PART II

I

PENCE

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

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

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

Overfed animal!...

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

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

Another "option," in fact....

Then, successively had come the stages when Mr. Dix had told her that in his opinion she was injudicious to change her style so frequently as she did ("Versatility's all very well, but it puzzles your public," he had said, as if it had not been precisely the ground of Amory's complaint that Croziers' were seeing to it that she had _no_ public at all)--when he had told her, that, if she really thought Angiers' could do better for her, Croziers' might be willing to release her from her obligation on repayment of the sum advanced plus a trifle for the accommodation--and when he had ceased to say anything at all. A pretty "option!"--Amory supposed that other man had called it an "option" when he had run away with her godmother's fifty-two pounds a year.

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

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

Cosimo quite understood that she was wedded to her art.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But--but--I don't understand. Is this fashion-drawing?" Amory asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I haven't ten pounds in the world," said Dorothy. Then she considered for a moment. "If it's really urgent--I mean if you really _must_ have it--I might--I never have yet, but I _might_ be able to get it----" She paused.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What'd be the good?" she sighed. "I signed the thing."

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

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

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

Amory lifted her shallow (but penetrating) eyes.

"Well, dear--if it were _really_ necessary--especially after all your kindness--but as you say it isn't--if you wouldn't very much mind--I think my signature looks better on my pictures----"

"All right. It doesn't matter," said Dorothy. "I'll let you know how I go on with Mr. Dix----"

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

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

But she was disappointed in Dorothy.

II

A DAMSEL ERRANT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somebody was fumbling softly at the door.

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

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

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

She simply dared not go out now.

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

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

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

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

She ran across the room and flung the curtain aside.

At the same moment Cosimo opened his eyes.

"Urro!" he grunted.

Then he sat sluggishly up.

"Hullo! It's you. Wherever have you been?" he muttered.

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

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

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

"Oh, I've been out looking for subjects. I've found one--a ripper--Covent Garden Market. But oh, I'm _so_ tired!"

"But surely you haven't been there all night, my dear girl?" Cosimo expostulated.

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

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

III

"BUSINESS AS USUAL"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No."

"Nor an 'Honourable,' with a 'u' in it?"

"No, he's just plain Mr. Dix."

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

"I think he'd do really well."

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

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

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

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

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

"But you just said that if they weren't hard to get they were no good to you."

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

"Well, perhaps he'll do better after the Inauguration."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But suppose we look at them," said Dorothy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Poor dear! But, I'm sure they couldn't resist _you_, Mr. Dix--not if you said the beautiful things to them you've been saying to me----"

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

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

Again she lifted the large baby eyes....

"I'm sure you will...."

* * * * *

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

IV

"IL FAUT QU' UNE PORTE--"

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

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

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

"There!" he said at last. "I think that'll make you safe, Amory."

"Thanks most awfully, Cosimo," Amory replied quietly.

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

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

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

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

"By Jove!" Cosimo exclaimed. "When was that?"...

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

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

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

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

"Prop it up!" repeated Cosimo. "Oh no. Wouldn't do at all."

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

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

"A good deal, or else why have 'em?" Cosimo retorted. He did not seem comfortable.

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

"Of course, so we have," said Cosimo apologetically. "I know we've got quite down to fundamentals. Still, there's no actual _harm_ in having a hinge."

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

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

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

"I haven't changed, Amory, really--really I haven't," he protested.

"You have, Cosimo," Amory replied, her head critically a little on one side. "You mayn't know it, but you're becoming--ordinary."

"Oh!" Cosimo broke out, revolted. "Ordinary--Cosimo!----"

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

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

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

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

"Don't say 'been,' Amory--it is," Cosimo interrupted.

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

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

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

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

"Amory," he pleaded, "don't look like that." This time he touched her hand.

"Like what?" she asked, without emotion.

"As if--it's so ridiculous--as if it wasn't all your fancy. You're a bit run down, that's all that's the matter with you."

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

"Look here--can I get you something--knock a chemist up or anything?"

"No, thank you, Cosimo."

"But--but--I'm really worried about you, dear----"

"You mustn't worry, Cosimo. These things have to be faced."

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

"All I wanted, thank you."

"That means eggs, I expect. You haven't a headache, have you?"

"Only quite a slight one. No, please don't brush my hair; if you wouldn't mind getting me a drink of water instead----"

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

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

"Is it made?"

"I don't know. Would you mind giving me a hand up? I expect I shall be all right again in the morning----"

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

"I'll put you a jug of water by your side, shall I?"

"Yes, please, and Tchekoff--the little book there----"

"Oh, come, reading in bed's the very worst thing you can do!"

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

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

"Oh, very well, if you wish."

"I was a fool not to wait till Monday.... You're all right?"

"Perfectly."

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

"Good night."

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

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

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

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

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

"Why not?" he asked, taken aback anew.

"Oh, very well," she answered indifferently. "I'm ready."

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

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

"Cosimo," she said slowly--"I've been wondering again----"

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

"I've been wondering again--why you don't marry Dorothy."

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

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

She looked earnestly at him.

"But----" he began, but Amory interrupted him gently.

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

Cosimo quailed inwardly, nor could he, in the face of Amory's earnestness, dissemble his quailing with a laugh. "But," he protested by and by, "I--I don't _want_ Dorothy, Amory!"

"I only ask you to ask yourself whether that isn't an _idée fixe_."

"I really don't think it's an _idée fixe_," Cosimo returned, after further examination of it. "And besides, _you've_ rather spoiled me for the companionship of--of anybody who comes along----"

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

He broke out almost angrily--"The past tense again, Amory! Really, I--I don't know what's come over you!"

"You mean that you'd miss me a little too?"

"Miss you!----" This time he did give a little mirthless laugh.

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

"But--but--whatever's put it into your head that I want to marry at all?" Cosimo cried, stopping and looking blankly at her.

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

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

"You mean you've an intuition I want to get married?" Cosimo broke out. "I swear----"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aunt Jerry affected a severity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And again he hoped that Amory was not missing anything.

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

"My--dear!" Amory broke out when, at half-past three, they passed the "Doves" again. "Did you _ever_!"

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

"My--dear! If _only_ you could have heard the priceless things that were said upstairs!"

Cosimo was wondrously bucked by the change in her.

"Oh, this is torture--do tell me!" he implored.

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

"You mean----?" said Cosimo tentatively.

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

"_Not_ the old conceptions, of the father as the head of the Family and so on?" Cosimo said incredulously.

"_Yes!_"

"_No!_--Parental Despotism?"

"Despotism!"

"_Not_ corporal punishment!"

"Cor-por-al punishment!"

"No Justice for children?"

"Love and Authority instead!"

"And woman as the mere plaything of man?"

"The mere plaything of man!"

"Property?"

"A chattel!"

"Woman's place at home with her children?"

"_C'est ça!_"

"By--Jove!"

Cosimo whistled.

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

"Surprise!--I'm thunderstruck!"

"You didn't know you'd been lunching in a regular museum of it all, did you?"

"A museum? A catacomb!"

"You wouldn't suppose that we lived in this Year of Grace, would you?"

"About 1100, _I_ should have said."

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

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

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

"Awful impostors, doctors."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V

BOND AND FREE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And with scarce a look at Amory he was off.

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

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

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

"Do you mean how did I get in? I just walked up. Nobody stopped me. Is it against the rules?"

"It doesn't matter, as it happens. But I'm afraid I've had lunch."

"Oh, thanks awfully, but I always go to one of those Food Reform places now; I feel ever so much better for it. I was only passing, and thought I'd look in."

"Good of you," said Dorothy, and there was a longish pause.

Amory thought it was not very clever of Dorothy not to be able to conceal her chagrin. Amory herself always tried to behave better than that to people who went out of their way to call on her. Probably what was really the matter was Dorothy's conscience; one cannot hold aloof from the noble movements of the day without at times feeling a little uneasy about it. But Causes can afford to be magnanimous. If Dorothy wanted to out-pause Amory, Amory would let her; and, that absurd picture being uppermost in her mind, she gave a little laugh and spoke of that.

"It's easy to see _you're_ not the art-adviser to Hallowells', Dorothy," she said. "_Must_ they buy such things? And what are they going to do with it? Get it lithographed, I suppose, for a supplement or something?"

When the subject of painting was raised Dorothy was still a little afraid of Amory and her superior knowledge--but less so than she had been. Twice in the course of its production she had seen "Barrage," and had stood apologetically silent before Amory's picture. At another time she would not have excited herself one way or the other about Sir Walter, but new forces thrust some of us into conservatism whether we will or not, and "Barrage" had made Dorothy almost ready to swallow Sir Walter holus-bolus. Therefore she said a little defensively, "What's the matter with it?"

"The matter!" Amory exclaimed. She was smiling. If Dorothy meant this for a joke she was quite willing to enter into it.

"Well," said Dorothy, more defensively still, "everybody isn't trying to do nothing but the greatest things all the time, after all."

"Oh, ça se voit!" Amory returned, rippling outright into a laugh.

"And," Dorothy continued, hating herself because Amory seemed to be driving her into a defence even of the absurd and solemn Miller, "we're only a business concern, not an Exhibition, you know."

"Oh? The wonderful thing isn't for sale, then?"

"No; and anyway, Mr. Dix didn't laugh at it." (This was true. Mr. Dix did not laugh at his bread when Hallowells' spread it with an extra thick helping of butter.)

Amory kept a straight face.--"Dorothy," she said, "what's happened to you?"

"How, happened to me?" Dorothy returned, a little tartly. That confounded "Barrage" had put her into an altogether false position. "Nothing's happened to me. Never mind me; tell me what's fresh with you. Has anything happened about your own picture yet?"

The fact that Dorothy was evidently rather cross was enough to make Amory aware of the superiority of cheerfulness. Besides, it might not be amiss to show Dorothy that, high and ideal as the Cause was, it was not quite without its mundane and practical side. That at any rate would not be beyond Dorothy's comprehension. Therefore Amory told Dorothy how the negotiations stood between herself and the Manumission League for the purchase of "Barrage."

Dorothy listened attentively. When Amory had finished she paused....

"Two hundred pounds, you say? Would that be for a sale outright?"

"Yes."

"And they'd be able to do whatever they liked with it--reproduce it or anything?"

"I suppose so. Do you mean it isn't enough?"

"I wasn't thinking of that so much. I was thinking--but of course I don't know all the circumstances."

"I'm not keeping anything back from you, Dorothy," said Amory. Indeed she wasn't. She knew that Dorothy's advice on such a point would be well worth having.

"Oh, I don't mean that at all," Dorothy hastened to say. "I only mean that it's hard to form a judgment without having seen for yourself. I don't like the idea of selling anything outright. If it was only a nominal royalty, in case they wanted to reproduce or anything of that sort----"

"Oh, that! As for that, I should be only too glad to let them reproduce if they wanted."

"Of course you would get the advertisement, but I don't see why you shouldn't have a small royalty too."

Amory smiled. The advertisement! Wasn't that just like dear old Dorothy! As if all the costly things that had gone to the making of "Barrage" could be valued and bartered like that! Amory explained gently.

"I don't think you quite understand, Dorothy. You see, it isn't like those other things Croziers' got. Those were just knocked off. I don't want to be conceited about 'Barrage,' but it has rather taken it out of me, in thought and emotion and those things. I've been feeling a perfect rag after a day at it. Of course, there were heaps of things I should like to do to it, but 'No,' I said that morning, 'you've expressed yourself, and if you began tickling it up here and there you'd only take away from the fierce meaning of it.' So I threw my brushes down, and then collapsed--perfectly limp."

"Oh!" said Dorothy deferentially. She herself had once collapsed during a spring rush, but that had been a quite inferior collapsing, from too long hours simply, not from any emotional strain. But Amory misinterpreted her mild and respectful "Oh!" She spoke rather sweetly.

"Of course I must live, and nobody can say I don't live frugally. But that apart, I don't do this for money at all. I do it because of my beliefs."

"Oh!" said Dorothy again, this time very much as some gallant monarch might have protested that he never meddled with the beliefs of ladies.

"I know," Amory continued firmly, "that there are some things we don't agree on, and of course I think I'm right and you're wrong, or I shouldn't believe what I do. But I do think that that picture in there," she made a little vague pointing movement, "preaches--well, a perfectly damnable lesson--from the feminist point of view perfectly damnable."

"I--I don't think it's meant to," Dorothy ventured to say. "I don't so much mind it really--not that it pretends to be very much--but parts of it are quite like something, and I think painting has to be like things when all's said and done--I mean--certain sorts of painting----"

It was rather a tickling experience for Amory to be schooled by a fashion-artist on "sorts of painting," and she wished Cosimo had been there to hear. And on these lines she knew that she could play with Dorothy as a cat plays with a mouse. So she was beginning, "Oh, why must painting necessarily be 'like' things, as you say? Is it a Law? Do tell me!" when suddenly Dorothy took her back altogether. For all the world as if both of them had been talking about one thing and thinking of another all the time, Dorothy boiled up.

"Oh, Amory, you do make me so cross!" she cried. "Really, to hear you sometimes, nobody would think an awfully pretty girl was talking! Who cares a button about your opinions, with looks like yours? I could understand it if you were plain! I do wish you could manage to be a bit more like a human being; why don't you put on some clothes like other people's, instead of always dressing as if you were going to have a baby? Can't you take an interest in things, instead of always moping the way you do? Why, you might be a superfluous woman yourself!"

For one moment Amory fairly lost her composure, but only for one moment. The next moment she had seen what was the matter. By "taking an interest in things" Dorothy meant forsaking her principles; by "putting on clothes like other people's," she meant abandoning her velvets and corduroys that took the light in such lovely broken bits of accidental colour, and dressing like one of her own impossible fashion-plates; and by being "a bit more like a human being," she meant sitting with a young man on a box and kissing him with a mouth full of sandwich. It was almost too funny to laugh at. If Dorothy would only ask her outright what she evidently had in her mind to ask her--why she didn't marry Cosimo--it would be perfect. Poor old Dot! She had been fairly caught only a few minutes before, and naturally would still feel rather sore. Amory waited for her to go on.

She did go on. "I've wanted to say this for a long time," she said. "Look here, Amory, why don't you marry Cosimo and have done with it? You're lovely--he's quite good-looking--you seem to understand one another all right--I'm sure you ought to by this time--and it would be ever so much more sensible! It seems to me you could drag on like this for ever!"

Amory's golden eyes seemed to dance with mirth. Of course that accidental discovery had forced Dorothy's hand beautifully. Dorothy was pleading with her as earnestly as if she had just been seen, not "canoodling" under a counter (that Amory believed was the word used in such cases), but lifted up on a plinth, in a heroic pose, with an archangel by her side, grouped with their faces towards the east or in whatever quarter the sun of Feminism might be expected to rise.... Amory had not even to say anything. All she needed to do was to stand smiling at dear old Dot and to watch her grow redder and redder. Obviously there was no need to accuse Dorothy when Dorothy was accusing herself.

In another moment, too, Dorothy was defending herself. Her eyes, in the surrounding flush of colour, seemed bluer than ever. And in jumping straight at Amory's thought she skipped a stage.

"I don't care anyway," she blurted out. "Some things _are_ understandable, but you and Cosimo--well, who's to make head or tail of _you_? You're always together, early and late, sometimes in your place and sometimes in his--of course _I_ understand, dear, but really I don't see how you could blame people who didn't if--if----"

Already Amory had drawn herself up to her full five foot against the redwood counter and had tossed back the bright nasturtium of her head.

"If what?" she asked, the brook-brown eyes looking full into Dorothy's blue ones.

"Well, if they draw their own conclusions, if you must know," Dorothy blurted out.

As a wet cloth wipes chalk from a blackboard, so the smile had gone from Amory's face. Most decidedly she wasn't going to stand this--at any rate not from Dorothy.

"Oh!" she said. "What people? And what conclusions?"

"Well, people do. You can't expect to have no conclusions drawn but your own."

"You mean conclusions about me and Cosimo?"

"I'm not saying _I_ draw any, Amory. I understand perfectly, of course. I mean I know there's nothing wrong. But you can't stop people talking."

Amory became still taller.

"May I ask who's been talking?" she added. "I won't say besides yourself, but this is the first I've heard of it."

"Amory!" said Dorothy, deeply wounded. She lifted her eyes almost humbly. "Do you really think that of me?"

"What am I to think?" Amory replied loftily. Yet she was glad that Dorothy had the grace to be ashamed. By twisting and turning and a shameless use of her charms Dorothy might contrive to get her own way with men, but she must not think she could come it over one of her own sex in the same way.

"Oh dear, I'm sorry I said anything at all!" Dorothy wailed.

"Oh, I'm glad, I assure you!" Amory replied quickly. "I don't believe in driving these things underground and then pretending they don't exist! If a thing is, I want to see it _as_ it is!"

"I know you're ever so much braver than I am, dear--I know I'm a dreadful coward at a push--you're worth twenty of me--but still, Amory, people _do_ say things, and not very nice ones, and it could so easily be avoided----"

"Avoided!"

"I know there isn't anything--I only mean the appearance to people who don't know----"

"And what," said Amory slowly, "do you suppose _I_ care for people of that kind, and what they think?"

"Yes, you always were splendid and brave--still----"

"Have you heard anybody talking like this?" Amory demanded.

"I said it was a wicked lie----"

"Ah, you _have_ heard somebody!"

"Not really saying anything--only wondering--you know how people wonder----"

"Then please tell me at once who it was," said Amory with dignity.

But Dorothy only grew more confused than ever.

"Oh, Amory, I can't do that--it was nothing that wasn't fair in a way--you oughtn't to ask me to do that----"

"Be so good as to tell me at once."

Dorothy was silent.

As a matter of fact the people who had been speaking of Amory and Cosimo were Walter Wyron and Laura Beamish, but Dorothy did weakly hope that if things were driven underground they might at least be forgotten.

"Aren't you going to tell me?" Amory demanded.

"No," Dorothy mumbled.

"You refuse?"

"Yes," Dorothy mumbled. And then suddenly she broke out almost passionately--

"I don't blame you in the very least, Amory, but I do blame Cosimo! I do, and it's no good saying I don't. A man's no right to be always about with a woman, getting her talked about, and doing things for her, and always in and out of her place! I do think he might know better!"

Amory was smiling again now, but not very pleasantly--"Oh!" she said. "So when you said you thought I ought to marry Cosimo, you meant that things had gone so far that I might as well?"

"I didn't, Amory. I didn't, I didn't!" Dorothy cried appealingly. "I really think you do seem to hit it off together somehow. And as for what people say, _you_ say what _you_ think about people, and they've a right to do the same, and anyway you can't stop them, and you can't expect to have the world to yourself. Why, I thought you were always talking about 'equal rights.'"

"I don't know whether you know that just at present you're talking about a very precious and beautiful friendship!" said Amory proudly.

"Yes, I do know--I mean I suppose so--you really are such chums, I know----"

"And I hope and trust the day's coming when such a thing can be without nasty prurient minds 'drawing their own conclusions,' as you call it, Dorothy!... Perhaps," the golden eyes were sidelong now on Dorothy's, "perhaps there was some particular--compromising situation--your friend objected to? Or was it merely the whole scandalous relation?"

Suddenly Dorothy, for her part also, did not much like the tone of this. She felt as if that sandwich might still have left crumbs upon her mouth. There might be a good many things to be said about her cousin Stanhope, but at any rate he did not compromise her on principle, nor did he discuss with her some of the rather astonishing subjects that seemed to come into this precious and beautiful friendship of Amory Towers and Cosimo Pratt. She would bow to Amory's superior knowledge when it came to matters of art, but she wasn't going to have even Amory's foot on her neck if Stan was to be dragged into the dispute. And if Dorothy again skipped a step in the chain of processes, she thought she had reason.

"I suppose that's because you caught me out a few minutes ago?" she said, rather challengingly.

"I'm not sure that I quite follow you. I'm sorry if I'm dull."

"Very well, if you want it more plainly, you said 'compromising situation' because you caught us just now. I've always stood up for you, Amory, but I'm not going to let you talk like that."

"Sorry," said Amory offhandedly.

"Well, you needn't say so in that tone either; we don't expect everybody to go about whistling, or knocking at doors and then waiting, like that charwoman and her daughter. I'm sorry if we shocked you."

"I don't think I mentioned--what you seem to be talking about, Dorothy. If I did I don't remember."

"You were thinking about it, though."

"Oh!..."

As if people might say what they liked about Amory and Cosimo, but Amory might not even think what she liked about Dorothy and Stan!

There was a rather hostile pause. Probably either felt that the particular male of her preference was being subjected to criticism.

"Well, we needn't quarrel about it," Dorothy resumed.

Amory brightened remarkably.

"Quarrel? Of course not, dear Dorothy--what an absurd idea! And of course, as you say, I _was_ thinking.... Are you--you know--may I congratulate you?" she asked softly.

Again Dorothy reddened. She would dearly have liked to fling a triumphant "Yes, we _are_ engaged!" into Amory's pretty face, but she and Stanhope had their pact about that. They were not officially engaged. Once more Amory had her at a disadvantage.

"No," she said shortly. It cost her a struggle not to add the mitigating words "Not yet."

"Oh ... I beg your pardon," said Amory, instantly apologetic. "You see----" she hesitated.

"Well, what do I see?" Dorothy Lennard demanded. Against her wishes she felt herself getting angry again.

"Well, dear, you _did_ ask me about Cosimo----"

"You're not engaged to him, are you?"

"No--but then----"

"You mean you don't let him kiss you?" sprang from Dorothy's lips.

Amory thought it crude--revolting....

Then for the second time Dorothy boiled up and over.

"Well, it seems to me you might just as well!" she cried. "Better, I should say--it seems to me you do everything else! I think I've given up trying to understand you clever people; you're beyond me entirely. I _like_ being a man's plaything--_there!_ I don't mind one little bit being a chattel--_there!_ And I think it would be perfectly ripping being property, as long as you belonged to the right person! And I _do_ believe in one law for the man and another for the woman. They _are_ different--they _are_, Amory! They're--they're--_ever_ so different! And I'm glad!... And it seems to me that if you and Cosimo lived in the same house you needn't kiss one another if you didn't want to, and anyway it would save a good deal of walking about! That alone might be worth getting married for--you could talk about the State quite undisturbed then! I know it's no business of mine, but you shouldn't look at me as you have been doing for the last ten minutes all on account of nothing! I'm sorry if I seem angry, because I'm not bad-tempered really, but dash it all, I do think it's the one thing a woman can't afford to be impracticable about, and sometimes you really do seem hopeless, Amory!... Unless----" she checked herself instantly.

But it was too late. She had said the word. Amory knew what it was that she had cut off so short--"Unless you _do_ know your business after all, and think that always sitting in his pocket, and letting him play with your hair, and talking about Heredity all the time, is the way to get him!" That was the peck that Dorothy measured her out of her own bushel! Those were the very methods by which Dorothy herself got round her Mr. Miller, and her Mr. Hamilton Dix, and this smart young man, whoever he was....

She meant that between herself and Amory there was not at bottom a pin to choose....

And since the Cause of Progress did demand that Amory should marry Cosimo, even had it all been true the end would still have justified those or almost any other means. There precisely lay the rub. What are you to say to a person so blind to true meanings as to accuse you of doing what, quite inessentially, you do merely happen to be doing? You cannot admit that they are right--they are so hideously wrong: you cannot tell them they are wrong--they cling so stupidly to a certain appearance of being right. What _are_ you to do?

One thing at least Amory did: she hated Dorothy in that moment. And because she herself wished to be merciful to Dorothy she did not take up that fatal "Unless----" Instead she said, very gently indeed:

"Aren't you rather taking the lowest view of things? _Must_ this physical side always be dragged in?"

Nor was Dorothy very much disposed now to mince matters. The word had popped out, and she was not going to run away from it. If Amory wanted to talk about physical sides, she might; Dorothy's own physique overshadowed Amory's as a ruffled swan overshadows a duckling. She turned, her bosom high, her hands stroking down her waist.

"But it's _you_ who drag it in!" she cried. "If only you _weren't_ always talking about it! But you only pretend you're only talking about something else; it seems to me you _never_ let it alone! What's your Eugenics, if it isn't that, and your Balance of the Sexes, and your State Nurseries? You aren't a snuffy old man writing learned treatises about it all; you're a pretty girl, and I dare say you're quite right, but I don't see the use of pretending----"

"Do you mean that I'm pretending to be something I'm not?" Amory asked sharply. "Say what you mean. Perhaps you mean virtuous?"

Dorothy stamped. "Oh ... need we?"

"Because if you really care to know----" said Amory proudly.

"Oh ... I'm going. Good-bye."

"You _can't_ go now," said Amory significantly. "Think for a moment and you'll see that you can't go now. People can't make charges and then run away. It isn't done, Dorothy."

"How absurd! Who's made charges?"

"I understood you to say that I was a pretender?"

"Don't be so ridiculous! You know very well what I mean!"

"Then you should be more careful about your expressions, Dorothy. Expression is all people have to go by, you know; expression's precisely art, in fact. But I should like you to tell whoever it is who's been talking about me and Cosimo something."

"What's that?" Dorothy grunted over her shoulder.

"You can tell them that they could be present at every one of those dreadful meetings and hear every word we say, if that's the idea. They wouldn't take any harm; in fact, it might take them out of themselves for a bit. And even if it was as they supposed, I don't admit that that would be as important as they seem to think. An altogether false importance is given to these things, Dorothy. My friendship with Cosimo wouldn't be one bit less beautiful whatever the 'conclusions' were people drew. Nor one bit more. I'm not a pretender, Dorothy. I don't pretend to be any wiser than I am. But I do think I'm rational. I--object--most--strongly" (she gave each word its special emphasis) "to this really secondary matter of sex being made a thing of the first importance. I hope that's all going to be changed before very long, and that more enlightened views will take its place. And, really, the brave women of the Movement are the very last people who ought to be talked about in that way. They haven't time for such things. They've far, far too much to do. I know some are married, but they have the true conception of marriage; it's the rational conception, not mere legalized tyranny on the one hand and submission on the other. So though we don't admit that what's commonly called virtue has anything to do with it one way or the other, we give you the virtue in as a sort of present. I think I shall have to lend you John Stuart Mill, Dorothy; he'd clear your ideas on the subject. I'll lend you _Subjection_. It's all in there, art and everything. If you read only a quarter of an hour every night you'll soon feel the benefit. Do read him.... And now I must go. I'm sorry if our talk has seemed a bit of a wrangle, but I have to state these things fearlessly, you see. At whatever cost we have to avoid false positions. The world really doesn't matter _that_ so long as we have the Right on our side. Do try to see it, Dorothy.--Good-bye."

She touched Dorothy's hand and turned away to the door; but, for all her serenity, one thought and one thought only occupied her as she plunged into Hallowells' labyrinth again and wandered through rooms and corridors in search of the way out. The more she thought of it the less it bore thinking of. It was the thought that Dorothy had to all intents and purposes told her that she allowed Cosimo to admire her and to help her to take down her glorious hair for the same reason that Dorothy sat on a box eating sandwiches with her own unenlightened young man, and that when young men came into the question there was not a pin to choose between them after all.

"Poor, dear, dull old thing!" she muttered as she left Hallowells'. "And it's she who pretends, for she'd have given anything to have heard me coming. All the same, if it _had_ been me and Cosimo...."

It would have been irrational, but she supposed she would have resented an intrusion too. Inherited prejudice is very strong....