She was even nobler in her confession of weakness than she had been in the strength and rush of her outburst. Again, for no reason that he could have explained, Cosimo felt a brute.... He paw this bright little creature, as the odious Dix had done? He sully a thing so radiant as their relation with—pawing?
Suddenly Cosimo found himself disliking Mr. Hamilton Dix more intensely than he had ever done before.
Amory, for her part—though she did not know whose—rather fancied that she had put a spoke into somebody’s wheel.
Thetruth was, Amory presently began to tell herself, that Cosimo’s life was in danger of becoming rather an aimless sort of thing. Few people knew the perils of aimlessness so well as did Amory Towers. She knew them because for a time she had suffered them in her own thought and work. But that was all past now. She had begun to work again. The foundations of a real picture were being laid at last. This was the famous canvas, “Barrage,” that afterwards made her name. None knew better than Amory herself its shortcomings as mere painting, but she had learned in bitterness that issues greater than those of painting were at stake to-day. To-day or never was the time to do all the things that had never been done. Accordingly, her picture was partly a painting and partly a sociological symbol. It was, as far as it was at present designed, a medley in which, before a series of guarded cave-mouths and dropped portcullises and defended doors, women of the various stages of civilization were grouped with men. Now they were in the attitude of menials at their feet, or hewing their wood, or drawing their water; anon, set on high pedestals, before which men made mock reverences, they stood wreathed with roses from beneath which iron fetters peeped grimly forth; and later,in apotheosis, Womanhood herself walked by man’s side, equal, sworded, flashing and free. If something of a likeness to Amory herself was to be traced in all these figures, every artist who works in a single room knows how frequently, for lack of pence, he must use himself as a model. It was this picture, of which more later, that enabled Amory to see so clearly the peril that beset Cosimo.
Of course Amory recognized that Cosimo was not absolutely aimless as long as he had Amory’s own art to admire; but that was a narrow and selfish way of looking at it. Amory didn’t want Cosimo to admire her art for any personal glory she might get of it. She wanted him, not for herself, but for a Cause. In her picture he posed as the champion who had stricken the bonds from the belted and sworded and flashing and free young woman (who was quite frankly Amory herself), because that was therôleshe wished to see him in; but she knew how easy it would be (Cosimo was so good natured) for any designing and retrogressive young woman to get hold of him and to enlist his support for the forces of conservatism and the night. That (Amory’s pretty lips compressed and her eyes shone with a cold and opal-like fire)mustnot be. In order that it might not be, Amory had made use of Dorothy’s name; not that she really wanted him to marry Dorothy, but that even to marry Dorothy would be better than to marry somebody more benighted still. It was a mereruse de guerre, justified by the larger issue. These things have to be done when the fiends of ignorance and the angels of knowledge contend.Amory called these fiends and angels the Anabolic and the Katabolic forces in human progress. It didn’t matter what you called them. Two principles always had contended and always would contend. It was a Law.
Therefore Amory wanted Cosimo on the side of the angels and victory. Ever so much more she wanted him on that side now that he was a man of some substance. For money is the sinews of Anabolic and Katabolic warfare also. Cosimo with his money and Amory with her new art—what might they not accomplish, working together? A whole Promised Land of endeavour lay shining before them. For Amory herself (for example) there were all the possibilities of symbolic painting—a style of painting which (actual draughtsmanship being admittedly her weak point) would suit her genius the more exactly for that very reason. Nobody can dismiss a symbol because it is badly drawn; any old drawing will do for a symbol. For the holy purposes of social regeneration the novelists thought any old writing good enough; and so it was. So it should be for Amory too. She had half a mind to let drawing go altogether. Then, with drawing out of the way, she saw her task. “Barrage” would be followed by a picture (perhaps a newer word than “picture” would be necessary to describe it) that would symbolize Labour Unrest; she was thinking it out in her spare moments already. Then there should be another, a slap in the face for Militarism. After that should come canvases dealing with Education, and Disestablishment, and the Triumph of SentimentalGovernment and the establishment of the New Matriarchy. Oh yes, Amory saw her task though twenty lifetimes lay before her....
And Cosimo? She could guide Cosimo too. No doubt at his own doors in Shropshire there lay wrongs to be righted—sites for village halls waiting to be built upon, libraries and communal kitchens and wash-houses to be founded, greens for morrice-games (Amory vetoed archery, as coming dangerously near to Militarism and the miniature rifle-range), societies for the study of folk-song, ethical societies, lectures on economics, bands for the exchange of foreign picture postcards (that the spirit of brotherhood among the enlightened of all nations might be fostered), and so on.... Oh, with Amory to direct him, there would be plenty for Cosimo, too, to do. And he had the money with which to do it.
And if Amory shrank from the cost to herself—the cost, namely, of conforming to the outworn institution of marriage—it was but for a moment. What was she, to attempt to stem the River of the Race? She must bear the burden cheerfully. And after all, with a little thought she ought to be able to ensure it that Cosimo as her husband should not be very different from Cosimo as he was now. By keeping his eyes constantly uplifted to the shining peaks of their joint duty, mere personal thoughts of self could be kept in their place. He would hardly want a wife when he possessed the heroine of a Feminist Crusade, she hardly a husband when she had an ally placed by his sex in thefortress that, whether by beleaguering or by assault, must be won. Yes, she would strive to bear even this. The glory of a campaign would supplant the private self-seeking of a courtship. They would mingle, not love-sick sighs, but the aspirations of their souls. No doubt when they were both old, and looked back, it would seem well worth the cost....
Amory herself would have been the first to confess the weakness that set her wondering how many bedrooms the Shropshire house had, and whether there were rose gardens and fruit trees on the southern walls. Even from thoughts of duty weak mortals must sometimes stoop. Besides, if there was not a village green with a maypole on it, some arrangement would probably have to be made. Amory didn’t think she would want morrice-dancing on the lawn in front of the drawing-room windows, except, of course, on birthdays and festival days and the days when the tenants paid their rent. The people themselves would probably prefer to have their merrymaking to themselves. Very likely they would only be shy before their betters. She would show the tenantry (she did not insist on the name) every consideration, as she should expect them to consider her.... And if there was a lily garden as well as a rose garden, she would send lilies as well as roses to the cottages quite frequently.
But Cosimo must be saved for the Cause quickly, for he was giving up his studio in March, and once he got away again he might fall into the hands of the designing woman whose existence Amory had suspected.She knew those designing women. She knew them by the simple process of inversion of everything that was noble within herself.
Amory had only seen Dorothy Lennard once since the afternoon when Dorothy had promised to see what she could do about Croziers’ contract. That had been when Dorothy had come to tell her of the mitigation of its rigour she had secured from Hamilton Dix. But, finding herself in Oxford Street one afternoon, she sought Hallowells’, and tried to find her way upstairs to the fashion-studio. “Tried,” one says, for nearly twenty minutes Amory was hopelessly lost in the wilderness that seemed to grow ever more and more complicated as the time fixed for the opening drew nearer. It was during her wandering through this labyrinth that Amory received a shock. Passing along a corridor of such vast length that she seemed to be looking at it through the wrong end of a pair of opera-glasses, she entered a large apartment where three women on their knees polished the floor. There she saw a large historical painting. It was the picture of Queen Bess, Sir Walter, and the Cloak.
Her first impulse was to fall back; her second one, which she obeyed, was to stand her ground, to put her head back and a little on one side, and to smile defiantly, indulgently, truculently, all three. It was as if she said to the picture, “We meet unexpectedly, but since we are here we may as well have a few words together, you and I!”
A certain amount of skill, manual and ocular, had gone to the making of the picture—enough, as we haveseen, to “hit” Mr. Miller “right there.” Perhaps that was the reason why it hit Amory right there too, though in the contrary sense. She stepped forward and examined it near; then she stepped back and examined it at a distance. As she did so, a man in an astrachan-collared overcoat and an indented grey hat hurried past, dropping his cigar and uncovering his head as he found himself in the presence of a lady, even one he did not know; and then Amory continued her gazing.
The picture struck her as incredibly funny. First, there was the subject—“Our old friend Chivalry,” Amory mused. Oh yes, Chivalry in other words, those garlands of roses in her own picture beneath which the iron chains peeped forth. Chivalry! Oh yes, Amory knew—any feminist knows—the toils men impose on women when they talk about Chivalry! Amory became cynical.... Let them amend the Divorce Laws, andthenAmory would listen to what they had to say about Chivalry! Let them give women equal opportunities with men, and she would excuse the lifting of a hat or the offering of a seat in a train! Chivalry might have had its place in the social organization of the Year Dot (see “Barrage”), but things had moved a bit since then, and woman to-daywouldwalk through puddles if she wished, though twenty cloaks were outspread for her to step on! Thank you very much for your Chivalry ... andnowwill you give us a little Justice for a change?... And then the complacent handling of the thing! There was really nothing to be said! Nobody could say it wasn’t“finished”; that was just it; it was fatally “finished”; the man had done exactly what he had set out to do, and—there it was. No unseizable desire, no unattainable dream, no Promethean attempt, no suspicion that here was not the last possible word on the subject; andthisin a new and straining and eager age, when men were just beginning to know that they knew nothing, and to put off their past boastings, and to take the cave-dweller into their counsels as their equal, perhaps their superior, in knowledge! Here, actually to-day, was a man who truly thought that he knew a thing or two more than the cave-dweller! Oh, the smugness, the self-satisfaction! Really, Amory would not dare to show such a man her “Barrage”; its pure heart of fire, shining even through all its shortcomings, would have shrivelled him and his conceit up! For surely there, in “Barrage,” was the true impulse of the arts to-day. Some called it “propagandist,” but what, Amory wanted to know, had all these Virgins and Children, all these Crucifixions, all these Holy Families of the past been but propaganda? The arts had been shackled to the propagation of superstition and dogma, and of the tenets of a religion that had found its expression one day in seven; but in the Newer Day all days were going to be equally holy, with the abolition of the Sabbath as a first step to the consecration of the other six. To the Virgins and Children of the future a proper comprehension of the Rights of Woman and the Responsibilities of Parentage would be brought. Eugenics would have a word to say about the Holy Families. The Crucifixions would probably be cut out altogether....To bring that day nearer was Amory’s mission. If she could only sell “Barrage”—and she thought she could now, for the Women’s Manumission Guild had approached her about it, and an Executive was further considering it....
And she would ask a good price for it, for the labourer is worthy of her hire, and she really must study her dress a little more....
Amory turned away from the picture and resumed her search for Dorothy.
But she had hardly left the room where the women polished the floors (showing how, even in physical strength, women were not the inferiors of men), when she received a second shock. She was backing out again from a room where a telescopic ladder rose to a sagging sheet under a skylight when she saw, beyond an oval section of redwood counter, the fair head of Dorothy herself. It was now luncheon time, the workmen had left, and Dorothy appeared to be eating her lunch amid the smell of shavings and varnish and plaster. Amory advanced.
But once more, she started back. She saw that Dorothy was not alone. And not only was Dorothy not alone, but she was sitting with a good-looking but ridiculously smart young man on a box so narrow that from mere necessity the young man had passed his arm about Dorothy’s waist. They were eating sandwiches from a paper bag, and if they were not sharing the same glass of lemonade, the second glass was certainly not visible.
Then, with his mouth full of sandwich, the youngman kissed Dorothy, who performed the same idiotic gesture on him in return.
Now no really sensitive person likes to see other persons in the act of an embrace, and Amory was exquisitely sensitive. And in this hard world it is the sensitive person who suffers for the dull. Further, even suffering takes a keener edge when you are seen to suffer. Therefore the least that Dorothy and her smart young man could have done, when, turning, they became aware of Amory’s presence, would have been to spare her the gratuitous pain of looking at her. But they did not. Having outraged her, they stared at her. They stared at her almost as if they asked her what she meant by stealing upon them like that. It struck Amory as it had never struck her before that Glenerne would have been Dorothy’s proper place. If this was the way she carried on during lunch time at Hallowells’, nothing at the boarding-house would have shocked her.
“Hallo!” said Dorothy, not (Amory thought) exactly welcomingly.
Still, if Dorothy had no tact, that was no reason why Amory should not act up to her own finest instincts. The truest delicacy would be to let it be supposed that she had noticed nothing. Therefore she too said “Hallo!” very brightly. They must not guess that they had caused her pain.
At first Amory thought that Dorothy was not going to introduce her friend, but when Dorothy did so, in three words—“My cousin Stan”—she was able to guess that even Dorothy was not quite without some sense of shame and confusion. Her cousin! Such unfertility of inventionwould have done discredit even to Jellies! But of course Dorothy was embarrassed, and had said the first thing that had come into her head. Amory bowed with reserve to “the cousin,” who, for his part, seemed inclined to laugh. Very rudely, he pulled out his watch.
“By Jove, a quarter to two! I must cut, Dot. Dusty’ll be looking for me. See you at tea-time? Right, I’ll ring you up. So long.”
And with scarce a look at Amory he was off.
No sooner had he gone than Amory broke into voluble speech.
“My dear,whata place! I’ve been looking everywhere for you this last half-hour—upstairs, downstairs, everywhere! I was almost sure I remembered the way to the studio—wasn’t it past a square room that has a painting in it now?”
“It was, but they moved us two months ago,” Dorothy replied. “Did you ask for me?”
“Do you mean how did I get in? I just walked up. Nobody stopped me. Is it against the rules?”
“It doesn’t matter, as it happens. But I’m afraid I’ve had lunch.”
“Oh, thanks awfully, but I always go to one of those Food Reform places now; I feel ever so much better for it. I was only passing, and thought I’d look in.”
“Good of you,” said Dorothy, and there was a longish pause.
Amory thought it was not very clever of Dorothy not to be able to conceal her chagrin. Amory herself always tried to behave better than that to people whowent out of their way to call on her. Probably what was really the matter was Dorothy’s conscience; one cannot hold aloof from the noble movements of the day without at times feeling a little uneasy about it. But Causes can afford to be magnanimous. If Dorothy wanted to out-pause Amory, Amory would let her; and, that absurd picture being uppermost in her mind, she gave a little laugh and spoke of that.
“It’s easy to seeyou’renot the art-adviser to Hallowells’, Dorothy,” she said. “Mustthey buy such things? And what are they going to do with it? Get it lithographed, I suppose, for a supplement or something?”
When the subject of painting was raised Dorothy was still a little afraid of Amory and her superior knowledge—but less so than she had been. Twice in the course of its production she had seen “Barrage,” and had stood apologetically silent before Amory’s picture. At another time she would not have excited herself one way or the other about Sir Walter, but new forces thrust some of us into conservatism whether we will or not, and “Barrage” had made Dorothy almost ready to swallow Sir Walter holus-bolus. Therefore she said a little defensively, “What’s the matter with it?”
“The matter!” Amory exclaimed. She was smiling. If Dorothy meant this for a joke she was quite willing to enter into it.
“Well,” said Dorothy, more defensively still, “everybody isn’t trying to do nothing but the greatest things all the time, after all.”
“Oh, ça se voit!” Amory returned, rippling outright into a laugh.
“And,” Dorothy continued, hating herself because Amory seemed to be driving her into a defence even of the absurd and solemn Miller, “we’re only a business concern, not an Exhibition, you know.”
“Oh? The wonderful thing isn’t for sale, then?”
“No; and anyway, Mr. Dix didn’t laugh at it.” (This was true. Mr. Dix did not laugh at his bread when Hallowells’ spread it with an extra thick helping of butter.)
Amory kept a straight face.—“Dorothy,” she said, “what’s happened to you?”
“How, happened to me?” Dorothy returned, a little tartly. That confounded “Barrage” had put her into an altogether false position. “Nothing’s happened to me. Never mind me; tell me what’s fresh with you. Has anything happened about your own picture yet?”
The fact that Dorothy was evidently rather cross was enough to make Amory aware of the superiority of cheerfulness. Besides, it might not be amiss to show Dorothy that, high and ideal as the Cause was, it was not quite without its mundane and practical side. That at any rate would not be beyond Dorothy’s comprehension. Therefore Amory told Dorothy how the negotiations stood between herself and the Manumission League for the purchase of “Barrage.”
Dorothy listened attentively. When Amory had finished she paused....
“Two hundred pounds, you say? Would that be for a sale outright?”
“Yes.”
“And they’d be able to do whatever they liked with it—reproduce it or anything?”
“I suppose so. Do you mean it isn’t enough?”
“I wasn’t thinking of that so much. I was thinking—but of course I don’t know all the circumstances.”
“I’m not keeping anything back from you, Dorothy,” said Amory. Indeed she wasn’t. She knew that Dorothy’s advice on such a point would be well worth having.
“Oh, I don’t mean that at all,” Dorothy hastened to say. “I only mean that it’s hard to form a judgment without having seen for yourself. I don’t like the idea of selling anything outright. If it was only a nominal royalty, in case they wanted to reproduce or anything of thatsort——”
“Oh, that! As for that, I should be only too glad to let them reproduce if they wanted.”
“Of course you would get the advertisement, but I don’t see why you shouldn’t have a small royalty too.”
Amory smiled. The advertisement! Wasn’t that just like dear old Dorothy! As if all the costly things that had gone to the making of “Barrage” could be valued and bartered like that! Amory explained gently.
“I don’t think you quite understand, Dorothy. You see, it isn’t like those other things Croziers’ got. Those were just knocked off. I don’t want to be conceited about ‘Barrage,’ but it has rather taken it out of me, in thought and emotion and those things. I’ve beenfeeling a perfect rag after a day at it. Of course, there were heaps of things I should like to do to it, but ‘No,’ I said that morning, ‘you’ve expressed yourself, and if you began tickling it up here and there you’d only take away from the fierce meaning of it.’ So I threw my brushes down, and then collapsed—perfectly limp.”
“Oh!” said Dorothy deferentially. She herself had once collapsed during a spring rush, but that had been a quite inferior collapsing, from too long hours simply, not from any emotional strain. But Amory misinterpreted her mild and respectful “Oh!” She spoke rather sweetly.
“Of course I must live, and nobody can say I don’t live frugally. But that apart, I don’t do this for money at all. I do it because of my beliefs.”
“Oh!” said Dorothy again, this time very much as some gallant monarch might have protested that he never meddled with the beliefs of ladies.
“I know,” Amory continued firmly, “that there are some things we don’t agree on, and of course I think I’m right and you’re wrong, or I shouldn’t believe what I do. But I do think that that picture in there,” she made a little vague pointing movement, “preaches—well, a perfectly damnable lesson—from the feminist point of view perfectly damnable.”
“I—I don’t think it’s meant to,” Dorothy ventured to say. “I don’t so much mind it really—not that it pretends to be very much—but parts of it are quite like something, and I think painting has to be like things when all’s said and done—I mean—certain sorts ofpainting——”
It was rather a tickling experience for Amory to be schooled by a fashion-artist on “sorts of painting,” and she wished Cosimo had been there to hear. And on these lines she knew that she could play with Dorothy as a cat plays with a mouse. So she was beginning, “Oh, why must painting necessarily be ‘like’ things, as you say? Is it a Law? Do tell me!” when suddenly Dorothy took her back altogether. For all the world as if both of them had been talking about one thing and thinking of another all the time, Dorothy boiled up.
“Oh, Amory, you do make me so cross!” she cried. “Really, to hear you sometimes, nobody would think an awfully pretty girl was talking! Who cares a button about your opinions, with looks like yours? I could understand it if you were plain! I do wish you could manage to be a bit more like a human being; why don’t you put on some clothes like other people’s, instead of always dressing as if you were going to have a baby? Can’t you take an interest in things, instead of always moping the way you do? Why, you might be a superfluous woman yourself!”
For one moment Amory fairly lost her composure, but only for one moment. The next moment she had seen what was the matter. By “taking an interest in things” Dorothy meant forsaking her principles; by “putting on clothes like other people’s,” she meant abandoning her velvets and corduroys that took the light in such lovely broken bits of accidental colour, and dressing like one of her own impossible fashion-plates; and by being “a bit more like a human being,” shemeant sitting with a young man on a box and kissing him with a mouth full of sandwich. It was almost too funny to laugh at. If Dorothy would only ask her outright what she evidently had in her mind to ask her—why she didn’t marry Cosimo—it would be perfect. Poor old Dot! She had been fairly caught only a few minutes before, and naturally would still feel rather sore. Amory waited for her to go on.
She did go on. “I’ve wanted to say this for a long time,” she said. “Look here, Amory, why don’t you marry Cosimo and have done with it? You’re lovely—he’s quite good-looking—you seem to understand one another all right—I’m sure you ought to by this time—and it would be ever so much more sensible! It seems to me you could drag on like this for ever!”
Amory’s golden eyes seemed to dance with mirth. Of course that accidental discovery had forced Dorothy’s hand beautifully. Dorothy was pleading with her as earnestly as if she had just been seen, not “canoodling” under a counter (that Amory believed was the word used in such cases), but lifted up on a plinth, in a heroic pose, with an archangel by her side, grouped with their faces towards the east or in whatever quarter the sun of Feminism might be expected to rise.... Amory had not even to say anything. All she needed to do was to stand smiling at dear old Dot and to watch her grow redder and redder. Obviously there was no need to accuse Dorothy when Dorothy was accusing herself.
In another moment, too, Dorothy was defending herself. Her eyes, in the surrounding flush of colour,seemed bluer than ever. And in jumping straight at Amory’s thought she skipped a stage.
“I don’t care anyway,” she blurted out. “Some thingsareunderstandable, but you and Cosimo—well, who’s to make head or tail ofyou? You’re always together, early and late, sometimes in your place and sometimes in his—of courseIunderstand, dear, but really I don’t see how you could blame people who didn’t if—if——”
Already Amory had drawn herself up to her full five foot against the redwood counter and had tossed back the bright nasturtium of her head.
“If what?” she asked, the brook-brown eyes looking full into Dorothy’s blue ones.
“Well, if they draw their own conclusions, if you must know,” Dorothy blurted out.
As a wet cloth wipes chalk from a blackboard, so the smile had gone from Amory’s face. Most decidedly she wasn’t going to stand this—at any rate not from Dorothy.
“Oh!” she said. “What people? And what conclusions?”
“Well, people do. You can’t expect to have no conclusions drawn but your own.”
“You mean conclusions about me and Cosimo?”
“I’m not sayingIdraw any, Amory. I understand perfectly, of course. I mean I know there’s nothing wrong. But you can’t stop people talking.”
Amory became still taller.
“May I ask who’s been talking?” she added. “Iwon’t say besides yourself, but this is the first I’ve heard of it.”
“Amory!” said Dorothy, deeply wounded. She lifted her eyes almost humbly. “Do you really think that of me?”
“What am I to think?” Amory replied loftily. Yet she was glad that Dorothy had the grace to be ashamed. By twisting and turning and a shameless use of her charms Dorothy might contrive to get her own way with men, but she must not think she could come it over one of her own sex in the same way.
“Oh dear, I’m sorry I said anything at all!” Dorothy wailed.
“Oh, I’m glad, I assure you!” Amory replied quickly. “I don’t believe in driving these things underground and then pretending they don’t exist! If a thing is, I want to see itasit is!”
“I know you’re ever so much braver than I am, dear—I know I’m a dreadful coward at a push—you’re worth twenty of me—but still, Amory, peopledosay things, and not very nice ones, and it could so easily beavoided——”
“Avoided!”
“I know there isn’t anything—I only mean the appearance to people who don’tknow——”
“And what,” said Amory slowly, “do you supposeIcare for people of that kind, and what they think?”
“Yes, you always were splendid and brave—still——”
“Have you heard anybody talking like this?” Amory demanded.
“I said it was a wicked lie——”
“Ah, youhaveheard somebody!”
“Not really saying anything—only wondering—you know how peoplewonder——”
“Then please tell me at once who it was,” said Amory with dignity.
But Dorothy only grew more confused than ever.
“Oh, Amory, I can’t do that—it was nothing that wasn’t fair in a way—you oughtn’t to ask me to dothat——”
“Be so good as to tell me at once.”
Dorothy was silent.
As a matter of fact the people who had been speaking of Amory and Cosimo were Walter Wyron and Laura Beamish, but Dorothy did weakly hope that if things were driven underground they might at least be forgotten.
“Aren’t you going to tell me?” Amory demanded.
“No,” Dorothy mumbled.
“You refuse?”
“Yes,” Dorothy mumbled. And then suddenly she broke out almostpassionately—
“I don’t blame you in the very least, Amory, but I do blame Cosimo! I do, and it’s no good saying I don’t. A man’s no right to be always about with a woman, getting her talked about, and doing things for her, and always in and out of her place! I do think he might know better!”
Amory was smiling again now, but not very pleasantly—“Oh!” she said. “So when you said youthought I ought to marry Cosimo, you meant that things had gone so far that I might as well?”
“I didn’t, Amory. I didn’t, I didn’t!” Dorothy cried appealingly. “I really think you do seem to hit it off together somehow. And as for what people say,yousay whatyouthink about people, and they’ve a right to do the same, and anyway you can’t stop them, and you can’t expect to have the world to yourself. Why, I thought you were always talking about ‘equal rights.’”
“I don’t know whether you know that just at present you’re talking about a very precious and beautiful friendship!” said Amory proudly.
“Yes, I do know—I mean I suppose so—you really are such chums, Iknow——”
“And I hope and trust the day’s coming when such a thing can be without nasty prurient minds ‘drawing their own conclusions,’ as you call it, Dorothy!... Perhaps,” the golden eyes were sidelong now on Dorothy’s, “perhaps there was some particular—compromising situation—your friend objected to? Or was it merely the whole scandalous relation?”
Suddenly Dorothy, for her part also, did not much like the tone of this. She felt as if that sandwich might still have left crumbs upon her mouth. There might be a good many things to be said about her cousin Stanhope, but at any rate he did not compromise her on principle, nor did he discuss with her some of the rather astonishing subjects that seemed to come into this precious and beautiful friendship of Amory Towers andCosimo Pratt. She would bow to Amory’s superior knowledge when it came to matters of art, but she wasn’t going to have even Amory’s foot on her neck if Stan was to be dragged into the dispute. And if Dorothy again skipped a step in the chain of processes, she thought she had reason.
“I suppose that’s because you caught me out a few minutes ago?” she said, rather challengingly.
“I’m not sure that I quite follow you. I’m sorry if I’m dull.”
“Very well, if you want it more plainly, you said ‘compromising situation’ because you caught us just now. I’ve always stood up for you, Amory, but I’m not going to let you talk like that.”
“Sorry,” said Amory offhandedly.
“Well, you needn’t say so in that tone either; we don’t expect everybody to go about whistling, or knocking at doors and then waiting, like that charwoman and her daughter. I’m sorry if we shocked you.”
“I don’t think I mentioned—what you seem to be talking about, Dorothy. If I did I don’t remember.”
“You were thinking about it, though.”
“Oh!...”
As if people might say what they liked about Amory and Cosimo, but Amory might not even think what she liked about Dorothy and Stan!
There was a rather hostile pause. Probably either felt that the particular male of her preference was being subjected to criticism.
“Well, we needn’t quarrel about it,” Dorothy resumed.
Amory brightened remarkably.
“Quarrel? Of course not, dear Dorothy—what an absurd idea! And of course, as you say, Iwasthinking.... Are you—you know—may I congratulate you?” she asked softly.
Again Dorothy reddened. She would dearly have liked to fling a triumphant “Yes, weareengaged!” into Amory’s pretty face, but she and Stanhope had their pact about that. They were not officially engaged. Once more Amory had her at a disadvantage.
“No,” she said shortly. It cost her a struggle not to add the mitigating words “Not yet.”
“Oh ... I beg your pardon,” said Amory, instantly apologetic. “You see——” she hesitated.
“Well, what do I see?” Dorothy Lennard demanded. Against her wishes she felt herself getting angry again.
“Well, dear, youdidask me about Cosimo——”
“You’re not engaged to him, are you?”
“No—but then——”
“You mean you don’t let him kiss you?” sprang from Dorothy’s lips.
Amory thought it crude—revolting....
Then for the second time Dorothy boiled up and over.
“Well, it seems to me you might just as well!” she cried. “Better, I should say—it seems to me you do everything else! I think I’ve given up trying to understand you clever people; you’re beyond me entirely. Ilikebeing a man’s plaything—there!I don’t mind one little bit being a chattel—there!And I think it would be perfectly ripping being property, as long as youbelonged to the right person! And Idobelieve in one law for the man and another for the woman. Theyaredifferent—theyare, Amory! They’re—they’re—everso different! And I’m glad!... And it seems to me that if you and Cosimo lived in the same house you needn’t kiss one another if you didn’t want to, and anyway it would save a good deal of walking about! That alone might be worth getting married for—you could talk about the State quite undisturbed then! I know it’s no business of mine, but you shouldn’t look at me as you have been doing for the last ten minutes all on account of nothing! I’m sorry if I seem angry, because I’m not bad-tempered really, but dash it all, I do think it’s the one thing a woman can’t afford to be impracticable about, and sometimes you really do seem hopeless, Amory!... Unless——” she checked herself instantly.
But it was too late. She had said the word. Amory knew what it was that she had cut off so short—“Unless youdoknow your business after all, and think that always sitting in his pocket, and letting him play with your hair, and talking about Heredity all the time, is the way to get him!” That was the peck that Dorothy measured her out of her own bushel! Those were the very methods by which Dorothy herself got round her Mr. Miller, and her Mr. Hamilton Dix, and this smart young man, whoever he was....
She meant that between herself and Amory there was not at bottom a pin to choose....
And since the Cause of Progress did demand that Amory should marry Cosimo, even had it all been truethe end would still have justified those or almost any other means. There precisely lay the rub. What are you to say to a person so blind to true meanings as to accuse you of doing what, quite inessentially, you do merely happen to be doing? You cannot admit that they are right—they are so hideously wrong: you cannot tell them they are wrong—they cling so stupidly to a certain appearance of being right. Whatareyou to do?
One thing at least Amory did: she hated Dorothy in that moment. And because she herself wished to be merciful to Dorothy she did not take up that fatal “Unless——” Instead she said, very gently indeed:
“Aren’t you rather taking the lowest view of things?Mustthis physical side always be dragged in?”
Nor was Dorothy very much disposed now to mince matters. The word had popped out, and she was not going to run away from it. If Amory wanted to talk about physical sides, she might; Dorothy’s own physique overshadowed Amory’s as a ruffled swan overshadows a duckling. She turned, her bosom high, her hands stroking down her waist.
“But it’syouwho drag it in!” she cried. “If only youweren’talways talking about it! But you only pretend you’re only talking about something else; it seems to me youneverlet it alone! What’s your Eugenics, if it isn’t that, and your Balance of the Sexes, and your State Nurseries? You aren’t a snuffy old man writing learned treatises about it all; you’re a pretty girl, and I dare say you’re quite right, but I don’t see the use ofpretending——”
“Do you mean that I’m pretending to be somethingI’m not?” Amory asked sharply. “Say what you mean. Perhaps you mean virtuous?”
Dorothy stamped. “Oh ... need we?”
“Because if you really care to know——” said Amory proudly.
“Oh ... I’m going. Good-bye.”
“Youcan’tgo now,” said Amory significantly. “Think for a moment and you’ll see that you can’t go now. People can’t make charges and then run away. It isn’t done, Dorothy.”
“How absurd! Who’s made charges?”
“I understood you to say that I was a pretender?”
“Don’t be so ridiculous! You know very well what I mean!”
“Then you should be more careful about your expressions, Dorothy. Expression is all people have to go by, you know; expression’s precisely art, in fact. But I should like you to tell whoever it is who’s been talking about me and Cosimo something.”
“What’s that?” Dorothy grunted over her shoulder.
“You can tell them that they could be present at every one of those dreadful meetings and hear every word we say, if that’s the idea. They wouldn’t take any harm; in fact, it might take them out of themselves for a bit. And even if it was as they supposed, I don’t admit that that would be as important as they seem to think. An altogether false importance is given to these things, Dorothy. My friendship with Cosimo wouldn’t be one bit less beautiful whatever the ‘conclusions’ were people drew. Nor one bit more. I’m not a pretender, Dorothy. I don’t pretend to be anywiser than I am. But I do think I’m rational. I—object—most—strongly” (she gave each word its special emphasis) “to this really secondary matter of sex being made a thing of the first importance. I hope that’s all going to be changed before very long, and that more enlightened views will take its place. And, really, the brave women of the Movement are the very last people who ought to be talked about in that way. They haven’t time for such things. They’ve far, far too much to do. I know some are married, but they have the true conception of marriage; it’s the rational conception, not mere legalized tyranny on the one hand and submission on the other. So though we don’t admit that what’s commonly called virtue has anything to do with it one way or the other, we give you the virtue in as a sort of present. I think I shall have to lend you John Stuart Mill, Dorothy; he’d clear your ideas on the subject. I’ll lend youSubjection. It’s all in there, art and everything. If you read only a quarter of an hour every night you’ll soon feel the benefit. Do read him.... And now I must go. I’m sorry if our talk has seemed a bit of a wrangle, but I have to state these things fearlessly, you see. At whatever cost we have to avoid false positions. The world really doesn’t matterthatso long as we have the Right on our side. Do try to see it, Dorothy.—Good-bye.”
She touched Dorothy’s hand and turned away to the door; but, for all her serenity, one thought and one thought only occupied her as she plunged into Hallowells’ labyrinth again and wandered through rooms and corridors in search of the way out. The more shethought of it the less it bore thinking of. It was the thought that Dorothy had to all intents and purposes told her that she allowed Cosimo to admire her and to help her to take down her glorious hair for the same reason that Dorothy sat on a box eating sandwiches with her own unenlightened young man, and that when young men came into the question there was not a pin to choose between them after all.
“Poor, dear, dull old thing!” she muttered as she left Hallowells’. “And it’s she who pretends, for she’d have given anything to have heard me coming. All the same, if ithadbeen me and Cosimo....”
It would have been irrational, but she supposed she would have resented an intrusion too. Inherited prejudice is very strong....
Othergrounds 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 momentshe 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 whenthe 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——” andcontinued 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 shockedbecause—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 giveyouthat impression?”
“Amory——!”
But she put up her hand peremptorily and continued.
“So that if anybodydoesthink 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; manytimes 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 allthat 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—IknowI’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, butsheseems to have been talkingmeover, 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 tellyou——”
“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.
“Youdomean kissing, don’t you?”
“If you must have the horrid word.”
“And it wasafterthat 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 aboutme!... 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 tellyou——”
Cosimo made a little protesting movement.
“Oh, Amory, do you think you need defend yourself tome——?”
“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 eversince——”
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’swedding——”
“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 understandthese 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 theFaerie Queene. That’s whatIthink about it.... Soyoudon’t mind, do you, Cosimo?”
Something in this, he did not know what, arrested Cosimo, but Amory gave him no time to think. Shecontinued—
“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 SlaveTraffic——”
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 withthatnoble 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 thinkthat——”
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 youmind?” 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 atfirst——”
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.
“Perhapsyoudon’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 trustedme——”
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.