done so. That, as Walter had said, would only have been another way of flying at her eyes.... Besides, Amory had been far too deeply occupied to formulate definitely her charges against Cosimo and Britomart. For all she knew it might have gone much, much further than she had thought. Sometimes, when Amory took breakfast in her own room, she did not see Cosimo until the evening, and Britomart too had heaps of time on her hands when she had finished with Corin and Bonniebell. Cosimo must not tell her that the "_Life and Work_" occupied him during every minute of his time....

Then, presently, she was sorry again that the Wyrons had been asked, for Walter had suddenly remembered the thread of his discourse, and, in continuing it, had been almost rude to Laura. She wondered whether he would have turned with a half angry "Why, what's the matter?" had Laura cried. Perhaps it was really a good thing the Wyrons hadn't any children, for this kind of thing would certainly have been a bad example for them. She herself was never rude to Cosimo before Corin and Bonniebell. She was always markedly polite. There were excuses to be made for Passion, but none for rudeness.

By this time Edgar Strong had finished his last piece of cheese and was wiping his lips with his napkin. Then he looked at his watch, and for the second time during the course of the meal spoke.

"Look here, Cosimo, I've got to be off presently, and we haven't settled about those advertisements yet. And there's something else I want to say to you too. Could we hurry coffee up? Where do we have it? In the studio, I suppose? Or do the others go into the studio and you and Walter and I have ours here?"

"We might as well all go into the studio," said Cosimo, rising; and they left the sombre room and sought the studio, all except Miss Belchamber, who went upstairs.

The sight of the innumerable cigarette-ends about the asbestos log reminded Walter of Mr. Crabtree again; and for a minute or two--that is to say during the time that Walter, taking her aside, told her of the quiet but penetrating side-light Mr. Crabtree had innocently shed on Mr. Wilkinson's scheme for some new paper or other that Cosimo was to finance--Amory was once more glad that the Wyrons had come. But the next moment, as Walter loitered away and Laura came and sat softly down beside her, she was sorry again. Laura was gently crying. That struck Amory as stupid. As if she hadn't enough great troubles of her own, without burdening herself with the Wyrons' trivial ones!

So, as she had nothing really helpful to say to Laura, she left her, and sat down on the footstool she had occupied on the day when Edgar Strong had said that he liked the casts and had asked her whether she had read something or other--she forgot what.

Edgar was talking in low tones to Cosimo, and Amory thought she heard the name of Mr. Prang. Then Cosimo, who always thought more Imperially with a map before him, got out the large atlas, and the two of them bent over it together. Walter joined them, and, after an interlude that appeared to be about the Lectures' advertisement, Walter strolled away again and joined Laura. Amory heard an "Eh?" and a moment later the word "touchy," and Walter went off to the window with his hands in the pockets of his knickers, whistling. Edgar took not the least notice of Amory's eyes intently fixed upon him. He continued to talk to Cosimo. Walter, who was examining a Japanese print, called over his shoulder, "This a new one, Amory? What is it--Utamaro?" Then he walked up to where Laura sat again. He was speaking in an undertone to her: "Rubbish ... take on like that ... better clear off then"; and a moment later, seeing Edgar Strong buttoning up his coat, he called out, "Wait a minute, Strong--we're going down too--get your hat, Laura----"

Five minutes later Cosimo Pratt and his wife were alone.

It was the first time they had been so for nearly a fortnight. Indeed, for weeks the departure of the last visitor had been the signal for their own good-night, Cosimo going his way, she hers. There had never been anything even remotely approaching a "scene" to account for this. It had merely happened so.

Therefore, finding himself alone with his wife in the studio again, Cosimo yawned and stretched his arms above his head.

"Ah-h-h!... You going to bed?"

As he would hardly be likely to take himself off before she had answered his question, Amory did not reply at once. She sat down on the footstool and stretched her hands out to the asbestos log. Then, after a minute, and without looking up, she broke one of their tacitly accepted rules by asking a direct question.

"What were you and Edgar Strong discussing?" she asked.

He yawned again.--"Oh, the Bookshop advertisement--and advertisements generally. It begins to look as if we should have to be less exclusive about these things. Strong tells me that it's unheard of for a paper to refuse any advertisement it can get."

"I mean when you got out the atlas."

"Oh--India, of course. The Indian policy. Strong isn't altogether satisfied about Prang. He seems to think he might get us into trouble."

"How? Why?" Amory said, her eyes reflectively on the purring gas-jets.

"Can't make out. Some fancy of his. The policy hasn't changed, and Prang hasn't changed. I wonder whether Wilkinson's right when he says Strong's put his hand to the plough but is now ... _ah!_ That reminds me!--Were you here when that preposterous fellow--what's his name--Crabtree--rather let the cat out of the bag about Wilkinson?"

"You mean about another paper? No. But Walter said something about it."

"Yes, by Jove! He seems to have it all cut-and-dried! Crabtree seems to think I knew all about it. Of course I did know that Wilkinson had a scheme, but I'd no idea he was jumping ahead at that rate. I don't want two papers. One's getting rather serious."

Still without looking at her husband, Amory said, "How, serious?"

"Why, the expense. I'm not sure that we didn't take the wrong line about the advertisements. Anyway, something will have to be done. Thirty pounds a week is getting too stiff. I'm seriously thinking of selling out from the Eden and the Bookshop. Do you know that with one thing and another we're down more than three thousand pounds this year?"

Amory was surprised; but she realized instinctively that that was not the moment to show her surprise. Were she to show it, the moment would not be opportune for the raising of the subject of the fund, and she wanted to raise that subject. And she wanted to raise it in connexion with Cosimo and Britomart Belchamber. She continued to gaze at the log. The servants, she thought, might have taken the opportunity of dinner to sweep up the litter of cigarette-ends that surrounded it; and then she had a momentary fancy. It was, that the domestic relations that existed between herself and Cosimo were a thing that, like that mechanical substitute for a more generous fire, could be turned off and on as it were by the mere touching of a tap. She wondered what made her think of that....

Cosimo had taken out his penknife and was scraping his nails, moodily running over items of disbursement as he scraped; and then the silence fell between them again.

It was Amory who broke it, and in doing so she turned her head for the first time. She gave her husband a look that meant that, though he might talk about expenses, she also had a subject.

"Walter was excessively stupid to-night," she said abruptly.

He said "Oh?" and went on scraping.

"At the best he's never a model of tact, but I thought he rather overstepped the mark at dinner."

Again he said "Oh?" and added, "What about?"

"His manners. His ideas are all right, I suppose, but I'm getting rather tired of his platform-tricks."

"His habit of illustration and so on?"

"And his want of tact generally. In fact I'm not sure it isn't more than that. In a strange house it would have been simply a _faux pas_, but he knows us well enough, and the arrangement between us. He might at any rate wait till he's called in."

Cosimo started on another nail.--"What arrangement?" he said.

Again Amory gave him that look that might have told him that, though he might think that only a lot of money had gone, she knew that something far more vital had gone with it.

"Do you mean that you didn't hear what he was saying about you and Britomart Belchamber?"

"Yes, I heard that, of course. Of course I heard it."

"Well?"

"Well!"

And this time their eyes met in a long look....

Cosimo had only himself to thank for what happened to him then. After all, you cannot watch a superb piece of female mechanism playing "Catching of Quails," and openly admire the way in which it can shut up like a clasp-knife and fold itself upon itself like a multiple lever, and pretend to be half in love with it lest sharp eyes should see that you are actually half in love with it, and take it for walks, and discuss Walter's Lectures with it, and tell it frequently how different things might have been had you been ten years younger, and warn it to be a good girl because of dangerous young men, and stroke its hair, and tell it what beautiful eyes it has, and kiss its hand from time to time, and walk with your arm protectingly about its waist, and so on and so forth, day after day--you cannot, after all, do these things and be entirely unflurried when your ever-so-slightly tiresome wife reminds you that, be it only by way of illustration, a young expert in such matters has coupled your name with that of the passive object of your philanderings. Nor can you reasonably be surprised when that wife gives you a long look, that doesn't reproach you for anything except for your stupidity or hypocrisy if you pretend not to understand, and then resumes her meditative gazing into a patent asbestos fire. Appearances _are_ for the moment against you. You can_not_ help for one moment seeing it as it must have appeared all the time to somebody else. Of course you know that you are in the right really, and the other person entirely wrong, and that with a little reasonableness on that other person's part you could make this perfectly clear; but you _are_ rather trapped, you know it, and the state of mind in which you find yourself is called by people who aren't anybody in particular "flurry."

Which is perhaps rather a long way of saying that Cosimo was suddenly and entirely disconcerted.

And his flurry included a certain crossness and impatience with Amory. She was--could be--only pretending. She knew perfectly well that there was nothing really. The least exercise of her imagination must have told her that to press Britomart Belchamber's hand, for example, was the most innocent of creature-comforts. Why, he had pressed it with Amory herself there; he had said, jokingly, and Amory had heard him, that it was a desirable hand to press, and he had pressed it. And so with Britomart's dancing of "Rufty Tufty." Amory, who, like Cosimo, had had an artist's training, ought to be the last person to deny that any eye so trained did not see a hundred beauties where eyes uneducated saw one only. And that of course meant chaste beauties. Such admiration was an exercise in analysis, not in amorousness.... No, it was far more likely that Amory was getting at him. She was smiling, a melancholy and indifferent little smile, at the asbestos log. She had no right to smile like that. It made him feel beastly. It made him so that he didn't know what to say....

But she continued to smile, and when Cosimo did at last speak he hated himself for stammering.

"But--but--but--oh, come, Amory, this _is_ absurd! You're--you're tired! Me and Britomart! Oh, c-c-come!----"

And then it occurred to him that this was a ridiculous answer, and that the proper answer to have made would have been simply to laugh. He did laugh.

"Ha, ha, ha! By Jove, for the moment you almost took me in! You really did get a rise out of me that time! Congratulations.--And I admit it is rather cool of Walter to pounce on the first name that occurs to him and make use of it in that way. Deuced cool when you come to think of it. It seems to me----"

But again that quite calm and unreproaching look silenced him. There was a loftiness and serenity about it that reminded him of the Amory of four or five years before. And she spoke almost with a note of wonder at him in her tone.

"My dear Cosimo," she said very patiently, "what is the matter? You look at me as if I had accused you of something. Nothing was further from my thoughts. I suppose, when you examine it, it's a matter for congratulation, not accusation at all. As Walter said, I don't want to fly at anybody's eyes. We foresaw this, and provided for it, you know."

At this cool taking for granted of a preposterous thing Cosimo's stammer became a splutter.--"But--but--but--," he broke out: but Amory held up her hand.

"I raise no objection. I've no right to. What earthly right have I, when I concurred before ever we were married?"

"Concurred!... My dear girl, concurred in what? Really this is the most ridiculous situation I was ever in!"

Amory raised her brows.--"Oh?... I don't see anything ridiculous about it. It received my sanction when Britomart stopped in the house, and I haven't changed my mind. As I say, we foresaw it, and provided for it."

"'It!'" Cosimo could only pipe--one little note, high and thin as that of a piccolo. Amory continued.

"I'm not asking a single question about it. I'm not even curious. I didn't become your property when we married, and you're not mine. Our souls are our own, both of us. I think we were very wise to foresee it quite at the beginning.--And don't think I'm jealous. Perfectly truly, I wish you every happiness. Britomart's a very pretty girl, and nobody can say she's always making a display of her cleverness, like some of them. I respect your privacy, and want you to do the best you can with your life."

The piccolo note changed to that of a bassoon.--"Amory--listen to me."

"No. I'd _very_ much rather not hear anything about it. As Walter said, Life _is_ Love, and I only mentioned this at all to-night because there is one quite small practical detail that doesn't seem to me entirely satisfactory."

She understood Cosimo to ask what that was.

"This: You ought to be fair to her. I know you'll forgive my mentioning anything so vulgar, but it is--about money. She can't be expected to think of such things herself just now,"--there were whole honeymoons in the reasonable little nod Amory gave, "--and so _I_ mention it. It's my place to do so. For us all just to dip our hands into a common purse doesn't seem to me very satisfactory. She's rights too that I shouldn't dream of disputing. And don't think I'm assuming more than there actually is. I only mean that I don't see why, in certain events, you shouldn't, et cetera; that's all I mean. You see?... But I admit that for everybody's sake I should like things put on a proper footing without loss of time."

Cosimo had begun to wander up and down among the saddlebag chairs. His slender fingers rested aimlessly on the backs of them from time to time. Amory thought that he was about to try the remaining notes within the compass of his voice, but instead he suddenly straightened himself. He appeared to have come to a resolution. He strode towards the door.

"Where are you going?" Amory asked.

"I'm going to fetch Britomart," he replied shortly. "This is preposterous."

But again he hesitated, as perhaps Amory surmised he might. His offer, if it meant anything, ought to have meant that his conscience was so clear that Amory might catechize Britomart to her heart's content; but there _had_ been those hair-strokings and hand-pattings, and--and--and Britomart, as Amory had said, was "not always making a display of her cleverness." She might, indeed, let fall something even more disconcerting than the rest--

Cosimo was trying a bluff.

In a word, between fetching Britomart and not fetching her, Amory had her husband by the short hairs.

She mused.--"Just a moment," she said.

And then she rose from the footstool, put one hand on the edge of the mantelpiece, and with the other drew up her skirt an inch or two and stretched out her slipper to the log.

"It really isn't necessary to fetch Britomart," she said after a moment, looking up. "Fetch her if you prefer it, of course, but first I want to say something else--something quite different."

That it was something quite different seemed to be a deep relief to Cosimo. He returned from the door again.

"What's that?" he said.

"It's different," Amory said slowly, "but related. Let me think a moment how to put it.... You were speaking a few minutes ago of selling out from the Eden and the Suffrage Shop. If I understand you, things aren't going altogether well."

"They aren't," said Cosimo, almost grimly.

"And then," Amory continued, "there's Mr. Prang. Neither you nor Strong seem very satisfied about him."

"It's Strong who isn't satisfied. I've no complaints to make about Prang."

"Well, I've been thinking about that too, and I've had an idea. I'm not sure that after all Strong mayn't be right. I admit Prang states a case as well as it could be stated; the question is whether it's quite the case we _want_ stated. His case is ours to a large extent, but perhaps not altogether. And as matters stand we're in his hands about India, simply because he knows more about it than we do. You see what I mean?"

"Not quite," said Cosimo.

"No? Well, let me tell you what I've been thinking...."

Those people who are nobodys, and have not had the enormous advantage of being taken by the hand by the somebodys, are under a misconception about daring and original ideas. The ideals seem original and daring to them because the processes behind them are hidden. The inferior mind does not realize of itself that every sudden and miraculous blooming is already an old story to somebody.

But Cosimo occupied a sort of intermediary position between the sources of inspiration and the flat levels of popular understanding. Remember, he was in certain ways one of the public; but at the same time he was the author of the "_Life and Work_." He took his Amory, so to speak, nascent. Therefore, when she gave utterance to a splendour, he credited himself with just that measure of participation in it that causes us humbler ones, when we see the airman's spiral, to fancy our own hands upon the controls, or, when we read a great book, to sun ourselves in the flattering delusion that we do not merely read, but, in some mysterious sense, participate in the writing of it also.

And so the words which Amory spoke now--words which would have caused you or me to give a gasp of admiration--affected him less extraordinarily.

"Why don't you go to India and see for yourself?" she said.

Nevertheless, Cosimo was not altogether unaffected. Even to his accustomed ear it was rather stupendous, and, if he hadn't been again uneasily wondering whether he dared risk having Britomart down when Amory should return to the former subject again, might have been more stupendous still. He resumed his walk along the saddlebag chairs, and, when at last he did speak, did not mar a high occasion with too much vulgar demonstrativeness.

"That's an idea," he said simply.

"You see, Mr. Chamberlain went to South Africa," Amory replied, as simply.

"Yes," said Cosimo thoughtfully.... "It's certainly an idea."

"And you know how people have been getting at the 'Novum' lately, and even suggesting that Prang was merely a pen-name for Wilkinson himself."

"Yes, yes."

"Well, if you went, for six months, say, or even three, nobody'd be able to say after that that you didn't know all about it."

"No," Cosimo replied.

"The stupid people go. Why not the people with eyes and minds?"

"Exactly," said Cosimo, resuming his walk.

Then, as if he had been a mere you or a simple me, the beauty of the idea did begin to work a little in him. He walked for a space longer, and then, turning, said almost with joy, "I say, Amory--would you _like_ to go?"

But Amory did not look up from the slippered foot she had again begun to warm.--"Oh, I shouldn't go," she said absently.

"You mean me to go by myself?" said Cosimo, the joy vanishing again.

Then it was that Amory returned to the temporarily relinquished subject again.

"Well ...", she said, with a return of the quiet and wan but brave smile, "... I've nothing to do with that. I shouldn't set detectives to watch you. I was speaking for the moment purely from the point of view of the 'Novum's' policy.--But I see what you mean."

But Cosimo didn't mean that at all. He interposed eagerly, anxiously.

"You _do_ jump to conclusions!"--he began.

"My _dear_ Cosimo," she put up her hand, "I'm doing nothing of the kind. As I said, the other isn't my affair. Oh, I do wish you'd believe that I was perfectly calm about it! As Emerson said, soul ought to speak from the top of Olympus or something, and, except that I want you to be happy, it's a matter of indifference to me who you go with. Do try to see that, Cosimo. Let's try to behave like civilized beings. We agreed long ago that sex was only a matter of accident. Don't let's make it so hatefully pivotal. After all, what practical difference would it make?"

But this was too much for Cosimo. He must have Britomart down and take his chance, that was all. At the worst, he did not see how Amory could be so unreasonable that a hand-pat or a hair-stroke or two could not be put before her in the proper light.

Unfortunately, the trouble was, not that she made a fuss, but that she made so little fuss....

Again he moved towards the door.

But Miss Belchamber herself, as it happened, saved him the trouble of fetching her. Their hands were at the door at the same moment, his inside, hers outside. She entered. She was wrapped in the large black-and-gold Chinese dressing-gown Cosimo had given her for a Christmas present, and there were pantofles on her bare feet, and her hair hung down her back in two enormous yellow plaits. She was eating a large piece of cake.

"I've left the hot water tap running," she announced. "I hadn't gone to bed. Does anybody else want a bath? I like lots of hot baths. I came down for a piece of cake."

She crossed to the sofa, crammed the last piece of cake into her mouth, dusted the crumbs from her fingers, tucked the dressing-gown close under her, and with her fingers began softly to perform the motions of _pétrissage_ upon herself in the region of the _erectors spinae_. As she did so she again spoke, placidly and syllabically.

"I made a mistake," she said. "Father's forty-six. Next June. And I shall go to Walter's new Lecture. He's in the guard's van. I mean the van-guard. And Prince Ead-mond's is in the van-guard too. Especially Miss Miles. She says the Saturn-alia is a time of great li-cen-tiousness and dancing. Are they going to start it soon?"

Cosimo was nervous again. He cleared his throat.--"Britomart--," he began; but Miss Belchamber went on.

"I hope they are. Walter says it would be a very good thing. I shall dance 'Rufty Tufty.' And 'The Black Nag.' I love 'The Black Nag.' That's why I'm having a hot bath. Hot baths open the pores, or sweat-ducts. Then you close them again with a cold sponge. I always close them again with a cold sponge."

Cosimo cleared his throat again and had another try.--"Listen, Britomart--we were talking about you----"

Miss Belchamber looked complacently at her crossed Parian-marble ankles. Then she raised one of them, and her fingers explored the common tendon of the soleus and gastrocnemius.

"The soleus," she said, "acts when the knee-joint is flexed. In 'Rufty Tufty' it acts. Both of them, of course. And the manage-ment of the breath is very important. It would be a very good thing if every-body opened their windows and took a hun-dred deep breaths before the Saturn-alia begins. I shall, and I shall make Corin and Bonniebell. Or won't they be able to go if it's very late? If it's after their bedtime I could bring them away early and then go back. I am so looking forward to it."

Cosimo made a third attempt.--"Britomart--", he said gravely.

"What?" said Miss Belchamber.

"I want to tell you about a rather important discussion we've been having----"

"Then shall I go and turn the tap off? The water will run cold. Then the sweat-ducts would have to be closed before they are opened, and that's wrong."

But this time Amory had moved towards the door. Cosimo, and not she, had wanted Miss Belchamber down, and now that he had got her he might amuse her. She thought he looked extremely foolish, but that was his lookout; she was going to bed. It seemed an entirely satisfactory moment in which to do so. She had managed better than she had hoped. The question of the fund had been satisfactorily raised, and it was obvious that the "Novum" would gain by having somebody on the spot, somebody perhaps less biassed than Mr. Prang, to advise upon its Indian policy. At the door she turned her nasturtium-coloured head.

"You might think over what I've been saying," she said. "We can talk of it again in a day or two. Especially my second suggestion, that about the 'Novum.' That seems to me very well worth considering. Good night."

And she passed out, leaving Cosimo plucking his lip irresolutely, and Miss Britomart Belchamber deeply interested in the common tendon of the other soleus and gastrocnemius.