PART III

I

THE LEAGUE

Other grounds of complaint against the Manumission League you might have, but you could never, never say that they minced matters. As they themselves declared, they could not afford to. Woman had been told for so long that she was a creature of impulse and caprice, not to be depended on for a judgment uninfluenced by personal considerations, that the eagle itself was not clearer-eyed than it now behoved her to show herself to be. Therefore the League's members were rigorously rational. They saw opposing principles in stark and irreconcilable conflict. You agreed with the League and all its ways, or you did not; you subscribed to its funds, which were considerable, or you identified yourself with the White Slave Traffic. You were for Manumission or Immorality. It was because woman had not seen so piercingly and ruthlessly in the past that she had got the name of an illogical and non-political animal; the League had changed all that. True, a weaker member did now and then hint in private that the League demanded more than it expected to get, so that the basis of a bargain might be established, but these admissions were looked upon with disfavour as a drag of darkness and the past. All or nothing: and he or she who was not for the League was against it.

It was for this reason that the barb that Dorothy had planted in Amory's breast so galled her that there would have been no getting rid of it without cutting out a portion of her heart also. She, on a point of sex, no different from anybody else! It was monstrous. Why, who in such matters was spotless if Amory was not? Who, unstayed by an exalted and pure ideal, could have behaved as Amory had behaved? Oh, these worser meanings, and the glee with which a world, base itself, seized upon them! Amory would have given anything to know the name of the person who had been talking about her; not that she hated any person, but oh, she hated, with a hatred that set a red spot glowing in either cheek, a slanderous tongue! She and Cosimo, her dear, brave old pal! Forked tongues had been at work on a relation so heavenly-pure as theirs!... Well, at any rate Cosimo must know. She would have felt a traitor to her chum had she kept this from him. "The world draws its own conclusions!" Cosimo must be told that without loss of time. It would be in the highest degree unjust to Cosimo to allow him to remain for another hour in a position so damnably false!

And Amory had been told this by a blue-eyed fashion-artist, whose wiles had no doubt corrupted a young man who, for all Amory knew, might have been one of Hallowells' shop-walkers!

With the red spots still burning in her cheeks, she sought Cosimo that very afternoon.

Until March Cosimo still had his studio, but he no longer lived there. He had taken a bedroom and sitting-room in Margaretta Terrace, the short right-angled street off Oakley Street that runs into Oakley Crescent. Amory gave her soft treble knock at his door at a little before five o'clock. The knock had been arranged between them. The landlady in the basement was deaf, and if, after waiting for a minute, Cosimo did not descend, Amory always went away again.

Cosimo was at home, and even as he opened the door he was aware of Amory's perturbation. He followed her upstairs to his sitting-room on the first floor, and the moment he had closed the door asked her what was the matter. She pulled out her enamel-headed hatpins and threw the hat into an arm-chair; but when she turned she was a little calmer.

"The matter? How the matter?" she said. "I'm dying for some tea. Have you got some? I've been to see Dorothy, but I suppose it was a bit early for tea when I left."

Cosimo had tea; he made it for himself in his room. As he lighted his spirit-lamp and filled the little kettle from the jug in the next room Amory listlessly tossed over the magazines on his little round table; but there was nothing new in them. She had grown suddenly dejected. There seemed to be nothing new in the world. She was as tired of Cosimo's little furnished sitting-room as she was of his studio in the King's Road or of her own studio in Cheyne Walk. She was tired of her work; she was tired of her friends--especially when they spread gross reports about her; for the moment she was even tired of "Barrage" and the League. And she was not sure that she was not tired of herself. Although Cosimo was back in town, she was plunged again into the mood in which she had wandered the streets during his absence, looking into eyes strange and various as the pebbles on a shore and thinking that the solitude would have been less frightening had she known as much as the names of their enigmatical possessors. She wanted a change; "Barrage" had taken more out of her even than she had supposed; she was petulant with herself. She was also exceedingly sorry for anybody of brilliant gifts on whom the world presses so harshly as to make that person petulant with herself. Self-contempt is ever the artist's blackest despair.

"Well," said Cosimo cheerfully, taking cakes from a square biscuit-tin which he had produced from a cupboard, "and what had Dorothy to say for herself?"

Amory did not hesitate. Though Dorothy could not keep her tongue from repeating a slander and then running away from it by refusing the slanderer's name, Amory respected herself a little too much to give Dorothy or anybody whomsoever away. So she lay back on one of Cosimo's sofa-cushions and put her cheek on the sofa-end.

"Oh, quite a lot," she answered dully. "She seemed to be enjoying herself. She asked after you."

"Really, awfully kind of her. She's still at the Juperies, of course?"

"Oh yes, still there."

"I say, you look fagged out. But tea won't be a minute. No, don't get up to help; all's ready when the water boils.... Nothing wrong, is there?" he asked, as Amory sank wearily back on the cushion again.

"Oh, give me some tea first."

"Then there is?" said Cosimo quickly, catching at the last word. "Not about 'Barrage,' I hope? They haven't cried off, have they?"

"No, it's nothing about 'Barrage.'"

"Then what ... but I'm worrying you, poor dear. I'll give you some tea and you can tell me then."

And, the water boiling, he made the tea and carried Amory a cup where she lay. He packed a cushion in the small of her back and made her put her feet up; then, sitting down on a little square hassock by her side, he patted her hand.

"No, don't talk just yet," he murmured. "Will you have a phenacetin? Well, perhaps the tea will set you right. Close your eyes and I'll try to take it away."

And, rising from the hassock, he drew a chair to the sofa-end, sat behind Amory, and began gently to draw his fingers over her closed lids and back towards the roots of her hair,--"Don't talk--give yourself quite up to it," he murmured....

Amory, relaxing totally, did so.

Sympathetic in all things as Cosimo was, in nothing was he so sympathetic as in his touch of an aching head. Softly as a woman, he changed from stroking Amory's lids, and began lightly to draw his sensitive tips along the angle of her jaw and up the sides of her bluebell-stalk of a neck. And he knew when she felt better, for he whispered "Sssh--I can feel it passing into my fingers and wrists--keep your eyes closed----" and continued to stroke. Amory could not have borne to let anybody else touch her so; it was only because of their intellectual affinity that she could bear Cosimo's long fingers upon her lids and cheek and neck. Mr. Hamilton Dix she must certainly have struck; and as she lay back, with Cosimo's silky tips passing over her face, she remembered, apropos of nothing, the only other male contact she had ever experienced--a brutal kiss, snatched years ago under the dark portico of the McGrath, with a knocking together of crania, and a smell of tobacco, and a horrible stiff little moustache.... She could not have endured even Cosimo with a moustache....

And Dorothy talked about the world and its "conclusions!"

By and by her fingers softly touched Cosimo's, in token that she felt better. Slowly she opened her eyes again.

"Ah!" she said.... "Thanks, dear. I don't know why I should come all over like that."

"By Jove, you had got it," said Cosimo, stroking his hands and wringing, as it were, the numbness from them. "I feel it all up my forearms."

"So now you've got it."

"Oh, it's rather pleasant; only like your foot going to sleep. It's going already. Now have some more tea and you'll be quite all right. I expect you've had too much on your mind, that's what's been the matter with you."

"I have, rather. And I've been upset to-day, too."

"I knew you had. What was it?"

"It was something Dorothy told me. Perhaps I'll tell you in a few minutes, but I don't in the least want to. Yes, I will have some more tea, please. Cosimo----"

She spoke so shortly that Cosimo started and almost dropped the teacup. There was that in her tone which suggested that, though she had only that moment resolved that what she had to tell him might be told by and by, it was torn from her now by something stronger than herself. Cosimo had turned.

"What? Good gracious, how you startled me."

"I want you to tell me something, Cosimo."

"What?" said Cosimo. The golden eyes were glittering on his. Evidently Amory was fighting hard to keep in check some powerful emotion.

"I want you to tell me this, and truthfully, please, and without any false modesty: Do I strike you as the kind of girl decent people might wish not to know?"

Cosimo was thunderstruck. He could only look at her incredulously. Was something worse than a headache the matter with her?

"Do you strike me----" he repeated.

"Yes," she interrupted. "Am I a--peculiar--sort of person?"

"Peculiar----?"

"Yes. I'll tell you why I ask in a minute. I want to know how I strike you first. You wouldn't call me an immodest girl, would you?"

Still Cosimo was all at sea.

"Do you mean--I mean, has somebody been shocked because--well, because you have brave and enlightened views?"

"I don't mean anything about my views. I mean about myself. To put it brutally, would you think that anybody had the right to say I led--a horrid life?"

Cosimo had been standing gaping, with the cup in his hand. This time he did drop the cup. He gasped.

"Do I understand----"

"Answer my question," Amory commanded. "Do I give people that impression?"

"You----!" was all that Cosimo could say.

"Do I give _you_ that impression?"

"Amory----!"

But she put up her hand peremptorily and continued.

"So that if anybody _does_ think that, you'd say it was just the vileness of their own minds?" (Amory herself could not help noticing that somehow it sounded worse when put in this way than it had when Dorothy had talked about "conclusions.")

"My dear girl----!"

"Mere unconventionality apart, you wouldn't say that?"

"Wouldn't ... why, anybody who'd say that must be mad!"

Amory straightened her back and nodded. "Thank you. That's all I wanted to know," she said. "I was a little afraid to trust my own judgment, that's all. Thank you."

But apparently it was not all that Cosimo wanted to know. Of course such a subject was always interesting quite apart from its personal application; many times he and Amory had discussed that kind of thing in the abstract by the half-day together; but now that was not all. His face was quite grimly set. Slowly he drew up a chair to where Amory sat, bolt upright and robed in her consciousness of rectitude, on the sofa.

"This," he said slowly, "is interesting. May I hear a little more about it, please?"

Amory had more than half expected him to take that attitude. Since Cosimo had had his hair cut he was still to be counted as "one of them," one of the enlightened ones; but, like Samson, he had lost perhaps a little of his strength in the process of shearing. He still saw the light, but sometimes it dazzled him a little--that was another reason why he needed an unflinching pair of eyes always by his side. Now his grimness was almost the ordinary conventional thing. The male behaved like that in most novels and in all theatres. Taken properly in hand, Cosimo would not be very difficult to manage.

"Need we go into it?" said Amory quietly. There was withering disdain of her traducers in the single glance she shot at him.

"I think we've got to," Cosimo replied, with the same slightly histrionic quietness. "I really think we'd better, don't you know."

"As regards myself, I don't consider it worth it," Amory replied proudly.

"I know you don't," the still strong man pursued doggedly. "That's because you're so high-minded and scornful and wonderful. You're so high above it all that really it's difficult for you to understand. But I think I'll make this my business, if you don't mind. Please tell me."

"Don't you think that by touching pitch you'd only be defiling yourself?"

"It isn't a question of me. It's you. I really think you'd better tell me."

"But what could you do?"

"Leave that to me. If it's a man who's been talking----" Cosimo left the sentence significantly unfinished. "Is it a man?"

"I don't know. Dorothy wouldn't tell me."

Cosimo half rose. "Oh, she wouldn't, wouldn't she? Perhaps she'll tell me, though! Will she have left that place of hers if I take a cab?"

Amory put up her hand rather quickly.

"Oh, Cosimo, do treat it with the contempt it deserves! You'd get nothing out of Dorothy. You know how obstinate she can be."

"Well, tell me what she said; then I'll consider whether I'll go or not."

"No, Cosimo, I'd rather not."

"But you must!"

At that Amory once more broke passionately out. She hit at the sofa cushion with her tiny white fist.

"Oh, it's--I _know_ I've not deserved it! That ought to be enough for me, and I do try to look at it in that light, but I'm not always so high-minded as you think, Cosimo, and it does hurt when they spring a thing like that on you without warning! And the way she did it!... Listen. I didn't mean to tell you, but _she_ seems to have been talking _me_ over, and there does come a point when the truth has to be told! I went up when she was having her lunch; she was having it with somebody or other, I forget his name; and--Cosimo--but I'm sure I needn't tell you----"

"Not----?" The golden eyes and the black-coffee brown ones were crossed as it were like swords for a moment, as if either had started into an attitude of defence against some monstrous meaning--the meaning that, Dorothy had said, was always between them.

"Yes," Amory sighed as if in disgust.

Cosimo stared, frowning.

"You _do_ mean kissing, don't you?"

"If you must have the horrid word."

"And it was _after_ that that she said----?"

"Yes. Rather unbelievable, isn't it?... And that," Amory broke out anew, "is what made me so angry. In a room where the workmen might come at any moment, too! And then to talk about _me_!... Listen, Cosimo, I'm going to make a confession. I know it isn't necessary with you, but I want to make it. I want you to know exactly how much and how little I have to reproach myself with; then you'll see. An awful man did once kiss me, at a dance at the McGrath--and once I did give a kiss--I'll tell you----"

Cosimo made a little protesting movement.

"Oh, Amory, do you think you need defend yourself to me----?"

"But I want to tell you. It wasn't to a man--it was to a beautiful object--the Antinöus in the Louvre. I dare say it was foolish, but I thought it so beautiful, and anybody with any understanding at all would have regarded it as--don't think me silly--as a sort of dedication--to my art--and I have been faithful to my ideal ever since----"

Cosimo's eyes were moist with emotion. The beautiful gesture! What a ripping touch that would be if anybody ever wrote the life of the painter of "Barrage!"... "Oh!" he breathed reverentially. "You are superb, Amory."

"And of course I'm not counting that stupid thing at my aunt's wedding----"

"That----," said Cosimo, straightway dismissing it.

"And that's all--absolutely all," said Amory, softly and bitterly. "To all intents and purposes I've never been kissed.... So don't you think, Cosimo, that from her at any rate I might have been spared this?"

She lifted the shallow opals of her eyes.

Suddenly Cosimo ceased to be the still strong man. He became the hero, dreadful in his anger.

"It's unbelievable--cruel!" he cried. "And I'm going to see about it! You wait here--I'm going now--I'm going to get to the bottom of this--you stay here till I come back."

He was half-way across the room, reaching for his hat.

But Amory called him. "Cosimo----!"

"We'll talk about it when I get back!" Cosimo muttered, grim once more. Talking would do any time. This was the hour for action.

"But--Cosimo--wait! You can't go to her! She'd think I'd been telling you things--she doesn't understand these moments when the truth simply must be told! Come here and be reasonable. She'd only round on you; I know her! If I can take it calmly I think you might. I'm not angry now. I'm going to take simply no notice. 'Let Gryll be Gryll and have his hoggish mind'--you know--it's in the _Faerie Queene_. That's what _I_ think about it.... So _you_ don't mind, do you, Cosimo?"

Something in this, he did not know what, arrested Cosimo, but Amory gave him no time to think. She continued--

"We should show ourselves quite unworthy of the faith we profess to take the least bit of notice, either of us. It's merely the old prejudice about the Subjection persisting. Why should the woman be compromised, as they call it, and not the man? They're equally guilty or equally innocent, one would have thought? But that's not our business really; our business is to strike and suffer, and strike and suffer, and to go on striking and suffering until not a tongue in the whole wide world dare say those hateful words again, 'One Law for the Man and Another for the Woman!'"

"But----" Cosimo gasped.

"Isn't it?" Amory bore him down, flinging out an adorable arm. "Isn't it? What is the battle, then, if that isn't it? What is every woman worth her salt, and a few devoted men, working and suffering and fighting for if it isn't for that? They're fighting against Wrong, Cosimo, and Vivisection, and Tuberculosis, and Man-made Laws, and the White Slave Traffic----"

But Cosimo was white. He had heard all this before, but something he had not heard before had evidently seized on him now. Again he tried to speak, but again Amory went triumphantly on.

"And with _that_ noble task before us, what does it matter what scurrilous tongues say? Let them say! We defy the world! The world!" (She gave a contemptuous laugh). "Why, the world will be drawing its 'conclusions' (I believe that's the expression) at this very moment. A young man and a young woman, discussing ideals together----," she became brightly mocking, "--dreadful! Two beings of the opposite sex merely discussing great Social Problems--ha ha! Heavens, if they only knew! I really believe, Cosimo, that of all the times we've been together, if once--just once--the roof could have been lifted off and we could have been seen, perfectly innocently occupied, the world would have had such a shock to its conceit and ignorance that the Dawn would begin to-morrow! I really think that----"

But here Cosimo found his tongue. "Amory," he gasped, "do you mean that they've been talking about--you and me?"

Amory laughed. "Why, you stupid old Cosimo, who else?"

"Do you mean--you and me?"

At that Amory's laugh ceased. She stared. "You?... Cosimo, did you--tell me--did you think I had a scandalous relation with anybody else?"

"No--no, no--but----"

"Then who did you suppose they'd been talking about?" she asked, staring.

"I--I--I didn't know----"

"Do you _mind_?" This was said slowly, as if Amory struggled with a new idea.

"No--of course not--I mean, I think you're magnificent--but it--it didn't occur to me--just at first----"

Amory smiled cynically. "Oh, I've not had any scandalous relation with anybody except you!"

"Er--er--ha--have some more tea," said Cosimo quaveringly, putting out his hand to the cold teapot.

There was a moment's silence.

"Perhaps _you_ don't believe me either?" said Amory presently, her head suddenly thrown back. "Perhaps you thought I'd found another friend while you were away?"

"Oh, Amory!" Cosimo reproached her; but he fidgeted uneasily. Perhaps he had suddenly remembered Pattie Wynn-Jenkins.

"Because--because----" Amory's voice quavered now, "because if you did, Cosimo, it wasn't true--it wasn't--I trusted you as I thought you trusted me----"

She showed signs of breaking down. That was infinitely pathetic. Is it not pathetic, when one who is prepared to defy the whole world provided she is allowed her single beautiful friendship, finds that friendship too yielding under the strain? Cosimo thought so, and put out his hand rather aimlessly.

But Amory drew her own hand back. The pathetic weakness passed. Wearily she laughed now.

"Oh no, better not, Cosimo. There are perfectly innocent things that we can't allow ourselves. It's hard, isn't it? but you see what the world is. It's probably damned us already; we're probably damned at this moment for being together here; but as long as we give it no reason it only recoils on its own head. I'm perfectly willing to accept the situation. I accepted it in a sense when I did that foolish thing with the Antinöus. I thought then that I was just vowing myself to my art, but I see now that it was a far greater thing. It really meant that I chose all the large and beautiful and abstract things--a sort of life of toil--and put off these other things once for all. I didn't know; I might not have had the courage if I'd known; but there's no going back. Once I said our friendship must end, Cosimo, but that's over too. They'd talk just the same if we ended it now. So let them talk. It's bitter, but if I can bear it you ought to be able to. After all, there is that petty sense in which I lose more than you do."

Cosimo had been staring hard at her. Again he had a merely conventional look. This time it was that of a man who, occupied with important and practical things, indulgently allows a woman to talk while he arrives at his conclusion. Presently he seemed to have come to the conclusion. His face was set.

"Well," he said, rousing himself, "that leaves only one thing to be done."

"Precisely," said Amory, with a little shrug.

"You must marry me," said Cosimo.

Amory fell back into the sofa-corner and for a moment looked at him as if she did not believe she could have heard aright. Then she smiled. She shook her head slowly.

Poor, foolish Cosimo! Was _that_ all he saw? Well she must teach him....

"Don't you see, Cosimo," she said, as patiently as if she had been instructing a child, "that that's the one thing that _can't_ be done?"

"Can't!--It must!"

"Really, Cosimo----"

"But it's as plain as it can be----"

"But you don't, you don't see, dear," Amory replied, still smiling. "That would be to be false to everything. It would be an admission. Think how all those people who have been so hideously wrong would instantly be sure they'd been perfectly right all the time! Why, it might just as well have been so!... No, Cosimo, that would be mere weakness--yielding to pressure, and an acknowledgment of that very opinion we hate so. We can't be on both sides at once, Cosimo. Either we've been right or we've been wrong, and I know which _I_ think we've been. Don't you see _yet_, dear, what it meant when I kissed the Antinöus? It meant that I removed myself _away_ from all that!... Really, Cosimo, I think you are almost dull enough sometimes to marry!"

"But--but--lots of the League people _are_ married----" said Cosimo, bewildered.

"Ah, but they aren't you and me, Cosimo! They haven't our perfect friendship. Besides, I'm _ra_ther proud, you know. I don't think I could ever accept a man who merely thought he was under an obligation to marry me. You never asked me before, and you were quite right, just as you're quite wrong in this. If you really want an answer, it's--No. And if you want to know whether you've got to behave one bit differently because of this--well, that's No too. I admit I was angry, but now that I've talked it over I find it really rather amusing. It's quite funny, in fact, coming from Dorothy, after you know what. There are Dorothy's ideas, and there are mine, and I do sometimes think that if Dorothy thinks a thing right that's almost enough in itself to make it wrong for me. I hope you see _now_, Cosimo?"

Cosimo may not have seen, but he was at any rate silenced. A new fear had seized on him now. Hitherto he had taken this question of "compromising" very much at Amory's valuation, without overmuch thought about it on his own account; but now--now that he had had his hair cut--that irrational conventional point of view refused to be altogether banished. Though it came late and should have come earlier, perhaps he ought to consider her a little more; indeed, things being so hatefully as they seemed to be, it might be better if, for some time to come at any rate, they were less together than they had been in the past. The thought afflicted him with a melancholy sense of loneliness and hopelessness; he felt a little as a man feels after a weakening attack of influenza. Something he had grown to need he must now be more or less deprived of.... But again, as he mumbled something of this kind, Amory came out shining and magnificent. Not go on precisely as before? Why (she exclaimed) that would be the next worst thing to marrying! If any difference was to be made at all, they must be seen even _more_ constantly together than before! Just as the League sometimes overstated things in order that those things should "carry," so even by a slight parade of intimacy they must enter their protest. To weaken now would never, never do! Surely Cosimo saw _that_?

So they dined that night at the Lettuce Grill, in St. Martins Lane, and Amory had never been more trenchant and brilliant, more bright and tender and free and brave. And after dinner they joined a larger party at one of the long tables, and Walter Wyron and Laura Beamish dropped in, and everybody was absolutely at his and her best, and it was almost like a larger and more responsible McGrath over again, and the Dawn, if emotion and enthusiasm and resolve counted for anything at all, was hastened that night by several years. And before the party broke up Amory definitely clinched the sale of "Barrage".... And Cosimo was pensive and abstracted now. He saw, not only how right Amory was in everything she said and did, but how temerarious he himself had been when, that afternoon, he had said, almost as if he had been making a sacrifice, that a being so daring and dashing and gloriously winged must of course marry him. There was no of course about it. It would be she, not he, who would be making the sacrifice. He would be lucky to get her. Laura Beamish, whispering to him that Amory, drinking to the Dawn in the Lettuce Grill's Unfermented Grape-fruit Moselle, was stunningly pretty, told Cosimo nothing that he could not now see for himself.

Yes, Cosimo Pratt saw at last that he had come near making a precious ass of himself when he had taken her acceptance of him so entirely for granted. He did not suppose for a moment that a girl so frank and free and brave could (to put it grossly) be holding out for her price; nevertheless her price could be no light one. And because it was not a light one, Cosimo was now full of eagerness to pay it.

II

"BARRAGE"

The sale of "Barrage" to the Manumission League was definitely concluded within the week. Amory thought it a distinct smack in the eye for Mr. Hamilton Dix. Mr. Dix, in hoodwinking her, and all but fraudulently getting her to accept Croziers' miserable hundred pounds, had no doubt thought he was doing a smart stroke of business; but he was likely to squirm now, and to wish he had not given her permission to sell privately what work she could. True, Amory admitted that in a sense she had been indebted to Dorothy Lennard for this release--but only in a sense. It was a thing anybody would have thought of, and things anybody might think of were very lightly and happily hit off in that perfect phrase of Nietzsche's, "the vulgarity of the lucky find." In any case, Amory and nobody else had actually painted "Barrage." So if Dorothy liked to go about boasting that she herself had procured the sale to the League--not that Amory knew for a fact that she had done or was doing this--well, it would be a little beneath Amory's dignity to contradict her. Some people cannot bear to hear of the success of others. Amory thanked goodness that she was not like that.

The transaction put her into possession of no less a sum than two hundred pounds. Two hundred pounds, and for a single picture--at last that was something like! She had always known it would come, and come it had. Again, as she had done after the Crozier agreement, she counted the time "Barrage" had taken to paint; again she saw those other pictures she intended to paint--the Education picture, the State Motherhood picture, the terrible indictment of all non-members of the Manumission League that the White Slave canvas was to set forth; and again she saw herself rich. "Barrage" had left her limp and a rag, but that was past. It paid in cash to soar. Throes meant thousands. She laughed at her immediate two hundred, and straightway set about the spending of it.

And first of all she discovered that no system of physical exercises yet invented can compare for one moment with silk stockings for giving an erect carriage to the female head. She bought a couple of dozen pairs, taking Cosimo with her to choose the colours. She bought scarves, too, Indian and Japanese, and the most exquisitely embroidered peasant smocks, and a kind of goose-girl costume for the evenings, to go with which Cosimo, as a joke, made her buy a pair of sabots also. She put on the costume in the studio in Cheyne Walk, and her tiny feet were bare inside the sabots, and her hair was done in two glorious plaits, and she had a Breton cap on the top of it. For the studio itself she bought nothing new; that, she said, was to be kept severely for work--she had already begun a cartoon for the White Slave picture, and Cosimo had posed for the angelic and accusing figure that symbolized Manumission and the League. The only new piece of furniture that she did buy was a hanging cupboard so tall that it would hardly go under the blackened and sagging ceiling. She filled it with the new velvets and silks and put the stockings and shawls and the dyed leather belts with the enamelled clasps in the drawers beneath; and then one Sunday she bore off Cosimo to Oasthouse View again, on the Mall, Chiswick. He was to see Aunt Jerry's baby.

This time they did not go to lunch; they arrived at about tea-time instead. But if by going later Amory had expected to avoid Mrs. Deschamps and Miss Crebbin and _her_ young man, she was disappointed. And not only that; as it happened, she and Cosimo walked straight into a party so large that its talk and laughter could be heard twenty yards before they reached the wrought-iron gate. Indeed, at the gate Amory hesitated for a moment and exchanged a quick glance with Cosimo; one voice had risen above all the rest; it was the voice of Mr. Wellcome. "Shall we hurry past?" Amory's glance seemed to say; but Cosimo hoisted himself out of a rather quiet mood and replied, "Oh, we'll go in--rather!" Perhaps he still lived in hopes of hearing Mr. Wellcome say "May all your troubles be little ones."

It would have been laughable, if at the same time it had not been so terribly socially deplorable, to see the ridiculous fuss they made of that baby of Aunt Jerry's. These people did not seem to have as much as a glimmer of the true significance of childhood--not to speak of its rights. They did not seem to realize that every false impression it acquired now would have to be corrected, painfully and with labour and tears, in the long years to come. It did not seem to occur to them, for example, that it was in the last degree important that, from the very beginning, its eyes should rest on none but beautiful and sage-green objects; instead they let it see Mr. Wellcome. They seemed to be totally ignorant of the fact that, already, beauty born of murmuring sound should be passing into its mite of a face; they prodded it, and guffawed in its tender ears, and said "Boh!" and "Diddums!" And was it conducive to a proper modesty and earnestness of purpose in later years that the child should be told already that it was precious and a gem, and that its mother could eat it, and (when it expressed its just resentment by a cry, so that its father had to take it into his arms and to sing to it), that the hills and the towers (the oasthouses presumably) that it could see from the window all belonged to it? That was a lie. They did not, and never would. Amory hoped that by the time it grew up there would be no such thing as private ownership of hills and oasthouses. But there they were, all of them, poisoning its vague young mind, and really not thinking of it at all, but of their own stupid cachinnations and witticisms. No wonder it cried.

And Mr. Wellcome was positively devastating in his humour. Mrs. Deschamps had her small fingers on his mouth even as Amory and Cosimo entered, trying to prevent the utterance of some dreadful facetiousness or other; pretty Miss Crebbin was blushing at it yet; but Mr. Wellcome tore Mrs. Deschamps' hand away as he saw the newcomers, and cried, "Well, all I can say is hooray for the little difference--here's Cos and Am--is all right behind, George?--Here, Cos, come and be getting your hand in----"

And he snatched the baby and forced it into Cosimo's arms.

Truth to tell, Cosimo held the infant quite as well as Amory did. When, in the course of the shocking display of promiscuity, it arrived at Amory, she stood with it much as a hatstand stands with the hat that is hung upon it. But she thanked goodness that she knew a little more than to say "Diddums" to it. It was a little boy; Amory was rather sorry for that; nevertheless she bent an earnest gaze upon it, as if, male as it was, she still sealed it as more or less vowed to the Cause. Mr. Wellcome was entirely wrong when he cried that he'd take short odds he could guess what she was thinking of. Mr. Wellcome could never have guessed. Mr. Wellcome was for the propagation of Tuberculosis and the direct encouragement of the Social Evil. In fact, Amory was not at all sure that men like Mr. Wellcome were not the real Antichrist.

Then the babe was borne away by a nurse, and, while George Massey, mingling his hissings with those of the silver kettle over Aunt Jerry's spirit-lamp, passed round cups of tea, the conversation came round to Amory herself and "Barrage." Mr. Wellcome had failed to catch the figure for which the picture had been sold.

"How much did you say?" he demanded again over his cup.

Amory glanced at Cosimo.

"Two hundred pounds," said Cosimo with a negligent air.

Mr. Wellcome's respect for the Cause evidently went up. "Come, that's not so dusty," he approved. "Have you been raking it in at this rate ever since you left Glenerne, Miss Am?" he asked, fixing her with his eye and tapping her on the knee. He was a friendly man.

Amory replied graciously that she had, more or less; it was not easy to fix a rate; sometimes she would be quite a long time without making very much, and then----

"I see; like winnings," said Mr. Wellcome. "Well, and Cos here's been touching too from all I hear." He winked slowly.

"_Mis_-ter Wellcome!" Mrs. Deschamps interposed, shocked.

But Mr. Wellcome only guffawed.

"Well, it makes the mare to go--eh, George? No doin' your duty as a citizen without it, George, what? I always say, every time I have a good win, '_Now_ for the duty as a citizen!' Not that horses ain't precarious, like art; but getting married's like learning to swim--when you're neck and crop in for it you find a way out all right. Well, I don't care, among friends, where it is, Glenerne or where you like--I know where there's a bottle or two of G. H. Mumm left, and the Spanish brandy's got no force, I give you _my_ word! It's betwixt Miss Crebbin and somebody--Miss Crebbin's favourite for the moment, but betting alters----"

And the opening of an oyster is not larger nor more watery than the next wink Mr. Wellcome gave.

"Aren't you going to stay and see him in his bath, Amory?" Aunt Jerry asked wistfully when, at a little after five, Amory and Cosimo rose to go.

"I'm afraid not," Amory replied, drawing on her new gloves. "Cosimo and I have to go and see _Europa_ at the New Greek Society; it's the first performance in England."

"The theatre--on Sunday!" Aunt Jerry exclaimed softly.

And Amory and Cosimo left. If they had stayed there would have been nothing to beat Aunt Jerry's consternation at the idea of going to a theatre on Sunday.

Hitherto it had not struck Amory that the Manumission League, in paying her two hundred pounds for "Barrage," had paid a very good price indeed for a canvas by an artist who, save for a few columns about her by Mr. Hamilton Dix (who was not to a column or so about anybody on whom Croziers' wandering eyes might rest), was unknown. Nor had it occurred to her that the League might want to see its money back again. Dorothy Lennard might entertain such suspicions, but then Dorothy was of a suspicious nature, always thinking somebody might be getting the better of her, and naturally crediting other people with intentions no better than her own. "I don't like sales outright," Dorothy had said.... And Amory, too, began to wonder whether righteousness also may not have its mammon when she first heard, at the Lettuce Grill, of the purpose to which it was intended to put her picture. It was only a rumour; indeed, Amory had it from a source no more official than Walter Wyron and Laura Beamish; but Walter's father was the mainstay of the New Greek Society, and things that he said had a way of being authentic, and Amory began to wonder whether she ought not to have had a royalty, or a percentage, or whatever Dorothy had called it after all. The rumour was to the effect that, merely as a means of sowing the good seed, "Barrage" was to be exhibited, not in an ordinary gallery with a hundred other pictures, but by itself, with drapery round it, set back in a sort of proscenium, with lights at the top and bottom, and a muffled harmonium playing sacred music in the next room, and a faint odour of Ruban de Bruges burning, and other appurtenances of reverence and solemnity. That converts might be made, the whole of the League's resources were to be concentrated on the enterprise, and the admission was to be a shilling. If the picture drew neophytes and shillings enough in London it was to be taken to the Provinces.

There are twenty shillings in a pound, and in two hundred pounds four thousand shillings. When four thousand shillings had been taken, "Barrage," omitting other expenses, would have paid for itself.

Now the League had many times four thousand members in London alone....

A royalty of, say, a penny in the shilling would have worked out at more than four pounds per thousand....

The League was going to do the thing _very_ thoroughly, and a special "Barrage" Committee was to be formed....

Two hundred pounds was well enough as far as it went, but there was going to be increment beyond that, earned really by Amory....

She felt a sharp stab of regret that she had let "Barrage" go for so little.

But the regret did not last long. She remembered in time that she was bringing herself down to Dorothy's level. The full reward she might not get, but all the renown would be hers, and, though she was no Dorothy, she was yet not so ignorant of business but that she knew that in other ways her market was now as good as made. And compared with the kudos that would be hers, even the foregone royalty fell away into the background. "Foregone," she told herself, was the world; for the effect was the same as if she had had the royalty and had magnanimously handed it back again to the Cause. To all intents and purposes, she was subscribing to the Cause's funds (say) a thousand guineas. Her name would not appear with that figure after it in any list, but it is well to do good by stealth, and the name would ring resoundingly enough in other ways. "Amory Towers, you know, the painter of 'Barrage'"--"'Barrage,' Miss Towers' great work"--"That feminist picture that everybody's going to see, 'Barrage,' by Amory Towers" ... yes, there would be lots of that. And in the Movement itself she would be a person of consideration and authority. She would have a voice in its councils. "Has Miss Towers given her opinion yet?" the leaders would ask one another on this point or that; and there were the other propagandist pictures yet to come. In the meantime it was a little odd that Amory was not asked to join the "Barrage" Committee. But perhaps that was as well too. Anybody can serve on a Committee, but it takes a somebody to paint a "Barrage." To inferior minds inferior work. It was better after all that there should be a little mystery about Amory and that she should be shut off from the common gaze as it were by a veil. More than her own exclusion she resented the inclusion of the name of Mr. Hamilton Dix. For Mr. Dix had been called in. Mr. Dix, whose articles on Hallowells' advertisements had brought him very much to the fore, had evidently been deemed by the Committee to be the very man to act as Art Director for "Barrage" also. And as that man of parts, who had no interest in Croziers', still never abandoned an attitude of benevolence towards Croziers' and such artists as they elected to "take up," Amory's twenty-odd older pictures also seemed in a fair way for being fetched up out of Croziers' cellars. One thing brings another. Amory had known it would come, and it had come, or was coming. And it was coming without her having receded from the highest that was in her by as much as a single inch. That (as Cosimo said) was what was so wonderful. In an age of polluted altars she had kept her single taper burning pure and bright.

To anticipate a little: those contingent results of the enormous publicity that was presently given to "Barrage" came duly to pass. Croziers' sold all but two of those old Saturday-night street-markets of hers at prices that varied from ten to thirty pounds apiece. Their numerous charges and commissions struck Amory as merely capacious; for all that, she received a series of cheques that totted up in all to more than four hundred pounds; and in several articles he wrote on the astonishing combination of human sympathy and pure idealism that distinguished the work of Miss Towers from the work of all other living artists, Mr. Hamilton Dix fairly let himself go. This was when "Barrage" left London for Manchester, Liverpool, and the North, to draw its thousands of visitors per week and to be chosen as a popular and attractive text, though with various applications, by half the Nonconformist ministers in the land; and one of the curious little after-effects of the enterprise was to show how entirely right Mr. Miller was when he said that the mere advertising "stunt" was over, and that advertising, to be effective to-day, must attach itself to something higher than itself. He would have attached a drapery business to the Royal Standard; but the feminist picture did even better. The "Barrage" turnstiles took their toll of shillings that were really the sinews of a Holy War.

Nothing, in Cosimo's opinion, could have been more simple and unaffected and fine than the way in which Amory still stuck to the shabby little studio in Cheyne Walk. More than once he protested, but she lifted her eyes to him and asked him, Was it not enough? The roof kept out the rain; the door kept out intruders; and she could open the diamond-latticed window and look at the stars whenever she liked. She liked the solitude, she said; out of just such a solitude the strength must be gathered that is to be put to the service of the multitude. She did sometimes sigh for the country; she was not sure that soon she might not take a trip away somewhere, a longish one, quite alone; she had always promised herself such a trip, to Italy, but the loved servitude of her career had never permitted her to get farther than Paris; but now there was nothing to keep her in England. She might even go and live permanently abroad, working for the Cause from wherever it might be. But wherever she went, Cosimo must not suppose she would ever forget him. She would write to him quite frequently. And he must write to her.

The first time Amory allowed Cosimo this peep at her plans his face became blank with dismay. They were sitting together on a bench in the little Embankment garden where the Carlyle statue is. It was an evening early in April, approaching dusk, and on another bench, twenty yards away, a dim huddle under the trees had caused Amory's lips to curl into a smile; it had reminded her of that horrible hypnotizing evening when she had walked on Clapham Common and had returned to pass a night of starts and tremors, lying dressed on Cosimo's bed. She could afford to smile now, though she did so a little disdainfully. Things had improved since then--rather! Cosimo, though he had always been splendid, had been somehow a little off-handed at odd times; not exactly casual, but as if, while esteeming her very highly indeed, his esteem had none the less fallen just a little short of her true deserts; but that, too, was being quickly altered now. And she _would_ like to see Rome too. Quite inferior people had seen Rome, and Amory owed it to herself and to her art not to be crowed over by anybody. She told Cosimo so.

"Yes," he said dejectedly; "I thought that would be the next. You're rising, Amory. You'll remember us poor grovellers sometimes, though, won't you?" Amory's tone of reproach almost passed reproach; it was as if she had received a twinge of pain.

"I don't think I've deserved that of you, Cosimo," she could not forbear saying.

But Cosimo persisted sadly.

"I beg your pardon, dear, but it is so. You might remember a little longer than most others, because you're finer and truer than they are, but time and distance do make a difference, and it's no good saying they don't. I know."

Amory wondered whether Cosimo knew the difference time and distance made because of Pattie Wynn-Jenkins, but she only shook her head on its white hyacinth-stalk of a neck.

"I don't forget my friends, Cosimo," she said quietly.

"I'm not accusing you, Amory. But," he continued mournfully, "there are brilliant circles in Rome, and I know exactly how you'd take your place there, and it would be quite right and proper in one sense, and nobody would be gladder than I. But I should be buried in that beastly hole Shropshire all the time, boring myself to tears with cows and grass and pheasants and a lot of stupid yokels----"

Gently Amory tried to show him how ungrateful he was.

"Oh, Cosimo, how can you speak so of the country that gave the world 'The Shropshire Lad'! I should always have beautiful thoughts of you--as my Shropshire Lad--and it isn't as if there wasn't a noble work to do in the country too. There's the Housing Problem, and an iniquitous Land System, and sanitary dwellings for the agricultural labourer----"

She went on, but Cosimo refused to see it. It was as if her "Barrage" would be carried in triumph through the streets of Rome as Cimabue's "Madonna" was carried through those of Florence, while he would be tapping the barometer each morning, and then taking a walk with no other company than that of his dog, and returning to his solitary lunch, and going to sleep in the afternoon, and wishing to goodness he'd never seen his beastly estate. And so strongly did he now feel how little he had to offer Amory that he did not offer it, but sighed instead, and said that he supposed he'd be driven to marry some wench from the nearest dairy in order not to die of sheer weariness within six months. Amory mused.

"About that, Cosimo," she said slowly at last. "You know what I've always wanted for you. I've always wanted you to marry some nice girl I could make a friend of. At one time I thought Dorothy might have done, but I see now that I was wrong. But you'd be better not marrying at all than marrying somebody who wouldn't enter into your ideas. Can't you live for duty alone, Cosimo, as I can?"

"You've more to sustain you," he replied dully.

"All duties are alike precious," said Amory firmly. "Yours is a more even temperament. I grant I rise a little sometimes, but for every rise there's a despair, Cosimo, and I often think almost anybody is happier than I. Besides, you'd have the richest of my thought in my letters. You remember that fine passage in Ruskin--I think it's in the _Crown of Wild Olive_--about the spoken word often being hasty and inaccurate, but the written one being choice and considered; I forget exactly how it goes. But you'd have that, Cosimo."

"Oh, that----" Cosimo sighed.

His eyes had rested on the grey huddle on the bench twenty yards away. The huddle had moved, and a dim face had appeared. It was the face of Mrs. 'Ill's daughter, Jellies, and Amory had seen it too. It seemed to brighten her. She gave a gay little laugh.

"There you are," she said; "when you say you'd marry a dairymaid, do you mean--that?" She made a little movement of her head. "If you do, Cosimo, by all means marry one. When things come to _that_ pitch I don't see that anything matters very much. Marry a dairymaid, by all means, if _that's_ what you mean by marriage. But"--her laughter suddenly ceased--"don't forget, Cosimo, that there is another side to it. You'd perhaps get all that some men seem to require, and perhaps you are that kind of man, but I shouldn't have thought it. I should have planned something very different for you.... And think what you'd forego. No Societies for the study of those lovely Folk-Songs. No revival of Morrice Dancing. No bringing back the peasantry to those beautiful and rational old smock costumes. No bringing up of the standard of rustic morals to the level of that of the chaste animals. No education of the people up to an enlightened system of Land Tenure. No jolly Socialist Vans, no Pamphlets, nothing fine. Only the extortions of Landlordism and the old hateful Three--Rent, Interest, and Profits.... I'm not saying that to do all this is your work, Cosimo. I'm only pointing out that it's _somebody's_ work. I don't know Shropshire; perhaps Shropshire isn't ripe for it; but it's being done elsewhere. It attracts me. But of course that is no reason why it should attract you. I only mean that I should have said it was worth examining."

Cosimo sat in the falling dusk, thrilled. What a daring and constructive brain!... And still some fools said women had no capacity for affairs! What (he wondered) would they have said could they have heard Amory as she was now--not argumentative, urging nothing, pleading nothing, with nothing to gain, quite detached and disinterested, merely anxious that, as she saw her own work before her, so others should see theirs? He rather thought they would have been silenced!...

And now there was no expressing how much Cosimo wanted her. Alone and of himself he could never have thought of these things, but with Amory by his side!... He seemed to see that Shropshire estate as it might be made. The bright parts of his vision seemed to gather as it were about a Maypole; the Maypole was in the middle; Cosimo knew the very spot for it. And the place really needed a Village Hall, on a contributory basis. In wet weather they could have the Folk-Songs and the Morrice Dancing there, and in fine weather on the green. There might be Vans and Pamphlets too; they might even set up a Village Press. And with these as a beginning the rest would come in time; but he could do nothing without Amory. He must have her. He knew it would not be easy, but he fancied--he was not sure, but he fancied--that there had been suppressed emotion in the tone in which she had called him her Shropshire Lad. Again he glanced at Jellies, whose face had disappeared again. The huddle, as far as he could see in the gloom, was quite motionless. Often and often with Amory he had laughed at this slow and elementary and adhesive love-making of the lower orders; it had always seemed so funny; and of course it was funny still with people of that class; Cosimo was not running away from that. Still, Cosimo had once taken a crossing-sweeper's broom and had swept for half an hour for him, and Amory _was_ temptingly pretty as she sat by his side in the dusk....

Between his dream of a Model Village, of which he was proud, and something else for which he felt a little apologetic, Cosimo did not quite know where he was; but he knew that he wanted Amory. A soft "Ow!" came from the huddle on the other bench; it rather put Cosimo off for a moment or two; but all was silent again, and he took heart. He altered his position, and ran his arm along the back of the bench.

"Do you really think, Amory----" he began huskily.

"Eh?" said Amory. Apparently he had startled her. She had been quite lost in abstraction.

"Do you think that's the choice--for me?"

"The choice?... Oh, I see! You mean what I was saying. Well, Cosimo, what do you think yourself?"

Cosimo spoke spiritlessly.

"I don't know. Sometimes it doesn't seem worth while my thinking when you're here. I want you to tell me."

"I don't think," Amory answered slowly, "that in cases like this one person has really the right to settle things for another. As you know, I hate the word Conscience; I prefer the expression Personal Will; but that's what it seems to me to be."

"But in so many things my will's yours, Amory. You see deeper than I. You're constructive. You're one of the world's Makers of Things. I should be a very good lieutenant or something, but I'm quite without the creative gift. Won't you help me to do all those beautiful things, Amory?"

But evidently Amory didn't understand him. She replied, with quick eagerness--

"Gladly--oh, so gladly! You know you have only to ask, Cosimo, now or at any time."

Cosimo tried again.

"I--I don't mean that exactly," he stammered. "That's splendid, that part in the _Crown of Wild Olive_, I know, but--but--I mean something else, Amory--dear----"

His hand had slipped from the back of the bench; softly it lay on Amory's shoulder. He could hardly believe that it had lain there many times before, it lay so differently softly now. And yet Amory did not seem to recognize the difference in the softness, nor did she appear conscious that he had called her "dear" in a tone he had never used before. She put her finger-tips lightly on his knee. "Wait a bit," she said. "I have it on the tip of my tongue--it's not the _Crown of Wild Olive_; it's _Sesame and Lilies_--you know--that passage about gossiping with housemaids and stableboys when you might be conversing with kings and queens--I shall remember it in a moment----"

For one fleeting instant it did strike Cosimo that if he had not taken down Amory's hair for her and called her "dear" in the past he might have had more resources at his disposal now--at any rate in the sense that Amory would have apprehended him more quickly; and yet that, too, had its little furtive compensation. His hand could remain where it was....

Amory continued to try to recollect the passage from _Sesame and Lilies_.

But suddenly she too gave, not a common "Ow!" but a quite sudden start into perception. She moved a little, but the hand on her shoulder did not. With quiet firmness she put her own hand upon it, but her slight effort to draw it away met with resistance. She had seen. She made as if to rise.

"Isn't it getting late?" she said, looking away over the river.

"Amory--don't go--you know what I mean----" Cosimo pleaded throatily. "It's--it's what I said the other day--you know----"

"Let's be going, Cosimo," said Amory. "I really don't know what you mean by the other day."

"After you'd seen Dorothy--and I wanted you to marry me--do marry me, dear----"

Somehow his hold of her suddenly loosened, and Amory was on her feet. From the bench twenty yards away two faces watched them through the gloom. Amory looked sorrowfully at Cosimo. She was not angry. She did not pretend that she did not understand.

"Cosimo," she said, and her voice was low, "I don't see how you can expect things to be the same after this."

Cosimo sat helplessly, as if still to sit might be construed as an invitation for her also to resume her place.

"I--I don't want them to be the same, dear----" he begged almost abjectly.

"And you mustn't call me dear--not in this new way," Amory commanded, softly, but with decision. "I do see what you mean--now. And I admit it makes matters clearer--too clear, perhaps. In that way our friendship may have been a disadvantage. It's committed us to a certain course, and we must either keep to that course or else undo things. I think you'll admit that's a Law. I----"

"Oh, undo them!" Cosimo cried ardently, catching, as he sat, at her hands.

But Amory drew the hands away and glanced towards Alf and Jellies. Her low voice thrilled, as it were, with the first tones of a tragic scene.

"Cosimo--no, I say. Not now. Not here. Perhaps never, and not anywhere. I'm almost sure it would be better not. I'm quite sure. It's not like that time the other day. I'd seen Dorothy then, you see, and she'd said that horrid thing. Mere pride made us go on as we had been doing in the face of the whole world. It was noble of you to offer it then--noble in a way, but quite impossible; and that's all past. Now our paths seem to lie in different directions, and we must follow them; it's a L--it's our duty. In the sense you mean, the sense of doing a sacred work, I was actually more your wife during that long and beautiful friendship than I can be now that you say you love me----"

"Oh, I do love you!" Cosimo groaned, hearing these words of doom. "I do love you, Amory!"

"Then I bid you love your duty more," Amory replied, with sweet mournfulness, placing her finger-tips ever so lightly for one moment on his shoulder, as it were an accolade. "Go, my Shropshire Lad, and do it. And I will try to do mine. Let that unite us, and let nothing gross and of the earth"--from the next bench came a resounding smack of two mouths placed together--"let nothing of the earth come near. So you will be my Cosimo, and I your Amory. Isn't that the higher and the better way?"

"Oh, but, Amory, it's so hard! You know you've often said yourself that the physical relation has its proper place! How--how would the world go on without it?"

"The world, Cosimo, goes on by the progress of ideas. Ideas can be in a sense our children, yours and mine. And these are born of no contact but the contact of the mingling spirits. I will write to you quite frequently--after a time, when I have forgotten a little; I will write such letters as you'd never, never receive from anybody else! And perhaps, after a number of years, we could meet again. When it was safer. I couldn't meet you until it was safe, and I must leave you now. Don't come with me, dear friend. I am not really going away; only the mortal part of me; everything else is yours, Cosimo. Good night----"

"Amory! Amory!"

"Don't make it harder, dearest thought--you _are_ thought of my thought----"

Cosimo sat still.

"Must that be all, Amory?"

"Is it so little? Oh, you don't know! Have you forgotten what I told you about the Antinöus? You are all _that_ to me!"

"Then----" Cosimo supplicated, his arms outstretched; but Amory turned away her head.

"Ah no! You mean I kissed the Antinöus. But I daren't kiss you, my Shropshire Lad; I might fail utterly. And it would be no good your trying to kiss me; you'd hold my corporeal part for a moment, but think of all you'd lose! Would it be worth while, Cosimo?" She smiled, benign as a star, down on him. "Would it?"

How could he say Yes? How, on the other hand, could he say No? He was between the highest she had ever taught him, and that common, blissful lethargy of the huddle on the neighbouring seat. Thus two Principles run through that multicoloured pattern of the world's web. It is a Law. Cosimo saw that it was a Law. He also saw that it was a hard one.

Suddenly he did the most sensible thing he could have done. He rose.

"Well, I'll walk along with you as far as your place," he said wearily. "I suppose I may do that?"

"Yes," said Amory. She would not have had the heart to refuse him so little. They walked in silence, and stopped before the greengrocer's entry.

"Mayn't I come up?" Cosimo asked.

"No."

"Oh, Amory! You can't mean never again?"

"Never again, I think, Cosimo. I'm going up to think, and to gather my things together. I shall leave to-morrow or the day after."

An "Oh!" broke from Cosimo's lips. So might a prisoner failingly exclaim who, having known that he must die at sunrise, should be ordered forth from his cell before the stars had begun to pale.

"Good night--and good-bye," said Amory, smiling bravely as she held out her little hand.

"Oh!... Not like this! Amory, I can't bear it!"

"It must be borne. I see now that this had to come. I don't say you may not see me just once more."

Even at that Cosimo caught eagerly. "When? To-morrow?"

"No, not to-morrow; I shall be packing. Nor the day after; I shall be busy with the 'Barrage' Committee. I'll write to you, Cosimo."

"Write!"

"Do you get many letters such as I should write to you?" she asked gently. "I'll write, Cosimo; perhaps you may see me once or twice more."

"Oh," Cosimo groaned, "however shall I get through the time!"

The years they had spent together now seemed as nothing compared with these last eternal days before the new order, whatever it was to be, should begin.

III

EPITHALAMIUM

It is not impossible, though it is in the last degree unlikely, that you may have lived in England in those days of Amory Towers' rise to fame without having heard of the furore created by "Barrage," and of its triumphant tour through the country, drawing shillings wherever it went; but you certainly did not live in London that spring without having another and not dissimilar event hammered home on you morning, noon, and night--the astounding series of social functions with which Hallowells' immortalized its Inauguration. "Not dissimilar," one says, and that is the truth, if not the very obvious truth. For both successes were due to the same cause--high, victorious advertisement. It made no difference that the two glories were different glories--that Mr. Miller knew the dignity due to millinery, and the "Barrage" Committee, ably assisted by Mr. Hamilton Dix, had the secret of making art boom. And perhaps the hidden causes that slowly make history decreed that both successes should come to pass at pretty much the same time. You put pressure upon an object, but that object also puts pressure upon you. Mr. Miller recognized the need of commerce for ideals, and the leaders of the Manumission League recognized the need ideals had of business organization. The one would elevate business into a Faith, the others make their Faith into an effective and shilling-producing business. It is a Law. It was also one of the Laws that Amory did not see.

For Amory forgot the slight and constant bitterness of having sold "Barrage" outright in the renown that was now hers. Virtually, by an omission so ludicrously accidental that even Dorothy Lennard had noticed it (so, in these miserable mercenary matters, has the small mind the advantage over the great one), she was pouring streams of gold into the League's war-chest. She solaced herself with that thought--but she intended to see that matters were placed on a very different footing next time. She did not know that there could be no next time. She did not know that though her signature might now be clamoured for by the advertisers of Brain Foods and Hair Washes, Dentifrices and the makers of Portia Caps, the public does not rise to the same fly twice. There was to be no successor to "Barrage." She might paint--she did paint--all those other fiery-cross canvases, the White Slave canvas, the Tuberculosis canvas, the State Motherhood canvas, and the rest, but she remained Miss Amory Towers, the painter of the famous feminist picture, "Barrage." And presently there grew up a cult of her finer but unrecognized masterpieces. Cosimo began it later, when he set about the writing of the _Life and Work of Amory Towers_. It became a test of your knowledge and discrimination. Your lip, if you were really one of the elect, curled a little at the mention of "Barrage"; not (you were expected, if you were a superior person, to say) that "Barrage" was not all very well in its way; popular and so forth; but--did your hearer know the "Tuberculosis" canvas? _That_ was the true Towers. So it was in this pluperfect esteem that Amory by and by came to bask, with Cosimo as her showman.

Benighted Dorothy Lennard, on the other hand, fluked into _her_ wretched success by sheer luck. She had never an ideal to her name, never realized that the best possession to which she could lay claim was a certain knack, a certain low business cunning. And it was only to be expected that this should pay her, in mere despicable cash, twenty times as well as Amory's purer _awen_ had paid. Amory was not in the least envious. Poor Dorothy would need it all, and more. However rich she became, she could never become a prophet; she might become a millionaire, but she could never qualify for the martyr's crown. Amory hoped her money might make her happy. But she did not see how it could.

But to this fluke of Dorothy's:--

When, long, long before, Dorothy Lennard had told Amory Towers that she had an idea that alone had made her wealthy as she stood, she had spoken with a superb confidence. Amory had looked for something of national, nay, more, of feminist value; but later she had begun to think that Dorothy had been merely giving utterance to an idle boast; some people, seeing others achieving something, must needs boast, merely to keep up appearances. Since that day Dorothy had kept her own counsel. She had kept her project even from Mr. Miller, without whom she had known she could do nothing; she had kept it from Miss Benson, and Miss Umpleby, and for long enough, from her cousin Stanhope. But presently she had had to tell Stan. He shared her sandwiches, and must share her ignoble scheming also.

It appeared that Mr. Miller and Hallowells' were to provide the money for them to marry on. They _must_ marry, they told one another twenty times a week--simply must. It was stupid, Stan said, not marrying; what on earth was there _not_ to get married about? He didn't believe in that off-and-on sort of business, as if they didn't know their own minds.... But _ought_ second cousins to marry? Dorothy had urged (scuffling disgustingly for the biggest bite of the sandwich); wasn't it said to be a bad thing? Weren't all these Eugenist people always saying what a bad thing it was? Miss Towers said so--

"Was that Miss Towers, that red-haired little thing you were in such a paddy with that day?"

"What day?"

"The day she caught us--doing this."

"(There, I'm glad you pricked yourself!)... Yes, that was Miss Towers."

"Seemed to creep up rather quietly, didn't she?"

"Stan! Of course she didn't!"

"Oh, all right. I wondered where you picked her up, that's all.... And does she say second cousins oughtn't to marry?"

"Oh, I don't know. Perhaps she doesn't. She says so many things."

"Well, you can tell her from me that I don't know anything about 'ought,' but I want to, and I'm jolly well going to. And look here, Dot, I won't have you wearing pins--just look what you've done to my hand."

"_Did_ it tratch its hand!"...

Then, of course, the question of prospects had arisen, and Dorothy had had to tell Stanhope Tasker what was in her mind.

"All right, if you think there's anything in it," Stan had agreed when Dorothy had unfolded her plan. "I don't quite see it, though."

"Idiot!" Dorothy had chuckled, taking a butt at him with her face as if they had been two of the chaste animals at play. "You just wait and see if Mr. Miller doesn't see it, though!"

"Hope he does, that's all," Stan had grunted over the glass of ginger-beer. "Then we'll clear out of this. I've got my eye on a job as secretary to a polo club. Just suit me. And I might get a game sometimes."

Before Dorothy had allowed Mr. Miller either to "see it" or to know anything whatever about it, however, she had first taken good care of the receptivity of Mr. Miller's mind. At that time the Inauguration had occupied him day and night; ideas for cheap stunts had come to him plenty as blackberries; but no idea had occurred to him that combined the flashy and ephemeral attractions of these with that real dignity of which the Throne, the Royal Standard, and the Established Church stood as the outward and visible symbols. And Dorothy had let him fume and fret. The longer he fumed and fretted the higher her price was likely to rise. And presently, by the time Mr. Miller had fumed and fretted himself into a state of nerves lest, after all his vaunting Hallowell & Smith's Inauguration might turn out to be just like any other Inauguration, the price was likely to be very high indeed.

Moreover, Dorothy had seen Mr. Miller's somewhat unscrupulous ways with the originators of other ideas. Mr. Miller was painfully subject to a weakness which might have been constitutional to himself or merely part of the general keenness of his job. This weakness was that he had sometimes been known to help himself to an idea, and to deny its real author as much as an acknowledgment. It was in vain that those authors screened themselves with elaborate and formal contracts drawn up in black and white. The law, by the one master-phrase that there is no copyright in idea, indemnified Mr. Miller. Dorothy knew that if she also did not want to be robbed, she must make herself more secure than any black and white could make her. Now there is only one way of doing this. It is by means of the free and flexible understanding of which agreements and contracts are but the rather clumsy letter. She had seen that, touch by touch, she must so prepare Mr. Miller's attitude that _any_ suggestion of hers would be more likely to appear valuable than not. That had meant such present sacrifices as the leaving of really quite passable "stunts" to others. Dorothy could not afford to suggest ordinary things. An imaginary red carpet, so to speak, was to be laid down before she approached Mr. Miller with a suggestion. And Mr. Miller would think the more highly of it in proportion as he paid highly for it.

So she had carefully "nursed" Mr. Miller, had used her charms when the use of charms would serve a turn and had been businesslike and off when the charm of her sex would have been out of place, had dined and supped with Mr. Miller, had left Mr. Miller alone for a week, had one day dropped a hint that Doubledays' manager was a friend of her people (expressing quite a liking for Doubledays' manager personally), and so on and so forth, until Mr. Miller thought her not only one of the brightest young women that had ever happened, but one with whom it was a pleasure to be seen in the well-dressed assemblies his British heart loved. And, of course, here Dorothy's connexions helped too. Lady Tasker crossed over at the Ritz one evening and sat talking with Dorothy for a full ten minutes, with Mr. Miller standing all the time and bowing whenever he got a chance; and his bow when Lady Tasker left was the bow of Sir Walter with the cloak. Thereafter he kept glancing across in the direction of Lady Tasker's party as if he wondered whether it would be permissible to take wine with Lady Tasker across the width of the room; and he spoke to Dorothy as follows:--

"Now that's the reel thing; I say this is an Experience, Miss Lennard. The way you introdooced me: 'Mr. Miller--,' no more than thaaat, but with a manner, so to say: 'Mr. Miller--,' and then went on conversing about intimate things just as if you'd been at home or in her ladyship's private suite of rooms at this ho-tel ... that's the Note! Now if we could secure Lady Tasker for our Inauguration--not to be on voo, but just to be there--that would be worth dallars, guineas, I mean, both to us and to her ladyship.... And is she Mr. Stan's aunt, if I may use the word, too? Well, now! I have to thank you for a real experience, Miss Lennard. 'Mr. Miller'--just like that--I might have been anybody way up! Some of our Misters make some of our Sirs look poor, if I may use the expression--cheap skates--'bum's' the word they use in America--nooveau. I'm vurry glad to have had the pleasure of Lady Tasker's acquaintance. Now indicate to me who the rest of the party are----"

And when, a week later, Mr. Miller, bowing to Lady Tasker at the theatre, received a bow in return, he certainly felt, if he was not actually, many "dallars" better off. Perhaps actually he was, too. Perhaps his Idea had received confirmation and support, so that he was enabled to go forward with fresh energy and enthusiasm. We must get our inspiration from somewhere, and these things are very difficult to explain.

It may be supposed that this and a few similar things did Dorothy no harm at all; and of course she lied grossly, at any rate by implication, when she introduced the name of Doubledays'. Not that Doubledays', too, were not straining every nerve. They and everybody else knew of the coming Inauguration that was already as completely planned as--say, "Hamlet" without the Prince. Perhaps Dorothy did actually say something to them; perhaps she gave Mr. Miller an account that she thought quite good enough for Mr. Miller; not all of us can take our truth nascent and unsullied from the Fountainhead of all Truth. Mr. Miller at any rate thought she might possibly be dickering with Doubledays', and that was the practical matter. An introduction to Lady Tasker at the Ritz was no good to him if Doubledays' also was going to be introduced to Lady Tasker at the Ritz, and these and other things were Dorothy's to give or to withhold.... You see how it was. You see how time-serving and unprincipled and altogether immoral it was. Amory would not have touched it with the end of a long pole. Had Stan written the "Life and Work of Miss Dorothy Lennard" he would probably have written the most deplorable record of our whole deplorable age.

Apart from these things, however, there was the intrinsic beauty of the idea itself. That went straight to the heart of every woman, and of nearly every man also. And it touched every single being of the future, too. To Mr. Wellcome it peculiarly belonged, and Jellies and the Eugenist might have shaken hands upon it. Actuarially its basis was as sound as it could be. Dorothy went carefully into this. The cost for the whole week would be nothing to Hallowells', and its return would be incalculable. Without it, those shining palatial premises would be as a setting that begged, prayed, implored for its jewel. If Mr. Miller didn't take it, Doubledays'--might. You don't bargain for these things; you show them, and name your price. If you are robbed, it is your own fault before the fact; only the people are robbed who deserve to be robbed. Dorothy didn't guarantee a gem of such water every spring; nevertheless she intended to ask for fifteen hundred pounds a year for a number of years on the strength of it--this time (for contracts have their dull uses) to be clinched by a formal contract. She was not a fashion artist now; she had barely passed her Sealskin; she was a Publicity Adviser, and what she did not know about wheedling and scheming and other gross misuses of her sex was not worth knowing. And she did not care one rap for Emancipation and the Cause. She thought the Cause a very useful thing, merely because it collected all the cranks together, so that you might know where to find them if you happened to want them and how to avoid them when you did not; and, applying her publicity training to the extraordinary success "Barrage" was by this time having, she had no difficulty whatever in seeing to what that success was really due. Given the occasion and the organization, anybody else's picture would have done quite as well as Amory's. Amory was merely lucky to have hit on the idea at the right moment, and foolish if she thought the idea and the moment were likely ever to jump so happily together again. And if Amory didn't know this, the odds were that Mr. Dix did.

This idea of Dorothy's, then (not to beat any longer about the bush), was that of the famous Wedding Week that has now passed into history. "Shopping Weeks" had been tried before, but they had struck Dorothy as "some of our Sirs" had struck Mr. Miller by comparison with the unadorned simplicity of some Misters--as "poor," "nooveau," and (to use the American expression) "bum." And yet they had paid. If those, then, had paid, such an idea as Dorothy's was likely to pay at least as well. It seemed to her that all that these highly-paid Captains of Commerce lacked was inventiveness. They could be trusted with the details, but they had no largeness of conception. They niggled where they should have drawn with a free hand: Dorothy knew that she had ideas enough to keep a dozen of them going.

Hallowell & Smith's, then, were going to provide, for a week, and up to the capacity of their largest hall, free weddings. Subject to certain conditions, that varied from the purchase of a veil to the opening of a monthly account--and even these were imposed only to stem the rush that was confidently anticipated--Hallowells' would supply carriages, the breakfast, flowers, cake, music, wine, silver-paper boxes, awnings, liveries, crimson carpets, souvenirs and what not, entirely without charge, deduction, obligation, or any catch about it whatever. Between the pronouncing of the Benediction at the Church and your stepping on to the footboard of the train that was to take you away, you simply put yourself into Hallowells' hands. Indeed, it was not Hallowells' fault that they were not able to do even more for you. Certainly it was not Mr. Miller's fault. For Mr. Miller simply could not see why, if in Scotland a wedding might be celebrated in an ordinary drawing-room, in England it might not take place in an up-to-date Store. He took advice, both legal and ecclesiastical; he approached both the Church and the Registry Office; and the only result was that he found something more inaccessible even than he had found the Royal Standard to be. Hallowells', dedicated though it was (subject to the Shops' Hours Acts) to that practical form of Faith which the Apostle James offered to show by his works, still remained, in the hidebound sense that is the only one accepted of dogma, an unconsecrated building. Mr. Miller felt this as an injustice. It seemed to him that the Church could not after all be very sure of its own position. If, as it preached, it was the duty of the strong to help the weak, surely it was equally the duty of an Establishment that had dignity enough and to spare to bestow a little of that dignity where there was need of it. Not to do so was a stultification of reel enterprise, and a refusal to give live and go-ahead brains (his brains and Dorothy's) their proper reward. He would have met the Church more than half-way; would have dressed his marshal-celebrant in any way they had wished; cloth-of-gold if they liked; no expense should have been spared: but the authorities of the Chapel Royal and St. George's, Hanover Square, stuck to their cobwebby old monopoly, and in a business sense Mr. Miller was forced to the conclusion that the Church was "bum."

But while the Sacrament itself lay beyond his power, its appurtenances provided an opportunity more glorious than Publicity had dreamed of yet. Never was a Publicity-secret more jealously guarded. Day and night a picket kept the door of the room in the Clerkenwell factory where the gigantic papier-maché Old Shoe was being made; and the white-and-silver hymeneal torches, both the large ones for the trophies and the small ones for table-decoration and the holding of flowers, were allotted to separate firms. All "roughs" given out to printers were red-labelled, like poison-bottles, "Destroy at Once"; and the deliveries of Menus, Souvenirs, Wedding-cake Boxes and so on were sealed with private seals. The theatrical costumiers who supplied the wings and wreaths for the Cupids were given for secrecy's sake, an address in Scotland from which the consignments were brought back by private van by road; and for long enough the Executive of the Wedding Week was divided about the building of an organ in the place. Mr. Miller rather wanted an organ: it would be, he thought, rather a scorching come-back on the Church; but his stunt-advisers persuaded him otherwise, and a string-band carried the day. And before it was absolutely too late for Doubledays' or any other firm to have queered the whole thing and to have got ahead of Hallowell's, Dorothy got her contract. The office of Consultant to Hallowell's for five years was signed, sealed and delivered unto her. Thereafter she might stick to the job or allow it to lapse, as she pleased; in the meantime, not counting contingent benefits that were sure to come, it would start her and Stan very comfortably together.

And so, with London at its fairest and fullest, and the flower-barrows in the Circuses ablaze with tulips and narcissi and gladioli and escholtzsias, and Bond Street blocked with cars and taxis, and the Park on Sunday mornings for all the world as if rivers of confetti and black patches flowed slowly back and forth, all was made in readiness at Hallowell's. And so well had the secret been kept that it was only when Miss Umpleby happened one day to go into the room where the Bell was being unpacked that anybody in the place (outside the Executive) had the faintest notion of what was going on. But the Bell gave it away to Miss Umpleby. Mr. Miller had got the idea of the Bell from that foreign land, America. It was twelve feet high and composed entirely of artificial flowers; and while it had originally been intended that each bridal pair should hew its way out of it with a silver axe, bringing the souvenirs for its particular party out with it, that idea had been abandoned as impracticable, and the Bell opened with two flaps like a roc's egg at a pantomime instead. Miss Umpleby was an intelligent young woman; she had read of the device before in the newspapers; and she flew to Dorothy.

"What are they up to in there, Lennie?" she demanded. "Mr. Miller isn't going to be married, is he?"

Nobody would have known from Dorothy's face that she guessed that the secret had leaked out.

"Mr. Miller get married? Mr. Miller is married. What are you talking about?" she asked.

"That thing in the room at the end of the corridor there. I peeped in."

"Then you'd no business to peep," Dorothy replied; and she denied all knowledge of what was toward.

But presently she was sorry she had done so. Miss Umpleby, being under no obligation of secrecy, told the girls of the fashion studio what she had seen. Dorothy entered the studio as they were discussing it that same afternoon, and the hail of questions that greeted her almost blew her out of the room again.

"Here's Lennie--she knows!"

"Is it going to be like that New York one that was in the papers, Lennie?"

"And who is it?"

"It isn't you, Lennie, is it?"

They paused for breath, and then went on.

"And there's stacks and stacks of mock-orange in boxes----"

"And lots of lace-paper----"

"And they're doing the Central Hall downstairs all in white and silver."

"_Do_ tell us!" they implored.

But it was only some days later, when there was no longer any danger of betrayal, that Dorothy told Miss Umpleby, as a great secret. Miss Umpleby clutched at Dorothy's arm.

"Really?" she cried excitedly. "Do you mean there'll be champagne, and flowers, and a cake, all for nothing?"

"Well, you give Hallowells' an order, and they'll do as many as there's room for."

"_Oh!_... How much is the order?"

"What, do you mean that you'd----?"

"Me and Arthur? Rather! I don't suppose we shall be married this side of the next eclipse if we don't do something of the sort! I'm not proud, as long as they don't mix the husbands up; I've had to watch Arthur, I can tell you, ever since he got his new Sans Souci hat!... But really, Lennie, do you think you could get us a ticket or whatever it is?"

"If you _really_ mean it----"

"Of _course_ I mean it. Oh, I say, you are a brick! What a lark!"

And so Miss Umpleby, who otherwise would have had to wait for another year, put her name down for that public wedding-breakfast.

And so a word was dropped here and a word was dropped there, and the business spies stole back and forth piecing gathered rumours together, and, some days before the announcements appeared in the papers, Doubledays' and the rest of them knew that they were done. No counter-device they could have prepared in the time would have compared for one single instant with that clean-cut and beauty-bright idea of Dorothy's. So some of them touched hidden springs that caused letters on over-advertised business to appear in the papers, but most of them took their defeat magnanimously, merely sending out fresh spies to try to discover "whose notion Miller had stolen that time" and to try to secure the services of that ingenious brain for themselves. Oh, Dorothy would have had no difficulty whatever in selling herself two or three times over! In fact she did so, at varying figures, though of course not to Hallowell's trade competitors. It is quite simple. When you are more anxious to sell your brains than somebody else is to buy them, then your price is a low one; but when people come running to you with their money in their hands, that is the time to stick it on....

Dorothy stuck it on. If Stan got his game of polo once in a while he must have just as good ponies as anybody else's...

And so, you know, in the beginning of the June of that year the famous Wedding Week opened. You do not need to dig deep into your newspaper files in order to read all about it and to remember how, for brilliance and festivity and renown, for crowds and mirth and family gatherings and thundering good business, it by far outdistanced any mere Shopping Week that had ever been held in this island realm. It caught on instantaneously. London talked of nothing else. From eleven o'clock to four daily, Oxford Street was blocked. Folk stood up to watch from the standing buses; streams of traffic were diverted into the side streets; it took you half an hour to walk on foot from Oxford Circus to Tottenham Court Road, and high across the street, all pale blue and silver and white, Hallowell's swinging banner, "OUR WEDDING WEEK," flapped and fluttered in the spring wind. And the evening papers reserved special columns for the daily doings. Press-photographers snapped; descriptive reporting soared; ponderously playful editorials gave the Wedding Week their imprimatur; comedians made it the theme of their choicest "gags." The _Daily Speculum_ rose to a million a day on the strength of its photographs of bridal-parties alone. There were rumours of a Manchester Wedding Week. One couple journeyed all the way from Stornoway to be married by Special Licence and to breakfast at Hallowells'; another couple came from the Potteries. In both these cases Hallowells' handsomely paid for the railway-tickets also. Newly-made husbands and wives were interviewed as they signed the large Bridal Book; they bore testimony that the champagne was excellent, the wedding-cakes not made of plaster of Paris, and that there were absolutely no gratuities whatever. Hallowells' defiantly invited investigation on these points. They issued a public challenge to anybody who could prove that they were not doing all they had undertaken to do. Especially they drove it home that any genuine bride or bridegroom or member of their party might drink just as much champagne as ever he or she wished. Doubts, they said, had been cast upon their _bona fides_, and they considered that they owed it to themselves to set themselves right with the public. And surely you could not blame them.

And inside the great domed Central Hall was the sight of a lifetime. The large twenty-four-hours' clock was embowered with cherubs' heads so that it almost resembled the picture by Reynolds, and quivers and darts and nuptial torches, big and little, were arranged in trophies everywhere. A real sculptor had been commissioned to model the figure of Hymen that stood in the middle of the hall, and at or in among the fifty tables the wedding-parties sat or moved. Ordinarily the parties were limited to a dozen; special notice had to be given of larger parties; _but_ the mirth those dozens made!... Party succeeded party while the chairs were yet warm; as one party ate its fruit those who waited for the vacated chairs stood so close behind them that they also might almost have bitten of the same banana or apple or pear. The room that is now the world-famed Juperies was the reception-room; there those who did not breakfast joined their friends who did; and the Umbrella Department was turned into a smoking-room for the men. And in they came, party after party, to Hallowells' to breakfast. Cheers went up from those whom Hallowells' carriages passed in the streets. An amber-yellow, the same yellow in which their parcels are now done up, was Hallowells' chosen colour; flowers of that colour filled the carriage lamps, rosettes of that colour were tied to the drivers' whips. The souvenirs and favours were tied with ribbons of that colour, and confetti of that colour (unless not desired) was thrown at the parties that descended from Hallowells' vestibule to Oxford Street; this confetti thinned gradually out on the pavements for a quarter of a mile either way, east and west. And every bride and bridegroom who breakfasted was made to enter the great Floral Bell, and to take, from the shelves that lined the structure, the parcel of souvenirs for the party. Two Cupids kept the flap-doors of the Bell. They shot harmless darts at Hallowells' guests. Sometimes these darts had _serpentins_ of coloured paper (amber yellow) attached to them; sometimes they had whistles. These last, as they flew through the air, made a noise like swallows.

And the parties themselves!... Arthur and Miss Umpleby were among the first to breakfast and then, to the strains of the Wedding March from the string band, to take their souvenirs from the Bell; but on the following day Mr. Nolan, of the Satteens, took Miss Feather, of the Fancies Counters, to have and to hold, and the whole of those two Departments took tea in relays in the room where Sir Walter spread the Cloak, and Mr. Miller himself presided at the tea, and gave Mr. Nolan an advance of salary, and the reporters, too, joined in the applause that greeted the announcement. Mr. Miller would have given his ears to have dared to suggest to Dorothy that she and Mr. Stanhope, Lady Tasker's nephew and niece, should eat their cake and enter the Bell along with the others; but though he guessed an understanding to exist, he knew no more than that, and in the end funked it. Moreover, to his chagrin, he was losing Mr. Stanhope. His swellest Marshal of all had handed in his paper. In vain had Mr. Miller offered to confer on him the title of Field-Marshal; Stan had told him that he really didn't feel up to the job, and had refused to reconsider his decision. But that drop of mortification was as nothing in the buckets and buckets of good business the Wedding Week was doing. If Stan was leaving, there was still Sir Walter, and a daily drilling of Marshals for an hour before that inspiring picture might be expected to work wonders. They had really performed very creditably at the Nolan-Feather wedding-tea, and a touch here and there of the easy negligence Dorothy had used when she had introduced him to Lady Tasker in the simple words, "Mr. Miller," should presently give their deportment its consummation and crown.

Thus, from a hundred churches, east and west and south and north, the newly joined couples came to Hallowells' to make merry with their friends. They came from Fulham and Wimbledon, from Kilburn and Epping, from Finchley and Streatham and Woolwich and Denmark Hill; and the hinges of the Bell wore loose with much work, and parcels' delivery vans took the cakes away in great loads each evening, and the strains of the Wedding Marches never ceased, and enough champagne was opened to have converted the great silver-and-white Central Hall into a swimming-bath. And besides the wedding parties, sightseers came also. One of these came daily, occupying a chair under the garlanded and cherubimed twenty-four-hours' clock. His eyes were agog; sometimes, as one in a dream, he half rose from his chair, grasped the hand of some passing bride or bridegroom, murmured something unintelligible, and sat down again, once more watching in a sort of stupid ecstasy. He was Mr. Wellcome.... And Walter Wyron came with Laura Beamish, and they clutched one another, and, both speaking at once, said that Amory and Cosimo must on _no_ account miss this, and Walter sent Cosimo a postcard that very night. Amory and Cosimo came on the morrow, but missed Walter and Laura in the crush, and retired to a sort of recess on the second floor, past which the lift-well ascended. There, sitting down on a narrow padded bench without a back, they talked. Cosimo had all but won Amory. Only a few points remained on which it was necessary that their understanding should be quite clear.

"You see, Cosimo," Amory explained earnestly, while the noisy parties went up and down in the lift, "in one sense two rational beings have hardly the right to marry at all as long as the Divorce Laws are in their present chaotic condition. Even a Judicial Separation places a quite unjust stigma on the woman, and the Restitution Decree has become a mere formal step to Divorce itself. There's absolutely no Equality in the contract. As Equity it's a farce from beginning to end. I'm not sure that the wisest thing to do wouldn't be to wait until the Law is altered. I want that one-sided plea of cruelty done away with, or else made the same for both. It's anomalous--it belongs to the Stone Age."

"I quite agree," said Cosimo slowly. "But we have our private arrangement about that. It's quite understood that if it isn't a success we each go our own way. You're to be as free as I am, Amory. I've no right to choose your friends for you, male or female. If things come to the worst, I fancy I'm not altogether without a sense of fairness and rationalness and philosophy. So our eyes are quite open."

Amory mused. "It's a risk for all that," she murmured. "There may be all sorts of things about both of us that neither of us knows. In a sense, we're complete strangers."

"Then," Cosimo urged, "let us be brave and take it. There's very little doubt that they'll reform those ridiculous laws before long. They're bound to. With the spread of Democracy cheaper Divorce is inevitable; and when it becomes quite common much of the stigma you speak of will disappear. Look here: I've an idea!... Why shouldn't we start a sort of private Insurance against not getting on together--put away a sum each year for the contingency, so that the expenses of Divorce would be met out of a fund? We could arrange some means of drawing on it, too, in case we decided to live apart. Don't you think that's a good idea?"

"Ye-es," said Amory slowly. "Ye-es. It's certainly a Law, I should say, that the only real way of keeping people together is to leave them perfectly free to separate whenever they like. The day of force, whether physical or legal, is over. That's what makes all that downstairs so exquisitely funny. They think that the way to bind yourself is to tie yourself fast! So of course it's our duty to dissociate ourselves as far as ever we can from all that.... Isn't it nearly time 'Orris and Jellies were here?"...

"Oh, they aren't due for half an hour yet. Now about Incompatibility, Amory----"

And their love-making went on.

The remark about 'Orris and Jellies had to do with their dissociation from the semi-communal feasting that was going on in the Central Hall. It had been Amory's idea that this dissociation would be more complete if 'Orris and Jellies also feasted with the rest of the world, and the joke had been cheap at the cost of the qualifying purchase at Hallowells' of Jellies' wedding-veil. So 'Orris, Jellies, Mrs. 'Ill, a woman who lent a hand at the Creek sometimes, together with one or two friends, had been told off to a table midway between Hymen and the Bell. Amory and Cosimo intended to watch from the gallery. They still regarded the world and its happenings much as they might have regarded a stereoscope, to be taken up for a few minutes when they found themselves in the humour for it, and put down again when it no longer amused them; and if Dorothy did not like the presence of this particular party at Hallowells', that could only be because Dorothy was a snob.

So Amory and Cosimo, presently descending by the lift again, watched Jellies' nuptial party from the balcony, and went on to discuss their own affairs again. They would be married--unless even yet they amicably agreed that it would be best that they should not marry--at a Registry Office; and if they did happen to feel hungry afterwards (certainly _not_ unless) they would go to the Lettuce Grill. The noise that came up from the vast oval below was no doubt a mere reaction from the false religiosity in the church an hour or so before, and champagne certainly heated the blood. Amory drank nothing at meals, Cosimo only barley-water. Jellies' husband, as they could see from where they leaned over the rail, was already a little drunk on champagne; there was no doubt whatever that he would presently be quite drunk on beer. And these were the people to whom England looked for a eugenically begotten race! Black eyes were in front of Jellies, and intervals of returning to her mother when 'Orris happened to be "in," and a shamefully large family, and work at the Jelly Factory as before, and very little prospect indeed of ever having either the money or the initiative to obtain a Divorce. It made Amory sad....

And as she stood, with Cosimo by her side, looking down on the laughing, moving crowd below, she thought of a picture that should move the best women and men of her land as even "Barrage" had not moved them. It was this:--

She would take a large canvas, and would rough out upon it that very oval down on which she now looked. And she would fill it with figures, even as it was filled with figures now. But they should not be giggling, guffawing, gesticulating figures such as these, uttering the inanities about lifelong happiness that they themselves knew to be untrue, and filling and refilling their glasses with the blood-heating champagne. No. They should be the enlightened men and women of To-morrow; rational, responsible, of a nobler-moulded flesh and a more ardent spirit; they should average about nine heads high. And their eyes should be centred, not on their own selfish and private parties, but on the figure in the centre of the room that she would put where that absurd Hymen now stood. This figure should be symbolic, colossal, twenty-five heads high. It should represent the Earthly Authority of the marriage-contract. Its feet should be set upon broken figures, each one of which should typify some marriage-form of the past--hedge-priests, broomstick-weddings, handfastings, morganatic unions, savage rites (from _Primitive Culture_), ecclesiastical rites, even the Registry Office; and the fragments of such pagan emblems as hearts and torches and Cupids and bells should appear all about it. And in her right hand the figure should bear, as it were, a crystal with a flame in it, which should be Marriage, and in her left another crystal with a flame in it, no less perfect, no less honourable, which should be Divorce. And these she should offer to the Children of the Morrow together, both at the same time. Either should be the warranty of the other, as the olive-branch justifies the sword, the sword maintains the olive-branch. So should that figure be set up. And benignly brooding over all, exactly where she and Cosimo now stood, should be two larger and vaguer shapes, rather difficult to do, but probably to be achieved by scraping and scumbling and pumice. These should symbolize the Divine Sanction. Soft and reassuring rays should shoot from their angelic eyes and rest upon the Earthly figure below; this should turn up its glad gaze to receive the rays. In one sense, it was true, Amory did not approve of this paraphernalia of angel-shapes, but merely as emblems they might prove serviceable. They were prejudices that must be accepted _pro tem_. Though she dreamed of To-morrow, she must paint her picture in terms of To-day.

Rapidly and earnestly she began to describe the picture to Cosimo....

"Oh! By Jove, Amory----" he breathed, wellnigh breathless before the daring of her genius.

"And those two wonderful shapes, just here, exactly where we are."...

"Looking down and comprehending everything----"

"Oh--like you, Amory!"

"Like you, too, Cosimo--for, if you don't actually paint the picture, you help in other ways----"

"Shall I, Amory," he breathed--"shall I always be there to help in those other ways?"

Her eyelids fluttered and dropped.

"You _do_ understand me as nobody else does."...

"I do--I do--I'm sure I do----"

"And you understand, too, that there's always that other kiss--the kiss of the Antinöus----"

"It shall be _our_ picture, Amory--all three of us," he said, with ardour.

"I hope we're not acting in haste, Cosimo."

"I'm quite sure we're not. Oh, let it be soon, Amory!"

He had put his hand on her arm, but she drew a little away.

"Don't touch me just yet, Cosimo, please," she asked him.

"No--I beg your pardon," he said humbly. "I know that in a sense you aren't here--you're creating. By Jove, it _is_ wonderful!"

He would have felt unworthy of her had he wanted to kiss her just then.

And, down below them, Jellies and her party rose, and a Marshal made a signal, and the conductor gave a couple of taps with his baton, and the bored musicians reached for their instruments, and their eyes rested sullenly on the tip of the poised stick....

"Hooray--let 'er go!" 'Orris roared huskily....

And once more the Wedding March broke forth.

END OF BOOK ONE

ENTR' ACTE

Two men turned out of the gateway of the McGrath and walked up the street that led to the Euston Road. Just before they reached the corner one of them stopped and gave a lingering, but sardonic, look behind him. He was Jowett, the Professor of Painting, and his companion was the friend who had once talked with him at a students' dance, while the Discobolus and the Gladiator had held the shawls and fans of the dancers. Then they went forward together again.

"So you're shaking the dust off your feet?" Jowett's friend said. "How many years has it been?"

"Twenty-odd. Twenty-two or three. Twenty-three years next March, to be precise. Nice way for a man to spend twenty-three years of his life, isn't it?"

"A very nice way, I should say. Beautiful things about you all the time--lots of pleasant young people and so on. One gets older, of course, but you have the fun of starting 'em in the world and seeing how far they go."

With an "Eh?" Jowett looked sideways at his companion; then he looked before him again.

"The world? That place hasn't got anything to do with the world," he said.

"No? Well, one of your old students seemed to be making quite a stir in it not so long ago--that girl who painted 'Barrage'--what's her name--Miss Towers, wasn't it?"

"Yes. Amory Towers. A small red-haired girl. I fancy I pointed her out to you once. She was married a year or so ago; married another of our students. Pratt, his name was."

"Then she's in the world now, at any rate."

"Think so? I very much doubt it. Of course she is, in one sense; I can't deny that; but this is what I mean: There's too much paper in their lives. They read too much. Draw too much. Especially reading. Lord, the books they get hold of! Weeks and months together I've heard 'em: Myers says this, and Galton says that, and Tolstoi says the other; and they make up a sort of world out of all that, and think it's the real one, or is soon going to be, and they live in it, and go on living in it, and never get out of it. I hope I've heard the last of Myers and Galton and Tolstoi."

"But--my good chap!"

Jowett glared. "Well?"

"Well!"

"You mean these _are_ the great men? Well, I'm not a great man myself, so what does it matter to me? And what does it matter to those infants? Oh, it's all in the old Greek tag: 'A great book is a great evil.'... You're laughing; look here: I'll tell you the kind of thing that used to happen half a dozen times a day. I used to set these boys and girls to draw a simple object--simple, but more than they could do, for all that, or ever would be able to do; it all depends on how much you see in a simple object. And I'd even show 'em how to do it--for there are one or two simple things I really know and can do myself. Well, presently I'd look up, and there would be sweet seventeen, giving me a pitying sort of smile. I'd ask her what she was smiling at, and then she'd coo, 'Oh, but Degas didn't draw like that!'--or Beardsley, or the newest man from Montmartre (but the chances were it was somebody rather corrupt). 'But you don't happen to be his pupil just at this moment,' I'd say.... Anyhow, the point is, that an adorable young female person, or a decent young fellow for that matter, with no more use for an idea than I have for Moses' Rod, would throw one of these names at my head as soon as look at me. And the bigger the duffer the bigger the name: get that well into your head: that was unvarying. They used to think it was a joke when I asked them, whether they could make an omelette--of course, I really meant make a baby's shirt and contrive to get a baby inside it, but I couldn't exactly say that, so I used to say 'omelette' very slowly and distinctly, and look hard at 'em.... A baby? If I had said it, another piece of paper would have come in. They wouldn't have been able to get a baby until they'd seen what Strindberg or Nietzsche or somebody had to say about it first! And even if they did manage it, then there'd be more paper--systematics--newest methods of this and that and the other--lectures on proteids before they dared to feed it--paper, paper, paper--I know--I've had twenty-three years of it----"

His friend twinkled. "Has the little red-haired girl any family yet?" he asked.

"I don't know; but"--something like a twinkle flickered for a moment under Jowett's shaggy brows also--"perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps Pratt knows at least one little bit about Life by this time. One of the girls there used to sing some song or other, I remember--something about--

"'Tying a piece of ribbon round his bonnie, bonnie waist, To let the ladies know he was married.'

and I shouldn't be surprised--I don't know, of course, but at a guess----"

"Oh?... You mean she'll be likely to be jealous?"

"Well, I fancy she'll have him safe under her pretty little thumb. I suppose there's nothing new about the whole thing really--same old twig, same old lime, same old bird. But a vast deal more paper--I still stick to that."

Jowett's friend twinkled again. "I know what's the matter with you and me," he chuckled. "We're both on the wrong side of five-and-forty. That's all that's the matter with us."

Jowett had been muttering within his shaggy moustache some extempore Litany or other; his friend caught the words, "From all young women who talk paper with their hair down--From all young men who think the New Woman isn't just the same as the Old one--And from all day-nurseries for the children of the well-to-do middle classes----" He stopped short.

"Think so?" he said. "You think that's it? Perhaps you're right.... Well, it's not my habit, but suppose--if it was only for the sake of the name----"

He indicated an establishment with large hanging lamps----

And they entered the Adam and Eve.