Chapter IX: Part III: I (1)

THE LEAGUE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh yes, still there."

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

"Oh, give me some tea first."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amory, relaxing totally, did so.

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

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

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

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

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

"So now you've got it."

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

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

"I knew you had. What was it?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Peculiar----?"

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

Still Cosimo was all at sea.

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

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

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

"Do I understand----"

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

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

"Do I give _you_ that impression?"

"Amory----!"

But she put up her hand peremptorily and continued.

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

"My dear girl----!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But what could you do?"

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

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

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

Amory put up her hand rather quickly.

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

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

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

"But you must!"

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

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

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

"Yes," Amory sighed as if in disgust.

Cosimo stared, frowning.

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

"If you must have the horrid word."

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

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

Cosimo made a little protesting movement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She lifted the shallow opals of her eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But----" Cosimo gasped.

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

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

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

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

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

"Do you mean--you and me?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a moment's silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You must marry me," said Cosimo.

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

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

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

"Can't!--It must!"

"Really, Cosimo----"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

"BARRAGE"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amory glanced at Cosimo.

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

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

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

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

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

But Mr. Wellcome only guffawed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Cosimo persisted sadly.

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

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

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

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

Gently Amory tried to show him how ungrateful he was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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