Chapter VI: Part II: I (1)

PENCE

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

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

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

Overfed animal!...

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

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

Another "option," in fact....

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

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

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

Cosimo quite understood that she was wedded to her art.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amory lifted her shallow (but penetrating) eyes.

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

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

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

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

But she was disappointed in Dorothy.

II

A DAMSEL ERRANT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somebody was fumbling softly at the door.

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

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

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

She simply dared not go out now.

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

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

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

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

She ran across the room and flung the curtain aside.

At the same moment Cosimo opened his eyes.

"Urro!" he grunted.

Then he sat sluggishly up.

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

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

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

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

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

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