PART I

GRAY YOUTH

OLIVER ONIONS

NOVELS BY OLIVER ONIONS

IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE EVIDENCE

THE DEBIT ACCOUNT

THE STORY OF LOUIE

GRAY YOUTH

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

NEW YORK

GRAY YOUTH

THE STORY OF A VERY MODERN COURTSHIP

AND A VERY MODERN MARRIAGE

BY

OLIVER ONIONS

Author of "In Accordance with the Evidence,"

"The Debit Account."

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

NEW YORK

_Publishers in America for Hodder & Stoughton_

Copyright, 1913,

BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

Copyright, 1914,

BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

TO

MARY STEWART

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Gray Youth is published in England in two volumes under the titles:

The Two Kisses and A Crooked Mile.

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE: A VERY MODERN COURTSHIP--THE TWO KISSES

PART I

CHAPTER PAGE

ARGUMENT 11

I CHEYNE WALK 18

II THE SURPRISE PARTY 33

III THE FASHION STUDIO 52

IV THE MCGRATH 67

V POUNDS AND SHILLINGS 83

VI WOMAN'S WHOLE EXISTENCE 99

VII THE VOICE THAT BREATHED O'ER EDEN 120

PART II

I PENCE 142

II A DAMSEL ERRANT 160

III "BUSINESS AS USUAL" 176

IV "IL FAUT QU' UNE PORTE--" 191

V BOND AND FREE 215

PART III

I THE LEAGUE 243

II "BARRAGE" 263

III EPITHALAMIUM 287

ENTR' ACTE 314

BOOK TWO: A VERY MODERN MARRIAGE--A CROOKED MILE

PART I

CHAPTER PAGE

I THE WITAN 321

II THE POND-ROOM 337

III THE "NOVUM" 352

IV THE STONE WALL 369

V THREE SHIPS 393

VI POLICY 414

PART II

I THE PIGEON PAIR 435

II THE 'VERT 447

III THE IMPERIALISTS 463

IV THE OUTSIDERS 485

V "HOUSE FULL" 503

VI THE SOUL STORM 524

PART III

I LITMUS 553

II BY THE WAY 568

III DE TROP 588

IV GRAY YOUTH 598

V TAILPIECE 620

BOOK ONE

A VERY MODERN COURTSHIP

PART I

ARGUMENT

A girl of seventeen, with a knitted tam-o'-shanter cap and a thick

cable of red-bronze hair hanging down her back, walked along a gallery

of the Louvre, looking for her aunt. The eyes that turned whenever she

heard a footfall or, passing a statue or case, saw a fresh vista before

her, were of a light brown, with just such a hint of gold in their

irises as you see when some opals are turned and catch a different

light; and they were confused and overfilled with the treasures on

which they had rested. She was an art-student, and must return to

London on the morrow in order to resume her studies at the McGrath.

It was her first visit to Paris, and she had spent the whole of

her three weeks at the Cluny and the Luxembourg, at the Louvre and

Versailles. Now, drenched and sated with beauty, she still could not

bear to leave it all. A few minutes before, passing through the Salon

Carré, where an elderly lady had been copying the Entombment, she had

wished that she too might be old and white-haired if only age might so

enlarge her capacity for loveliness, that even youth would be well lost

for it. Already she loved the highest when she saw it, and, being an

artist, she needs must attempt it too.

The girl found her aunt near the spot where the Antinöus stands on its

pedestal, and walked along by her side, neither speaking nor listening

to the elder lady's remarks on the objects they passed. They did not

seem to her to be worth listening to. She knew that for her aunt art

had reached its _comble_ on the day when the late Sir Noël Paton had

affixed his signature to "The Man with the Muckrake," and she had got

out of the way of trying to explain that much water had flowed under

London Bridge and many students flowed through the McGrath since that

time. Besides, she did not want to talk. She wanted this last high hour

in the Louvre as much as might be to herself. She wanted to taste the

full emotion of it, not even analysing it, if only for once analysis

would cry a truce. At the end of the gallery they turned and walked

back again.

It was as they passed the Antinöus for the second time that the girl

felt her young bosom rise almost painfully. She could not have told

why, without premeditation, she suddenly lingered, so that her aunt

passed a little ahead. She watched her disappear behind some plinth or

pedestal or other, and then stopped opposite the marble bust.

There was no knowing when she might find herself in this wonderful

place again, and it seemed to her that her farewell of it now required

some symbol. She gave a furtive glance round. Neither visitor nor

_gardien_ was to be seen, and again something seemed to rise in her

throat. Noiselessly she stole to the pedestal. For a moment she

wondered whether she dared; the next instant she had risen,--in her

low-heeled brown shoes she was hardly more than five feet high,--she

had risen on tiptoe.

She crushed her lips against the Antinöus's marble cheek.

What it was she really kissed she had no idea. They say that male

artists have been known to kiss the pallid mask of the Girl said to

have been found in the Seine, but probably they have kissed, not the

senseless plaster, but some more glowing inner image. But the girl

thought of no young man, Greek and dead or modern and alive. Perhaps

by her act she set young men expressly aside, adoring the imperishable

expression instead. It was the first kiss she had ever given. There was

no sex-impulse in it, and yet it was a gesture of sex. She would not

have known what other gesture to employ.

With a fluttering heart and a heightened colour she rejoined her aunt,

and on the following day returned to London. For days after that a

nameless wistfulness still lingered in her shallow brook-brown eyes.

A fortnight after her return they gave a fancy-dress dance at the

McGrath, and the girl made one of a supper-party of a dozen or more

who, during the interval, in one of the smaller painting-rooms, settled

on the floor in a wide ring, with plates of sandwiches and jelly and

cakes and blancmange making a rapidly disappearing parterre of food in

the middle. The ring was as noisy as a merry-go-round of painted horses

on a Bank Holiday, and they played Hunt-the-Slipper, and perhaps in

the scuffling there was a little crude hand-holding--though nobody held

the girl's hand. Then they went back again to dance in the Antique

Room, where the tall casts, the "Discobolus" and the "Gladiator," the

"Germanicus" and the great writhe of the "Laocoön," had been wheeled

back against the walls, and stood, like so many sightless servitors,

holding wraps and shawls and the fans and oddments that had been put

down on their plinths. The girl danced again.

She was dressed this time as a porcelain shepherdess, in a hooped skirt

of tender pink with tiny sprigs of green sown throughout it. She had

borrowed the dress from one of the other girls. At supper, sitting in

the ring, she had resembled a rose-peony that had been taken by its

stalk and pressed down on the floor. About the slender hyacinth-stalk

of her neck was a black velvet ribbon with a locket, and the thick mass

of her hair peeped over the shoulders of her partners like an irregular

knob of bronze lustre. Her shallow ribboned hat was on "Homer's" head,

between the "Gladiator" and the "Greek Slave."

Some time during the later part of the evening, she was induced by a

young man in evening-dress, with restrained manners but a hardy eye,

to descend the stairs, and, passing the hall-porter's little glass box

and pushing at the outer swing-doors, to take a walk in the courtyard

of the School. The McGrath is only part of a larger institution. In the

forecourt are grass plots enclosed by low swinging chains, and, tall

and dim, with many broad steps and Corinthian columns, the pediment of

the great main portico towers over the court on the eastern side. The

girl and her cavalier crossed the grass plots, ascended the steps, and

stood within the gloom of the pillars.

There, without warning, the young man suddenly stooped and kissed her.

She knew that these things happened, and daily; but tears of misery

and revulsion and shame started into her eyes. It seemed--she did not

know what--a soilure, a coarseness, a bringing down of some lovely and

to-be-dreamed-of thing to mere brutal demonstration. The young man

was not even one of her companions of the McGrath; he was a medical

student, he had told her, and so perhaps naturally insensible to the

finer emotions. With a sudden pained "Oh!" she started from him, her

hands crushed with horror against her pretty cheeks and mouth. She

thought she heard him say, "Why, what's the matter?" but she was not

sure; she was sure of nothing in this moment but of her own sense of

miserable outrage. She left the young man calling softly behind her,

ran quickly down the steps, and reached the dancing-room again.

Near the door as she entered two men stood, looking on. Both were men

of forty-four or forty-five, and one of them was Jowett, the McGrath

Professor of Painting. His companion had just asked him a question; he

tugged at a ragged and grey-streaked moustache before replying.

"Art students? What becomes of 'em? God knows! You might as well ask

what becomes of people who eat their meals in restaurants or little

girls who learn to play the piano. They aren't a class. Perhaps one in

a thousand or fifteen hundred comes to something, but the rest--well,

what this place really is, if you want to know, is a sort of day

nursery for the children of the well-to-do middle class."

"You mean they marry and then drop it?" the other asked.

Jowett tugged again at the unkempt moustache. He spoke patiently and

wearily.

"Oh yes; and co-educate their offspring; and by and by I suppose we

shall have evolved a sort of intermediate sex, half women who make a

hash of doing men's work, and half men who put flowers in their hair

and talk about music. It always seems to me that these girls ought to

be sewing or baking, and the men drinking beer and singing limericks in

a canteen.--There's a girl, now----"

The small creature dressed as a shepherdess had just run past. The eyes

of both men followed her. Jowett continued.

"Miss Amory Towers. She's the pick of 'em; one of the clever ones, I

mean; and as far as my experience takes me, that means she's just a

little too clever for a woman and not nearly clever enough to make a

really satisfactory man. But, of course, she's young, and I may be

wrong.... I put her straight into the Life when she came here, but what

she really needs is somebody to put her into Life in another sense. But

I doubt if anybody here'll do it. These fellows don't see other men

enough; too much squiring these young women about.--Eh? Harm in it?

Not a ha'porth; they're too dashed blameless altogether. Sometimes

it's positively unnatural; it seems to me to raise the very questions

it's supposed to suppress. Probably these youngsters will grow up to

be fifty, and then discover all the follies they've had the chance

to commit and haven't committed, and then they'll go about preaching

doctrines about it all. Really, they scare me sometimes. I'm not

naturally gross, but they do drive a fellow----"

But here the other interrupted him.... "Hallo, your little shepherdess

seems to be going early."

Amory Towers, her tiny figure wrapped in a hood and cloak and her young

heart one unhappy ache to know the meaning of these two first kisses of

her life, was hurrying away.

I

CHEYNE WALK

In Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, there used to stand, and may stand yet, a

tenement of which the ground floor was a small "lock-up" greengrocer's

shop, and the remaining portions either dwelling-rooms or else rooms

that, like the shop, were left at night and returned to again the

next morning. The narrow entry to the right of the shop had once been

white-washed, but was now so discoloured that the street boys had

ceased to scribble on its walls the names of horses and other matters.

It was full of the smell of apples and oranges and of the more suspect

odour of earth and bruised rinds and decaying outer leaves, and there

was usually a cat or two about, licking up the last splash left by the

milkman's can. When a new milkman took the round he was lucky if he did

not come down all-fours at the bottom of the narrow winding staircase

that turned off sharp to the right. The staircase itself was as black

as the inside of a pair of bellows, and a piece of paper at the foot of

it bore two names:

MISS DOROTHY LENNARD

MISS AMORY TOWERS

These were followed by the words: "First Floor: if Out, leave Parcels

at Shop."

The landing of the first floor was slightly less black than the

staircase itself, but the grey half-light filtered through, not from

any window, but from the unhinged side of the door of the room rented

by Miss Lennard and Miss Towers. As if the landing had been damp and

the room beyond warm (which possibly was the case), this door, which

was of thin matchboarding, warped inwards quite two inches at the top,

and, indeed, seemed to be held only by the fastening in the middle.

When the door happened to be locked the glimpse through this crack was

always productive of a slight annoyance. It was as if Miss Dorothy

Lennard or Miss Amory Towers was nearly in, or not quite gone away, or

in any case must be returning in a few minutes. People often waited for

quite a long time before finally giving up hope.

Early on an April afternoon some years ago there walked quickly into

the entry and ran confidently up the dark stairs a tall young woman in

a large black picture-hat and a long tea-coloured silk raincoat. On the

first landing she pushed at the door with her foot. There was a short

succession of flapping and shot-like sounds (for if the door skellowed

inwards at the top it stuck correspondingly at the bottom), and then

the door started open and the young woman entered.

"Amory!" she called loudly. "Where are you?"

The last words were superfluous, since (unless she had climbed out

of the long front casement and on to the gutter) it was not possible

for Miss Towers to be in hiding in the room. And out of the square

aperture at the back, that commanded a view of washing, weeds,

discarded bottles, the greengrocer's "empties" and the back gardens

of the west side of Oakley Street, she could not as much as have got

her head. Nor did Miss Lennard wait for an answer. Down the chimney

opposite the door there came a dense yellow cauliflower of smoke; Miss

Lennard hastily closed the door again; and then, first looking for a

moment this way and that, she strode to a black-and-white desk near

the long casement and began to turn over the litter upon it. This,

which was a foot and more high, consisted of magazines and ladies'

journals and tracing-paper and proofs, and it was surmounted, first,

by a plate with a couple of bananas and a half-eaten bunch of grapes

upon it, and secondly, by a glass of water, clear above, cloudy in the

middle, and with a thick reddish sediment at the bottom. As she sought,

Miss Lennard popped three or four grapes into her large O of a mouth,

throwing the skins towards the fireplace, from which another opaque

yellow cauliflower poured, though this time not quite so far out into

the room. She had removed her gloves; her hands were large and firm

and waxen and without rings; and one or other of them found its way of

itself to the grapes while the other continued its search.

The smoking of the chimney had blackened the ceiling, which bellied

downwards in the middle like the under side of a giant's mattress; and

it had also dimmed the surfaces of such of the brighter objects of

furniture as the cheap working-room contained--the picture-glasses, the

gate-legged table, a bowl full of dead daffodils, and some crockery.

But Miss Lennard and Miss Towers frequently said that it was not for

the inside of the room, but for the sake of the views from the long

lattice in front, that they had chosen the place. These were for ever

changing and charming. From a standpoint just within the door you

looked over the Embankment Gardens and saw, through trees, lighters

following the bullying tugs, or barges, their sails reefed to the

sprits, resembling tall attenuated figures in the act of grasping

punting-poles. Placing yourself in the middle of the worn floor you

saw, crossed out as it were by the middle lattice, the Chelsea Jelly

Factory and other buildings across the river. And standing quite by the

fireplace you saw the lacy lines of the Suspension Bridge and the low

grey-green trees of Battersea Park. As the chimney emitted more yellow

curds, Miss Lennard, with an "Ugh!" opened the middle section of this

window. The papers among which she had been searching were instantly

whisked across the floor.

"Bother the thing!" she muttered. "How stupid if it's at Oxford Street

all the time!... I say, Amory, have you seen that Doubleday thing? You

know--the Chemisettes. I was sure I'd left it here."

The door had rattled again, and Miss Amory Towers had entered.

Miss Towers did not answer at once. From a brown pudding-bowl of

a hat with a silken cord round it, she drew out two enamel-headed

hatpins, and hung the hat on a hook. Its removal showed her rich

hair no longer in a plait, but wreathed round and round her head and

interplaited until it resembled a vividly painted fir cone. She wore a

peacock's-neck-coloured blouse with several necklaces of iridescent

shells at the collar; a roughened leather belt encircled the waist that

would have been large had she herself not been so small; and, while the

breeze from the open window rippled in Dorothy's tea-coloured raincoat,

it hardly stirred the folds of Amory's heavier skirt of dusty-looking

brown velvet.

She moved to the window. "I haven't touched your things," she said.

Then she stood, half leaning against the embrasure, gazing moodily

across the river.

Certainly she was fetchingly pretty. As if you had looked at her

through one of the very weak reducing-glasses illustrators use in

order to see how their work will diminish, so her features had not

only a special smallness, but somehow a special brightness of their

own as well. The slight neck was white as a bluebell stalk; the faint

flower-like stippling that never quite broke through into avowed

freckles reminded you of a rubbed old miniature that might have been

painted, not on ivory, but on a lamina of pale gold; and her inordinate

hair lighted up the whole casement angle. But she was perturbed about

something. She watched a string of lighters drift down with the tide,

and then, without turning her head, said, "Dorothy----"

Dorothy, who had been once more searching among the scattered papers,

rose from her knees. She held a piece of paper in her hand. "Got it!"

she cried triumphantly. "I knew I'd left it here.... What?"

"Have you heard about Aunt Jerry?"

"Thank goodness I haven't trailed all the way from Oxford Street for

nothing!... Aunt Jerry? No. What about her?"

"She's going to be married."

Ordinarily Dorothy Lennard's blue eyes were wide, receptive rounds; in

moments of surprise they always seemed to open to twice their size.

They did so now.

"No!... Oh, my dear, _do_ tell me, quick."

"Mr. Massey, at the boarding-house."

"Mr.----? _Not_ the safety-valve?" she cried.

"Yes."

"My--_dear_!... But he's forty if he's a day," Dorothy exclaimed.

"He's forty-three. Aunt Jerry's thirty-eight."

"Oh, but she's such a darling! Have they told people yet? May I write

her a note? When are they going to be married?" Miss Lennard came

as near to asking the three questions all in one as was physically

possible.

"Write if you like. They're getting married in July. I call it----"

But instead of saying what she called it Amory turned impatiently to

the window again. She was biting the corner of her upper lip.

"Why," said Dorothy, checked in her glee, "what's the matter?"

But Amory did not speak. She had been about to say, if a thing so

obvious needed to be said, that it was ridiculous (to say the least)

for people of thirty-eight and forty-three to be thinking about

marriage; but that was not all. There were other things, that, since

Dorothy could not understand them even if she did say them, were

perhaps not worth wasting breath over. Not that Dorothy was actually

dull; but for all that Amory had almost ceased to hope that Dorothy

would ever grasp her, Amory's, true position. Their circumstances were

so very different. Of course Amory was ready to concede that Dorothy,

like herself, did contrive to live on what she earned; she earned from

thirty to thirty-five shillings a week as a fashion artist; but it

was one thing to make do on that, with people behind you to catch you

when you stumbled, and quite another to have (as Amory had under her

godmother's will) a scanty thirteen pounds a quarter, to sell a sketch

or a picture once in a blue moon, and to know that that is all the help

you need look forward to. Dorothy would quickly have found out the

difference had it been she, Amory, who had had the people with houses

in town and places up and down the country, and herself, Dorothy, who

had been the daughter of a poor and clever Cambridge practitioner who

had died before he had managed to get on his feet, and had left his

daughter to live with the only relative she had in the world in a

hateful boarding-house in Shepherd's Bush! And it was all very fine for

Dorothy to joke about it, and to say that the fewer relatives she had

the luckier she was. There was no getting away from it: these things

did give a confidence to Dorothy's stride, and an assurance to her

glance, and an expectation of success to her eyes.

Therefore Amory did not answer when her friend asked her what was the

matter.

But Dorothy, after a moment's cogitation, contrived, though probably

by accident, to hit on what was the matter for herself.

"I must write to her at once," she said. "In July--so soon! I _am_

glad! I _do_ hope they'll be happy!... And what'll you do? Go on living

at the boarding-house?"

Ah! (Amory thought), so Dorothy did see it from somebody's point of

view besides Aunt Jerry's! She moved one shoulder petulantly.

"Aunt Jerry paid the bills there," she said.

"Do you mean that you'll go and live with them when they're married?"

Dorothy asked.

"No, I don't," said Amory with marked brevity. Dorothy hadn't seen her

aunt and Mr. Massey together or she wouldn't have asked that. And one

of them was thirty-eight and the other forty-three! Talk about the

loves of the valetudinarians!

"Well, what will you do?" Dorothy asked again.

Again Amory turned to the window. She spoke with her back to Dorothy.

"What _can_ I do? What is there left? Come and live here, as far as I

can see," she replied.

"Oh," cried Dorothy at once, struck with the idea, "that'll be jolly!"

(Jolly! With that warped door and that chimney! Jolly! Amory almost

laughed.)

"Oh yes, very jolly," she said, tossing the adorable little head.

But Dorothy caught the tone in which she said it.

"Oh, I don't suppose it will be if you're determined it shan't, but

don't I just wish _I_ had your talent and chances!" she replied

cheerfully. "My hat, wouldn't I swap! Why, think of what all the

critics--Hamilton Dix at any rate--are saying about you! You're going

to have a show all on your own----"

"H'm! If I ever do! Don't forget it's been put off three times already."

"Well, but each time it couldn't be helped, and you're going ahead

working all the time, and it'll be a tremendous leg-up for you when

it does come. You ought to have _my_ job, my dear, in the middle of

a catalogue rush, or when you've drawn the lingerie ladies as like

fishes as ever they can be, and you get letters complaining that you're

starting young men on the downward path--you'd come back to your

pictures thankfully enough then, _I_ can tell you! The fact is you

don't know what you do want.... Now I'm going to make a cup of tea and

then I must fly back; I only came for that Doubleday thing. Have some?"

She crossed to the sink, emptied the leaves from the teapot on to the

heap that already choked the trap, and filled the kettle and set it on

the fire.

It always annoyed Amory when Dorothy told her that she didn't know

really what she did want, for she always did know--at any rate for the

time being. True, she had worked in various styles in the past; to

an unintelligent watcher she might even have seemed vacillating and

changeable: but after all, what better course could a student follow

than that? Youth was the time for bold experiment. Settled convictions

too early arrived at were things to be distrusted. And there were

indications that she really had "found herself" at last. She had swept

aside, quite a long time ago, her earlier efforts of the days of the

McGrath; she had outgrown, too, the Meunier-like figures, all muscle

and hammers and leather aprons, that had first attracted Mr. Hamilton

Dix's attention; and all round that Cheyne Walk room were stacked the

canvases of her latest and (she hoped) her finally settled phase--her

Saturday night street-markets, her "character studies" worked up from

sketches made in Whitechapel and Shoreditch, her scenes sketched in

alleys and courts and during long waits in gallery-queues. Therefore

she was a little annoyed with Dorothy now.... Dorothy was clearing the

table and cutting bread-and-butter. Amory continued to look out of the

window.

Then, while Dorothy still prepared tea, she moved from the window

and walked to the little shelf of books that occupied the recess on

the farther side of the fireplace. She took down a volume protected

by a stout brown paper wrapper and began to read as she stood. Still

reading, she sidled slowly back to the window, where the light was

better, and mechanically turned the page. She could always pick up a

book and lose herself at a moment's notice like this. If at such times

she was spoken to, she usually gave an "Eh?" or a "Yes--no, I mean,"

and continued to read. She considered it to be evidence of her powers

of mental concentration.

The book she was reading now was the first volume of _The Golden

Bough_. Such a book, of course, was far too expensive for her to

buy; therefore, in order that she might read it and its kind, she

subscribed to a sort of private Association which was composed of

herself and a dozen or so of her old friends of the McGrath. They

bought the books as they were published, passed them (protected by

the brown paper covers) from one to another, and after a time sold

them back to the bookseller again at diminished (but still quite

good) prices. None but rather expensive and abstruse books were thus

bought; had _The Golden Bough_ been procurable in the Bohn Library the

Association would have felt that something of its choiceness had gone;

and Amory hoped, when she had got through _The Golden Bough_, to be the

next in rotation for certain of the Tudor Translations, and she did

wish Laura Beamish would hurry up with _Apuleius and the Golden Ass_.

These things contributed to breadth of outlook. It had for too long

been a justly-founded reproach against artists that they had no general

culture. Amory felt that, of all people, an artist certainly could

not know too much; and what an artist knows will go, sooner or later,

into his or her art.... She was still deep in _The Golden Bough_ when

Dorothy called, "Ready--come along, Amory----"

Reluctantly Amory laid aside the book and sat down at the little

gate-legged table.

As the two girls took tea they talked of Miss Geraldine Towers's

engagement, of Amory's own plans after the wedding, of the Exhibition

that for various reasons Mr. Hamilton Dix had repeatedly postponed, and

of one thing and another. Then Dorothy rose. She must get back to the

fashion studio in Oxford Street.

"You're going to work, I suppose?" she said, as she tucked the

Doubleday thing into her belt and adjusted her hat before the little

kitchen mirror.

Amory yawned. That was another thing Dorothy never seemed really to

grasp--that while she, Dorothy, might sit down to her absurd attenuated

fashion figures as it were with the striking of a clock, Amory's work

was rather different. Dorothy, of course, always professed to admire

Amory's painting enormously; in a sense she had no choice but to do so,

unless she wished to write herself down an out-and-out fool: but she

never really understood, in spite of the pains Amory had taken with

her. It was rather pathetic.... Amory yawned again.

"Oh, I don't suppose I shall do very much. This about Aunt Jerry's put

me quite off. And"--she grimaced slightly--"there's to-night. They're

having a party, or a celebration, or something at our boarding-house. I

expect that'll be rather ghastly. Want to come and see?"

But Dorothy only laughed.

"To-night? A party? Me? I shall be lucky if I get away by eleven....

And oh, I say, Amory,"--her tone changed suddenly, and all at once she

seemed embarrassed,--"I nearly forgot--there's something--it had almost

slipped out of my head--I hope you won't mind my suggesting it----"

It was part of Amory's cleverness, helped of course by her wide

reading, that she often knew what people were going to say almost

before they knew it themselves. She knew what Dorothy was going to say

now. And it was not true that Dorothy had nearly forgotten; that was

merely false delicacy and a roundabout way of approaching the subject.

Amory smiled.

"You see," Dorothy went on, "there's a job of sorts going--not a

fashion--not exactly a fashion, that is--more like a painting--and I

think the price could be screwed up to fifteen pounds for it--Mercier

would get twenty-five; but then he's Mercier. So I wondered----" She

paused diffidently.

It was not the first time she had tried to put work into Amory's

way. And Amory knew that she was perfectly right in refusing it; it

was Dorothy who did not know that the commercially acceptable thing

is separate in kind, and not a dilution of a different excellence.

Dorothy, by rising, might in time attain to the heights of the great

Mercier, who did "Doubleday Spring Covers," but Amory, stooping,

would only have stooped for nothing. She lifted her golden eyes to

her friend. She was half amused at the success of her guess, and half

sensible of Dorothy's well-meaningness and kindness of heart.

"It's awfully good of you--but you know I simply shouldn't know how to

begin," she said. "I think perhaps I'd better stick to my own job."

"Not if I gave you tips?" said Dorothy, almost wistfully.

"I'm afraid not."

Dorothy openly admired her. The two girls had been at the McGrath

together, and Dorothy's admiration was the homage that artistic vice

(fashion-drawing) paid to artistic virtue (street-markets and an

impending one-man-show).

"I say, Amory, you are plucky!" she exclaimed.

Amory knew that she was not plucky in the least, but it did not

displease her to let it go at that. She murmured something about

"Absurd!" and Dorothy, with a wave, was off. Amory heard her step in

the entry below; then the sound died away on Cheyne Walk.

Left alone, Amory set on the kettle again for washing-up; then, until

it should boil, she looked anew round the room in which, for all she

could see to the contrary, she would soon be living. And tea had now

put her into a rather better humour. After all, it might not be so bad.

Not that it was not all very fine for Dorothy to talk; anybody could

talk lightly about living over greengrocers' shops who had people who

rode in cars with tea-baskets and bridge-tables inside them and lived

in houses with eight-foot baths and electric lights in the wardrobes so

that they could see which frocks they were taking down; nevertheless,

it might not be so bad. Cosimo Pratt would help her. Cosimo was so good

at arranging things. If anybody could make this single dingy room with

the lovely view comfortable, Cosimo could. And Cosimo, unlike Dorothy,

really did understand her painting....

She did not pick up _The Golden Bough_ again; instead, she stood in

front of a photograph of the Gioconda that was pinned to the plaster

wall. It was one of a row--a Rembrandt, a Corot, the Infante, and

others--which she had bought in Paris four years before. She had

Pater's description of the Gioconda by heart, as also she had that of

Richard Jeffries of the Accroupie underneath it; and she was murmuring

the passage, when, with a great burst of steam, the kettle boiled over.

She set about her washing-up.

It was a task she loathed. All domestic work she loathed. In pouring

the boiling water on to the cups and saucers, with the kettle held out

at arm's length so that she should not splash herself, she got hold

of the hot part of the handle; and when she had run cold water on to

the utensils she dipped her fingers into a scalding cup in a corner of

the tin that had not been cooled. The butter on the plates was horrid,

and instead of the proper drying-cloth she got hold of a painting-rag,

with turps on it. A knife-handle came off in the boiling water, and,

incautiously drawing too near the sink, she splashed the brown velvet

skirt after all.

It was as she was washing her greasy hands afterwards that she became

conscious of a vague and familiar odour. From what part of the house

it came she did not know--perhaps from the greengrocer's downstairs,

perhaps from the rooms overhead. It came up the pipe, and it was the

smell of water in which cabbage had been boiled.

Hitherto it had not been worth complaining about, but now, if she

really was coming to live in this room, something would have to be

done. What it was that would have to be done--well, she would ask

Cosimo.

II

THE SURPRISE PARTY

"Glenerne," the boarding-house between Brook Green and Goldhawk Road

in which Amory lived with her aunt, was really two large houses thrown

into one; and, besides sheltering its twenty-odd guests, it served as a

sort of academy for the teaching of English to foreign waiters. These

came--German, Swiss, Danish, Belgian, even Turkish--without a word of

our tongue, gave their services for several months in return for their

food, and a year or so later were to be found in the restaurants of

Frith and Old Compton Streets and the brasseries of Leicester Square,

as English as you please. Perhaps in the manner of food they came off

better than did the guests themselves, for, while the establishment

provided four set meals a day, you had to sit down to all of these

unless you would go slightly hungry. Miss one and you never quite

caught up again.

But you forgot this slight nearness to the knuckle in the fullness with

which Miss Addams's advertisement in _The Shepherd's Bush Times_--the

one that began "Young Musical Society"--was redeemed. Every night there

was something "on"; if it was not a whist drive or singing it was an

impromptu dance in the large double drawing-room on the first floor,

or charades, or a semi-private rehearsal by the Glenerne contingent of

the Goldhawk Amateur Dramatic Society. The _esprit de pension_ was very

strong; it was as if a vow of loyalty to Miss Addams's cruets had been

taken.

The walls of the drawing-room were trophied with the photographs

of former guests; these stood, framed or unframed, in groves on

the mantelpiece (indeed, when Christmas came round with its cards,

it was impossible to open a door without bringing whole castles of

photographs and pasteboard greetings down into the fender); and, ranged

on one special little whatnot between the Nottingham lace curtains

and Millais's framed and glazed supplement of "Little Miss Muffet,"

were Miss Addams's "grand-children"--the offspring of the three or

four gentlemen or ladies who, at one time and another, had left the

boarding-house to get married. About these translated ones something of

the legendary, even of the grandiose, had grown up; and one particular

chair in the dining-room, that on Miss Addams's right hand, was still

known as "Mr. Wellcome's chair."

At half-past eight on the evening of the day on which Amory had told

Dorothy of her aunt's engagement a suppressed gaiety pervaded the whole

boarding-house. Dinner was over, and in the little greenhouse that

prolonged the hall at the expense of the narrow back garden a few of

the men were still smoking; but the drawing-room upstairs was filled

with a twittering of anticipation of the guests knew not what. Except

that it was to be in honour of Miss Towers's engagement, Miss Addams

had refused to tell what the evening's entertainment was to be. But

even those who had missed dinner had been told that that night Mr.

Massey had been promoted to Mr. Wellcome's chair, _vice_ Mr. Edmondson,

Glenerne's youngest gentleman, who hitherto had occupied it in order

to settle a disputed point of precedence between Mr. Rainbow and Mr.

Massey himself.

So, until Miss Addams should deign to declare herself, it seemed as

if whist or dancing might break out at any moment. Mr. Sandys, of the

Lille Road Branch of the East Midlands Bank, seemed loaded with song

on a hair-trigger, and had already cleared his throat once or twice;

little Mrs. Deschamps, who played the accompaniments, needed but a

look to remove her rings, set them in a neat row along the piano-top,

give the stool a twirl, and ask Mr. Geake, the Estate Agent, to turn

over for her; and young Mr. Edmondson, who was a booking-clerk, moved

here and there, humorously complaining that it was a bit thick, his

being ousted from Mr. Wellcome's chair like that. He did not cease to

pester Miss Addams to tell her little mystery. Miss Addams, huge and

pyramidal in her black satin, only smiled over her tatting (she smiled

frequently--the expression caused her slight moustache to pass for the

shadow of a dimple), and told him to wait and see.

"You know how you can get your place back again--after July," she said

demurely.

Miss Geraldine Towers and Mr. Massey were not in the room, and their

absence had already given rise to several of the rallies of wit that

were characteristic of Glenerne. For instance, when the little widow,

Mrs. Deschamps, had asked Amory with an air of great innocence where

her aunt was, and Amory had replied that she thought she was writing

letters, a ventriloquial voice, that might or might not have been that

of Mr. Sandys, had been heard to ask whether Mr. Massey was licking

the stamps; and again, when Mrs. Deschamps had asked Mr. Geake whether

he would be so good as to fetch her book for her (it was on the chair

by the aquarium), Mr. Geake had given the widow an intelligent look

and had replied that he rather thought the corner by the aquarium

was No Thoroughfare. Mrs. Deschamps had given a little apologetic

cough and had said, How stupid of her! and young Mr. Edmondson, whose

conversation was frequently a good deal beyond his years, had raised

a laugh by stroking his smooth lip and saying that he supposed it was

only Human Nature after all.

Amory was sitting on a painted three-legged stool under a standard

lamp, listlessly turning over the pages of a magazine. She hated this

place and these people, and only ironically had she asked Dorothy that

afternoon whether she would not like to come to this party. And she

almost hated her aunt, who was probably still sitting in the little

bead-curtained recess on the landing where the cloudy aquarium stood.

It seemed to her that if Aunt Jerry must get engaged at thirty-eight,

she might at least have done so without giving occasion for this kind

of vulgar and familiar comment. But she supposed that that was what

the "Young Musical Society" of Miss Addams's advertisement really

meant: gouty flirtations, ping-pong in middle age, having your toes

trodden on during scratch dances by stout and breathless partners,

and Progressive Whist with twenty-five-years-old stories told between

the deals. Amory's pretty mouth curled: she saw it all with merciless

clearness. Glenerne seemed to her to be half ancients trying to be

young, and half young people quickly getting old before their time. Oh,

that terrible and affable Mr. Edmondson--that awful Mr. Geake--that

impossible bank clerk, whatever his name was! And the place itself!

These Nottingham lace curtains, with the dreary joke of the artificial

spiders crawling upon them, and the macramé-hung mantelpieces, and the

Japanese joy-bells tinkling on the chandelier, when, with plain brown

or green paper, and a stencilled frieze in two colours, and a Japanese

print or two put just in the right places, and a few chosen books here

and there, even Glenerne might have been made quite passable!... She

was glad she was going to Cheyne Walk. She would at least be among her

own people and her own surroundings there!

She wished herself in Cheyne Walk at that moment when Mr. Edmondson

walked up to her where she sat. It never seemed to occur to Mr.

Edmondson that his company might not be at all times desirable, and

she almost shrank from him as she found her great fir-cone of red-gold

hair only an inch or two from his green knitted waistcoat. At a greater

distance, she sometimes glanced at this waistcoat with interest, as if,

in this place where the old became young again at the expense of their

juniors, she expected Mr. Edmondson to become visibly stouter from day

to day. Mr. Edmondson spoke now with idiotic cheerfulness.

"Looking at pictures, eh?" he said parentally. "Don't you get a bit

fed-up with 'em after a whole day of it?"

"No," said Amory.

"Don't you, really! Well, I must say illusterated papers have made

great strides this last few years. Who'd ha' thought of a _Daily

Spec_ a few years ago? And we think nothing about it now. I see 'em

out o' my little window once the morning rush slacks off a bit--the

bookstall's just opposight--they chuck their ha'pennies down one after

another--'_Spec!_' they say--never think twice about it."

"Oh?" said Amory. Mr. Edmondson might have been the historian of modern

journalism, looking back. He continued.

"'Uge circulation it must have; why, I've known 'em get through as

many as thirty-eight quires in a single morning at our place alone;

_some_body must make some money out of it! I forget what their divvy

is.--But I wonder you don't get fed-up with pictures for all that.

It'll be like me dealing out tickets instead of cards for whist."

"Almost the same," said Amory.

Mr. Edmondson looked at her for a moment suspiciously, as if he thought

she was getting at him. Not very long before, Mr. Edmondson would have

resented being got at by girls, especially in his green waistcoat; but

he had grown soberer and more tolerant since then. He went avuncularly

on.

"What d'you suppose Miss Addams is going to spring on us? I guessed

French blind-man's bluff for a start, with word-making and whist to

cool off a bit on: but Mrs. D. says forfeits.... What, are you off?"

"Yes, I've a letter to write."

"That's the style: business before pleasure. I hope you write in a good

light always: nothing worse for the eyes than writing in a bad light.

It's no good wishing you had your eyesight back again when it's gone:

the thing is to take care of it while you're young. I saw a bit in the

paper the other day--it was about reading in bed----"

But Amory fled.

As she dropped the _portière_ of the drawing-room door behind her

she encountered her aunt on the landing. She stopped. She was very

angry with her aunt; she felt that her aunt was making of her, too, a

laughing-stock. She turned her shallow brook-brown eyes, but hardly her

head, as she spoke.

"I do think----" she began impetuously, and stopped. She stopped out of

the sense that these things ought not to have to be said. In making it

necessary for Amory to remark on them at all her aunt was putting her

into a false position.

Miss Geraldine Towers had her hand on the knob of the door. She smiled,

but did not turn the knob.

"What, dear?" she asked amiably.

"I do think you needn't set them all talking the way you do. You might

think of me a bit. Really, it's rather much sometimes."

For a moment Miss Towers turned pink, then she laughed. She was plump

and personable; her new way of doing her hair had taken ten years off

her age and if her high lace collar was rather tight and did cut her a

little under her second chin, well, we all have our troubles, and there

are worse ones than plumpness. She straightened her wisteria-coloured

satin blouse so that the waist above the tailor-made fawn skirt looked

its smallest, and tilted her laughing head back so that it seemed to

rock on the two points of her collar-whalebones as if they had been

gimballs.

"My dear," she broke out, "_don't_ be so absurdly solemn! Try to enjoy

yourself; you'll never be younger than you are now! And I do wish you

wouldn't go about in those sad art-colours always. You look like a

sparrow having a dust-bath. They may be all right for pictures, but it

isn't as if you sat in a frame all day. Good gracious, anybody'd think

you were eighty to see you sometimes! Laugh and the world laughs with

you, my dear. Come inside, and don't be silly; we're going to have

great fun."

But again Amory turned away.

More than once she had had a wild wonder whether that trip to Paris had

not had something to do with her aunt's preposterous rejuvenescence;

but no, it was hardly possible that while she herself had wandered

in the museums Aunt Jerry had given herself to secret and wicked

pleasures. No, it was the boarding-house and the young musical society

again. That clever advertisement had really made Aunt Jerry think

that she was young.... It did not occur to Amory that perhaps these

ancient ones, of forty or fifty or more, had earned a rest. It did

not occur to her that life might have bruised and scarred them, and

that they laughed a little loudly and stridently for fear of worse,

and that there was hardly one of them whose eyes had not rested on

sadder and more sordid and tragic scenes than her own had ever seen.

She saw them, as it were, in the flat, as a mere human pattern, and

when she was bored with it, Glenerne was a thing to be shut up like

one of its own photograph albums. Their manners offended her, and she

inquired no further.... In the meantime, however, flirtatious little

Mrs. Deschamps would sit in a corner with anybody, and her aunt entered

into an engagement at an age when she really might have been expected

to be thinking of serious things, and the whatnot in the corner, with

its photographs of Glenerne's grandchildren, was a source of mirth that

seemed never to run dry, and if Amory must be misunderstood, well, it

was better to be misunderstood than to be understood by these terrible

people.

Amory went to her room and took down a volume of Pater.

But she had hardly opened the book when there came a tap at her door,

and, in response to her "Come in," her aunt's middle-aged fiancé

entered.

Dorothy Lennard had called Mr. Massey the safety-valve because he

always seemed to use three times as many "s's" in his conversation as

anybody else. These escaped over a neat little row of very white lower

teeth like those of a bulldog. The dark hair that grew up the sides

of his head always reminded Amory of the elastics of an old pair

of boots, and his cropped dark moustache did not interfere with his

perpetual gentle hissing. He wore gold glasses and a closely-buttoned

frock-coat; he was an educational bookseller in St. Mark's Road; and it

had now been known for some hours in the boarding-house that he, a man

of some substance, had been moved to come to Glenerne first of all by

the sight of Miss Geraldine Towers shaking the crumb-tray out of the

window to feed the birds.

"My dear Amory," said Mr. Massey, "Geraldine has asked me to come and

see whether you won't join the rest of us in our little celebration. I

need not say that it would be pleasant if you would assist."

Without (she thought) too open an appearance of resignation, Amory

closed her book again. She supposed she must.... "All right, if you

like," she said, without fervour.

"Thank you," said Mr. Massey gratefully. "I was sure you would not

absent yourself.--And since I am here, I wonder whether I might say a

word for which occasion has not hitherto presented itself?"

Amory was silent, noting the educational bookseller's periods. He

continued.

"It is perhaps a little too early to speak of it, but it might set your

mind at rest. When Geraldine and I are married, in July if all be well,

I do not want you to feel that any difference to yourself will be made.

Your home, if you wish it, will still be with us."

Amory broke out a little quickly, as if not to leave it for a moment in

doubt that she was properly grateful, "Oh, thank you so very much, Mr.

Massey----"

"George--or Uncle George----" said Mr. Massey gently.

"--Uncle George--and I do hope you won't think me horrid--but I thought

of living in my studio----"

Mr. Massey made a little calming gesture with his hands, as if to say

that all should be exactly as she pleased. He nodded several times.

"I understand; your art; you know best; don't think I wish to put the

least constraint on you. I only want to assure you that your aunt's

house is always at your disposal," he said kindly.

"Thank you so much," said Amory hurriedly; and there was a sudden pause.

"It will probably," Mr. Massey went on deliberatively, as if he passed

a succession of desirable dwellings in mental review, "be on the Mall.

Yes, Chiswick Mall. One sees such sweet sketches there, especially of

sunsets. But in case you do elect to occupy your studio, there will

be a little business we shall have to arrange. It may even include a

little money. But we can talk of that later.--Shall we join the others,

my dear?"

He was genuinely fond of her. When she touched her hair before the

little white-draped glass he discreetly turned his back, almost as if

he wished to reassure Amory about any stray jest she might have heard

about the aquarium corner; and then after a moment he punctiliously

gave Amory his arm. They returned to the drawing-room.

Perhaps Miss Addams herself had become a little anxious about her

promised surprise, and had decided to make sure of something else in

case it failed her, for they had begun to dance. Every boarder was

there, including M. Criqui, the Frenchman; and, ranged inseparably

against the wall, were the three Indians whose faces resembled olives

with white moving eyes. Mats and rugs had been pushed back to the

walls; M. Criqui "turned" for Mrs. Deschamps; Mr. Edmondson was

waltzing with pretty Miss Crebbin, the typist; and Mr. Sandys danced

with Miss Swan, of the Preparatory School near the tram terminus.

The window looking on to the back garden was open; the screen of

pock-marked coloured glass had been drawn in front of the fire; and

the pictures on the walls moved slightly in the draughts. Mr. Geake

had placed himself on point-duty near the folding-doors, and was

shepherding couples past the awkward place; and from a group of men

who conspired out on the landing came sudden bursts of laughter from

time to time. Mr. Massey, the hero of the occasion, left Amory, and

moved here and there, patting backs, touching elbows, and ever and anon

beaming with mild delight about him and rubbing his hands.

The waltz ended, and another began; and Mr. Edmondson, who seemed to

have shaken off his seriousness and to have lapsed into youth again,

came up to Amory and asked her whether he might have the pleasure.

Amory, resolved to go through it now that she was here, placed her

hand on his arm. "Might as well have one of these while there's any

left," he said genially, snatching a paper fan from the mantelpiece as

they passed; "I wonder what those blighters are up to!" He indicated

the group that conspired near the door.... "You ain't interested

in football, I s'pose? I'm going to the Final at the Palace on

Saturday--special leave, what oh!--Donkins'll take my place--and it

won't half be a squeeze, I give you _my_ word! Funny place to go for a

squeeze, eh, Miss Amory?"

Mr. Edmondson was now quite the Mr. Edmondson of the green waistcoat,

not to be got at by girls if he knew it.

And still the inscrutable Miss Addams, with her eye drifting a little

more frequently towards the door, gave no sign.

"Here, I say, come orf it!" Mr. Edmondson grinned as he and Amory

passed M. Criqui and Mrs. Deschamps for the fourth time. They were

talking French. "No taking advantage, Criqui!... I don't call that

playing the game," he continued to Amory. "But you talk French, of

course?"

"A little," said Amory.

"Hanged if I can make out half what them blighters say," Mr. Edmondson

continued cheerfully. "In English, I mean. One of 'em came up this

morning--8.45--right in the thick. '_To-tnm-co-croad!_' he says, just

like that; and if I don't give him a brief for Tott-n-m C't Road and

the right change before you can say knife I've got Aspinall down on me

like a cartload o'bricks. It ain't no tea-party, my job ain't, not in

the thick, you take _my_ word for it! Chap tried to ring a bad two-bob

on me this morning; broke in two in the clip--you've seen the clips we

use, haven't you? What, you haven't? Just you notice some time!--Broke

in two--like that--and him barging there with twenty people behind

shouting 'Hurry up' and prodding him with their sticks and brollies.

Oh, it's a pinch, I _don't_ think!"

But still Miss Addams's surprise didn't come. After that waltz Mrs.

Deschamps flatly refused to play again until she had had a dance, and

so Miss Crebbin, the typist, played, to calls of "New ribbon, Miss

C----! Mind the visible writing!" Then Mrs. Deschamps sat, first by the

door, where she told M. Criqui that all Frenchmen had such dreadful

reputations, and next at the open window at the back, where she asked

him what "In the Spring a Young Man's Fancy" was in French, and then

disappeared altogether. Aunt Geraldine, laughing, moved everywhere,

with Mr. Massey following her with his hands clasped behind his back,

and if she had to show her half-hoop of diamonds once she had to do so

a dozen times. Then Mrs. Deschamps came back, crying over her shoulder,

"If you tell, M. Criqui, I'll never speak to you again!" but M.

Criqui did tell, of how Mrs. Deschamps, venturing into the greenhouse

downstairs that was used as a smoking-room, had been detained almost by

force until she had smoked half a cigarette.

Nor was it Miss Addams's surprise even when one of the group of men who

had been conspiring by the door handed an envelope to Mrs. Deschamps.

"A note for you, Mrs. D.," he said, and Mrs. Deschamps turned it

backwards and forwards and said she wondered who it could be from.

She tore the envelope open and then fell back with a shriek, while

the circle of men about her roared and slapped one another on the

shoulders. A small object had leapt from the envelope with an angry

buzz, and now lay still on the floor.

"The Kissing Bee!" shouted elderly Mr. Rainbow, making a reckless

attempt to assume the voice of a Ludgate Hill hawker.

"Causes 'eaps o' fun and roars o' laughter!" Mr. Beeton, of the

cycle-works, cried.

"Don't go 'ome wifaht it!----"

"One penny!----"

"Knocks the jam-splosh and the spill of ink silly, eh, what?"

"Here, let's have a look--where do you get 'em?"

"_Oh_, you wretches!" pouted Mrs. Deschamps.

And then, in the very midst of the hubbub, Miss Addams's surprise was

upon them. A Belgian waiter stood in one of the doorways. He held

himself more erect than usual against the wall; save that the tips of

his fingers were turned in to prevent his too loose cuffs from falling

too far down, his attitude would have been that of perfect "attention."

"Mis-tairr----Ooell-come!" he announced.

A shout went up that stirred the dust on the chandeliers. Stout,

red-faced, rubbing his hands, and (in flat violation of Miss Addams's

rule) puffing a gigantic cigar, Mr. Wellcome himself stood in the

doorway, frowning humorously on the group that twisted with laughter

about Mrs. Deschamps.

"Now, now, now, now, now--what's all this about?" Mr. Wellcome cried

with mock severity.

Acclamations broke forth.

"Wellcome, by Jove!" cried Mr. Rainbow, in a sort of glad consternation.

"Bravo!" shouted Mr. Geake. "It's old Wellcome!"

"Come in out o' the wet!"

"Welcome, Wellcome!"

"Hooray!"

Mr. Wellcome came in, crossed straight to Miss Addams, kissed her

without a moment's hesitation (only remarking, "When the cat's

away--eh?"), slapped his hands loudly together, and then, turning his

head half a dozen times this way and that, cried, "Well, and how are we

all, eh?"

They cheered him again.

"And now where's Massey and the blushing one?" Mr. Wellcome demanded;

and when he had found them and shaken hands with them he almost doubled

the scholastic stationer in two with the blow he gave him between the

shoulder-blades. He gave a "Ha, ha, ha!" of amazing volume.

"Done it now, my boy!" he cried. "Nasty things, actions for Breach!

Twopence on the bus from High Street to the Broadway now! Well,

well, we all do it, even the flies on the sugar-basin! Congrats,

congrats.--Now, Mrs. Deschamps! Damme, I must have a kiss from you too,

if it was only for the sake of old times!--Where's Mrs. W----? Tut-tut,

_you_ ought to know better than to ask; ask Massey, he knows--or he

will one of these days!... Well, now we're all here let's get on with

the Prayer Meeting. _Phtt!_"

Mr. Wellcome whistled and snapped his fingers to the waiter at the door.

For Mr. Wellcome never came empty-handed. The Belgian waiter approached

with a tray, and it was now discovered that another tray chock-full

of jingling glasses stood outside. Mr. Wellcome travelled for Perclay

Barkins & Co., and knew butlers and wine-tasters and cellarmen and

head-waiters, and was to be relied on for valuable information about

vintages and bottling and tobacco-crops.--"Stand there, Whiskerino, by

Miss Addams," he commanded the waiter; and from the tray he began to

toss into Miss Addams's lap a number of articles.

"Thought you might find a use for these," he said off-handedly. (They

were packs of cards that had been used once in some Club or other.)

"And you might as well have the latest multiple corkscrew as anybody

else, I suppose, eh? Catch!--Now, friends and gentlemen all, oblige

me by joining me in a smoke. The curtains, mother? Dash the curtains;

Massey don't get engaged every day, at least I hope he doesn't; not

that there's any knowing what some of them does under the rose--ha, ha,

ha!... Now, Sandys, help yourself. Here's a cutter. Smoke half of it,

and then throw t'other half away; there's plenty more in the box.--Now,

where's Rainbow? Here you are; you're my man; _you_ know a little

bit of all right when you taste it; half a minute, and I'll ask your

opinion of _this_----"

Mr. Wellcome's face became deeply serious as he stooped for a minute;

then, as he stood upright again with a bottle in his right hand and a

liqueur glass in his left, it shone once more.

"Steady ... _there_!" He passed an exquisitely filled glass to Mr.

Rainbow. "Warm it in your hands a minute first--this way--smell it--and

now roll it slowly round the inside o' your mouth!----"

Had Mr. Rainbow been Cinquevalli balancing the billiard-balls every eye

could not have been more intently on him.

"_Mmmmmm!_" he murmured ecstatically, lips closed, nostrils gently

sniffing, eyes fondling the glass.

"Eh?" said Mr. Wellcome, winking to all and sundry, as much as to say,

Hadn't he told them so? "Eh? What? Spanish, should you say? _I_ should

think so! W. W. gives you _his_ word for that, worth something or worth

nothing as the case may be!... Now, all! Rainbow's only the taster,

in case it was poison; you hold that tray steady, Antonionio; ladies

first, I think, is the law of politeness----"

And the tiny glasses, rich and deep as Amory's hair, were passed round.

Never such a party had been given at Glenerne. The smell of the cigars

and the brandy filled the air like some incense burned before the god

of the naughty World; more witty things were said by loosened tongues

than their owners could ever hope to remember. Fun? Oh, there was fun

when Mr. Wellcome himself took matters in hand!... "Now, who says

a flutter?" he said by and by, shuffling one of the packs of cards

as only Mr. Wellcome could shuffle cards. "For love, Nellie--and

forfeits----" But Nellie (Mrs. Deschamps) had already been fluttered

by the Kissing Bee, and was in a mood too softened for cards; and, for

fear the brandy should have affected anybody, another tray with strong

coffee was passed round by Omar K, the red-fezzed boy from Smyrna with

the face of the hue of a chocolate "shape." They kept it up late; for

once the "lights out at eleven" rule was suspended; and even Amory sat

up quite a long time after she might without singularity have gone to

bed. At last Mr. Wellcome rose. He for one had enjoyed himself just

fair-to-middling, he said. The mats and rugs were left where they were,

pushed back against the walls. Quite twenty voices downstairs in the

hall sang that Mr. Wellcome was a jolly good fellow, and what remained

of the Spanish brandy was brought downstairs for the two policemen who

(nobody knew how) were presently discovered, smiling and with their

helmets in their hands, just within the front door.--"Best respects,

sir," said one of them, and "Many of 'em," said the other.

And so said all the rest.

III

THE FASHION STUDIO

The Fashion Studio that employed Miss Dorothy Lennard had originally

been, and in a sense was still, the enterprise of a small printer; and

Dorothy had been what Amory called "lucky" to get there. Had Amory

herself wanted a post as an apprentice to fashion-drawing, she would

have had to fill her folio with "specimens," to sit with half a dozen

other applicants in a waiting-room until it had pleased some manager or

proprietor to touch a bell and to give orders that the prettiest one

was to be admitted, and then, on her work or prettiness or both, to

take her chance. But Dorothy had been enabled to skip all that. Even

more than the wealthy Lennards and Taskers who stood in the background

behind her, a certain blindness to higher things had given Dorothy an

advantage from the start. She had, for example, quite unprincipled ways

with men. Almost any one woman (Dorothy was in the habit of reasoning

modestly) could turn any one man round her finger if she went the right

way about it; and it seemed to her that the men knew that too. If they

didn't, why were they always trying to dodge the individual issue, and

to say such fearfully solemn things about the abstraction of Womanhood

itself? Dorothy thought she saw the reason. It was that, in the lump,

men could usually manage them. It was in detail that they hadn't a

chance.

Therefore Dorothy, having quite made up her mind who her printer-victim

was to be, had not for a moment dreamed of writing him a letter

and then waiting on him with a folio. Instead, she had cast about

among cousins and so forth until she had found one who knew the

sleeping-partner of the firm. Then, after some little consideration of

ways and means, she had contrived to meet this sleeping-partner, this

maker and unmaker of mere printers, not in the firm's matchboarded

office with the machines growling overhead, but at supper at an hotel.

These things make all the difference to the consideration in which

you are held.... She had hardly had to ask for her job. Machinating

men, with their stories and drinks and cigars, can do a good deal, but

Dorothy knew how to make of her guileless blue eyes a spiritualizing

of mere drinks and stories and cigars. She had, too, ideas the very

_naïveté_ of which was likely to strike a man immersed in mere dull

business routine. Meeting the printers' sleeping-partner again, this

time at a lunch that spread over into tea-time, she had been able to

drop into his ears her own purely personal conviction (against which he

would, no doubt, see any number of reasons: still, there it was)--her

conviction that his fashion-business, as it stood, was not capable of

very much further development. It was not her affair, she had said;

that was merely how it struck her; but--she wondered whether the band

_could_ be induced to play the "Chanson Triste!"----

And so the printers' catalogue-business had been turned topsy-turvy.

The printing-office was in Endell Street, and the printing was still

done there; but the fashion-studio was there no longer. It was now

in Oxford Street, not far from Manchester Square and the Wallace

Collection. The single room on the top floor overlooked the vast

interior square where, later, acres of glass roofs and flying bridges

of iron were to arise; in a word, they had subrented part of the

premises of Hallowell & Smith's, the huge Ladies' Emporium--and if you

have never heard of Hallowell & Smith's it is not Hallowell & Smith's

fault. A mutually profitable "dicker" that had something to do with

Hallowell & Smith's minor printing made the place cheap; and, though

the firm's Summer and Winter Catalogues were still drawn and printed

elsewhere, nothing (it had seemed to Dorothy) would be lost by allowing

Hallowell & Smith's to discover presently that they had facilities for

this kind of work actually on the spot.... This was the kind of hint

she had dropped to the power behind the printer who had shown himself

so fussy about the ice-pail and the music "by request." She had no

plan, but streams did seem to set in certain directions, and it was

not much good going against them. They had not obtained the order for

Hallowell's Catalogues yet, but one thing at a time. Dorothy must learn

her own part of the business first. She must practise her Fur-touch,

graduating to Feathers, and so on to faces themselves. More might

happen by and bye.

In one respect at least the change was not altogether for the better,

for, bad as the rumble of the machines at Endell Street had been,

Hallowell's mammoth rebuilding, which included much throwing down of

old walls amid eruptions of lime and dust, and the running day and

night of a crane the top of which lost itself in the blue air, was

worse. These activities shook the whole fabric of the place, playing

the very deuce with Torchon and Valenciennes. But in every other

respect the change was not only an improvement, but the Fashion Studio

now stood in the full stream of general developments. It only needed

a time-serving, and, for choice, a feminine mind, and there was no

telling what might not happen.

To reach the upper room where the seven or eight girls worked, you

had to pass from the lift along a long concrete-floored corridor and

then through a large outer room that was one of the sitting-rooms

of Hallowell's "living-in" female employees. Of the fashion-drawing

factory Miss Porchester was head. She herself went out in the mornings

to shops and warehouses to sketch, sometimes taking as many as a

dozen buses and cabs in the course of a single morning; and in the

afternoon she returned with, the fruits of her wanderings--or, rather,

with the seeds, for they were yet to grow and ripen marvellously. Fat

Miss Benson took them in hand first. With a foot-rule by her side for

checking, lest there should be too much even of a good thing, she

roughed in those elongated and fish-like figures which, if you would

see them in normal proportion, you must squint at aslant up the tilted

page. Then Miss Hurst or blonde Miss Umpleby took over the drawing,

further developing the Tea-gown or the Walking Costume, or the lady

in her corsets riding in a motor car, or whatever it might be. From

them it passed to Miss Smedley or Miss Cowan, who worked it up with

lamp-black or Chinese-white or what not, for Miss Ruffell to put in

the faces, large-eyed and soulful. Dorothy measured and squared the

production, gave a last look to see that the fish-like ideal had not

been lost in its progress from hand to hand and that there was nothing

else that might start a young man on the downward path, and put a line

round it if a line was needed. Pigtailed little Smithie affixed the

protecting piece of tissue-paper. It was finished.

Miss Porchester, gaunt and dark, sat at a little table apart, where she

could keep an eye on her staff. She kept the register of work done, and

saw that the requisite "points" were properly emphasized--the new skirt

"set" with a slight difference, the hat tilted an inch lower over one

eyebrow than during the season before. She received the travellers, and

taught her girls, if they must talk to one another as they worked, to

do so without removing their eyes from their sheets of Bristol-board.

Quite animated conversations would go on by the hour together without

so much as a head moving; and Dorothy's own blue eyes, which were

never so wide open but that they could always open a little wider,

would contract and dilate over her work as she talked as if they had

contained a pulse.

Whatever Amory might think about it, the other girls too thought

Dorothy lucky to have had a real art-training. They had not been to the

McGrath.... And, quite apart from the _cachet_ this gave her, Dorothy

herself certainly had a way with her. Miss Smedley, for example, was

as old as Dorothy, but Miss Smedley, for no reason that could be

described, always seemed to move in an atmosphere of kindlily-bestowed

pity; but nobody would have dreamed of pitying Dorothy. It was

very much the other way. As if they had known her methods with

sleeping-partners (which they did not), they looked up to her. Her

sayings were repeated, her mistakes covered up for her; and even Miss

Porchester never gave her "one for herself." She was the only one of

the girls so exempted.

One morning at about the time Miss Geraldine Towers became engaged to

Mr. Massey, the fashion-studio was able at last to draw a long breath

of relief and to tell itself that the worst of the half-yearly rush was

about over. The last page of the last Summer Catalogue had been sent

off to Endell Street, and for a month or two only the normal trickle of

odd jobs would be coming in. Even the rule about not moving your head

as you talked had been relaxed, and only one cloud marred the general

sense of release--the certainty that some of the girls would be "given

a holiday" until the next rush began in the Autumn. The girls were

discussing this that afternoon. Miss Porchester had gone to Endell

Street; fat Miss Benson, her second in command, had passed through

the adjoining sitting-room half an hour before, and was guessed to be

talking on the stairs with Mr. Mooney, of Hallowell's Handkerchief

Department; and Dorothy also intended to take the risk of Miss

Porchester's inquiring for her and to fly off presently to Cheyne Walk.

"Oh, _you_ needn't worry, Smithie," said Miss Umpleby, her chair tilted

back so that her primrose hair and clasped hands rested against the

coats and jackets on the wall. "They always want somebody to run about

and be useful. Hilda and I'll be the ladies till August. We shall come

back again with the Furs."

Hilda Jeyes had her elbows on the table; she was munching an apple.

"It all comes of our being kept at the one thing, over and over again,"

she declared. "Look at me: what am I? A Camisole Specialist! Why, if I

was to be set to do Damask, or Mourning, or Boots, like Benny, I should

no more know where to begin than I could fly! If only that girl on the

_Daily Spec_ would die! I'd be after her place in two twos, I promise

you!"

"They never die when they're on newspapers," Miss Umpleby remarked,

with the detached air of one who reminds her hearers of a well-known

fact in mortality statistics. "Splendid thing for the health. I wonder

the doctors don't prescribe it."

"And when they get married they stick to their jobs just the same,"

another girl commented. (To be on the staff of a newspaper, it may be

said, is the prize of the fashion-artist's profession.)

"No ladies with one foot on a chair for the _Daily Spec_, like the one

you began this morning," Miss Umpleby remarked.

"Well, what chance have we here, I should like to know, with one

roughing out all the time, and another doing nothing but heads, and

another the curly-cues! There isn't one of us except Benny who could do

a job right through!" Hilda Jeyes grumbled.

"Just so that we can turn the stuff out quicker!" somebody else joined

in. "'Holiday's' a good name for it, I _don't_ think!"

Miss Umpleby turned her eyes nonchalantly to the coats above her head.

"Monte Carlo for me, I think," she said. "Then I shall be able to put

in those petticoat bodices with Casino backgrounds and do somebody else

out of a job."

Hilda Jeyes threw away the core of her apple. "You needn't growl,

anyway, Umpy. You are engaged."

"So I am," remarked Miss Umpleby, as if she had just remembered it. "I

think I'll ring my source of trouble up now." She brought the chair

down on to its fore-legs again. "Tell me if Benny comes. You can all

listen if you like.--Hallo, Exchange!--One-six-double-one Hop!"

And at the telephone on Miss Porchester's table she began a conversation

in which the words "Carlton ... or the Savoy if you like ... Mentone

... I've a little time on my hands now," recurred from time

to time.

Dorothy herself had more than once thought that this sub-division of

work was hard on the girls. Umpy lived with her mother near dotting

Hill Gate Station, and was engaged to a boy who got thirty shillings

a week as a clerk in the Russian Import trade; Benny and Hilda Jeyes

shared cheap rooms somewhere in Bloomsbury; the others lunched on buns

or brought bread-and-butter or sandwiches in paper, and would have had

to spend an hour in looking for a dropped shilling had they been so

fortunate as to possess a shilling to drop. All were at the mercy of

the half-yearly rush and the intervals of idleness between. Dorothy had

sometimes wondered whether she herself ought not to have sponged on her

relations rather than keep one of these needy girls out of a place....

But she was a practical young woman, with more plans than theories,

and eyes that did not carry over many of the dreams of the night into

the working days; and beyond a certain point she refused to shoulder

the responsibilities of a world she had had no hand in making. Up to

that point--well, if (say, by and by) she were ever to "run" a studio

of this kind, she would see that the work was not so sub-divided that

her girls had no chance in the open market. And she would offer now

and then a little inducement over and above wages, and would arrange

for them to get quite good but shop-soiled things at a fair reduction,

and would get them to take an interest in their work, and would stop

Hilda sucking her brushes, and would have the brick taken out of that

ventilation-pipe, and another set of wash-bowls, and would annex that

adjoining room, and--and--well, anyway, if Catalogues had to be done

like this, she would see that those who did them were no worse off

with her than with anybody else, and perhaps a bit better.... And now

she must get off to Cheyne Walk. She rose, and went for her hat and

raincoat.

"You're not off, are you, Lennie?" said Miss Umpleby. She had finished

talking into the telephone. Her last words had been, "Mean old

thing!... Well, will you treat me to eighteen-pennorth at the Finbec,

then?... Fried plaice and chips?... All right...."

"Yes. Another stroke in my unfortunate family, tell Porchester. They

came in a cab to fetch me. Good-bye...."

She sought the lift, descended, passed along the narrow alley to the

side street, and caught an Oxford Street bus.

Her reason for leaving early was to warn Amory that guests might

be expected at Cheyne Walk that evening. Going out to lunch that

day she had met, coming away from the Wallace, a party of her old

fellow-students of the McGrath. She had recognized them fifty yards

away up Duke Street--tall Cosimo Pratt, without hat and with a grey

flannel turned-down collar about his shapely throat, Walter Wyron in

his snuff-coloured corduroys, Laura Beamish, Katie Deedes, and two or

three other girls in clothes that (it seemed to Dorothy) looked as if

a touch of opaque Chinese-white had somehow found its way into clear

greens and russets and browns.--"Why, there's Dorothy!" Walter Wyron

had exclaimed, turning from the Peasant Industries Shop on the west

side of the street. "Hi, Dorothy!..." (Half the street had turned to

see who shouted so.) "_Dorothy!_..." (The other half of the street had

turned.) "Come here and tell us how's Fashions!..."

They had borne Dorothy off to a teashop to lunch.

Dorothy sometimes wished that they would find a newer joke than that

about her occupation. It seemed to come virgin to them every time they

met. It was not as if she had had any illusions about it. Moreover,

when you came to think of it, Walter Wyron (much as Dorothy admired his

decorative drawings in black and white), only published one of them

every three or four months, and lived on his hundred and fifty a year

the rest of the time. And handsome Cosimo Pratt had never published a

drawing nor exhibited a painting in his life. Of course, even their

failures were as much higher than Dorothy's successes as the heavens

are higher than the earth: but Miss Porchester would not have trusted

one of them with a Summer or Winter Catalogue cover. In her secret

heart Dorothy was rather glad that Amory had not accepted her own offer

of a day or two before. Mercier was going to do it. And Mercier didn't

suppose it would be bought for the nation when it was done.

But for all that they had rather rubbed Dorothy's job in at lunch that

day, and, when they had tired of doing so directly, had continued to do

so indirectly by asking, in altered tones, questions about Amory and

what she was doing. When (they wanted to know) _was_ that show of hers

going to be? _Why_ didn't she hurry Hamilton Dix up? Didn't Amory know

that that Harris girl was painting all her subjects and had one at the

Essex Gallery now? A talent like Amory's!----

"You'd better come and ask her," Dorothy had replied. "Why not all come

round to-night? Cosimo, you're quite near, and Laura could fetch her

guitar----"

"No! Really?" Cosimo had broken out in his glad, rich voice. "I say,

shall we all go?"

"I'm on," Walter Wyron had cried eagerly.

"You could fetch your guitar, couldn't you, Laura?"

"And Amory hasn't heard Walter's new recitation----"

"Good. We'll come."

"Rather!"

And now Dorothy was hurrying to Cheyne Walk to help Amory to prepare.

She reached the room over the greengrocer's shop at half-past four, and

found Amory in a long pinafore, painting. "You needn't knock off," she

said, when she had made her announcement; "I'll go out and buy in."

But whether it was that Amory was in difficulties with her work, or

whether her pulse had suddenly bounded at the thought of a party really

after her own heart, she threw down her palette.

"Oh no, rather not!" she cried. "I'll come with you. Just half a

minute; I'll wash my brushes when we come back. How ripping!"

Joyously she snatched down from the hook her porringer hat; her eyes

shone as she thrust the enamel-headed pins through it. She had not seen

Cosimo for several weeks, the others for months and months, and she

was pining, simply pining, for a party that a rational person could

enjoy. So excited was she, and so full of the preparations for their

guests, that she quite forgot their own dinner; it was Dorothy who

stopped at the butcher's for three-quarters of a pound of steak, and,

at the confectioner's remembered the Chelsea buns. At a wine-shop they

bought a flask of Chianti, and at a grocer's nuts, biscuits, and a box

of dates. Walter and Cosimo could be relied on to provide cigarettes,

and oranges and bananas were to be had at the shop downstairs. As the

clock of Chelsea Church struck five they descended Oakley Street again,

so laden with parcels that the disturbance of a single package or paper

bag would have meant the spilling of the lot. For the oranges and

bananas Amory went downstairs again. By the time she returned Dorothy

had taken a brush and was making ready to sweep.

"Oh, please," said Amory, "just a minute till I've put my canvas out

of the way--and it won't take me three minutes to clean my palette and

wash my brushes----"

She carried her wet canvas out on to the landing beyond the warped door.

If, while Dorothy swept, Amory lingered a little over her brush-washing

and palette-cleaning, and then proceeded to make of the wasted paint a

paper "butterfly," she had this justification--that she swept as badly

as she washed up. Moreover, she was already running over beforehand

the heads of a really elevating talk she wanted to have with Cosimo on

the subject of Eugenics. Cosimo was the kind of man you could talk to

sanely and sensibly about these things; he could discuss them with her

in the proper inquiring spirit, and without either mock modesty or a

thought behind. He despised mock modesty and the thought behind as much

as Amory herself despised them; he had frequently said so. That, with

the knowledge that she herself was by a good deal the cleverer of the

two, seemed to Amory the really satisfactory relation. They were "the

best of pals." Amory liked the expression. It was so unlike Glenerne

and the leers about the aquarium corner.

Therefore, as Dorothy, sweeping, asked her how her aunt's

engagement-party had gone off, she replied with an almost indulgent

laugh. Dorothy wouldn't believe (she said) how absurd her aunt could

be. Dorothy, burrowing with the broom into a corner, laughed too.

"All aunts are, my dear. (Mind your foot.) Don't talk to me about

aunts. I've got some, thanks. (Sorry, and I'm afraid I shall sweep all

the dust on you if you stand there.) Our latest is a frightful row

between Aunt Emmie, that's the one in Calcutta, and Aunt Eliza, the

one in Wales. All about some diamonds everybody'd forgotten all about,

but some stupid old busybody of a bank-manager must go and turn them

up, and Aunt Emmie says grandfather gave them to _her_, and Aunt Eliza

says he gave them to _her_, and ... well, there you are. The less said

about those diamonds the better in a family like ours, _I_ should have

said. (Oh dear, Amory, _do_ stand somewhere else!) Cousin Clara says

they're pretty sure to be the wages of somebody's sin. Talk about your

one aunt! I've a dozen, half of 'em not quite right in their heads ...

(Amory, if you don't move I shall hit you with the brush!)..."

Amory moved, finished her "butterfly," and began to cut it out with a

pair of scissors.

"I'll unpack the bananas," she said, as Dorothy laid the broom aside.

Deftly she unpacked the bananas; skilfully she took the oranges

from their tissue-paper, dropping the tissue-paper on the floor.

She arranged them on a large apple-green dish, which she set on the

gate-legged table; and then she stood back surveying the colour and

grouping while Dorothy peppered and salted and prepared to cook the

three-quarters of a pound of steak. She turned the dish this way and

that, seeking fresh lights to put it in. Amory's work was never done.

Often she was busiest when she seemed most idle. _She_ could not say

to eye and brain, as Dorothy could say to mere hands, "It is finished

now ... you may rest...." It was not finished even when Dorothy had set

the table, cooked the steak, and made all ready for serving. There were

the yellow bananas and the glowing oranges to paint in her mind, on the

white cloth now instead of on the oaken board....

They dined and cleared away, and, while Dorothy washed up, Amory

replaced the dish of fruit on the table, set out the biscuits and cakes

on the Persian Rose plates, and made of all, with the flask of Chianti,

another still-life group. Then she disposed the chairs as if by happy

accident, and poked the fire. The casement looking over the river

became an oblong of dim blue; the fire burnt up, and glowed on the

black and sagging old ceiling; and Amory hoped that the people overhead

were going to be quiet to-night.

Then, at a little after eight, there came from outside, somewhere

beyond the Pier Hotel, the sound of a baritone voice. It was Walter

Wyron, singing "The Raggle-taggle Gipsies." Amory started up.

"Here they come!" she cried, clapping her hands.

And she ran down the stairs to meet them.

IV

THE MCGRATH

Amory liked people to be one thing or the other; that was the real

reason why she loathed and abhorred Glenerne. She had had ripping times

amid the naphtha-lights of the Saturday night street-markets and at

Bank Holiday merry-go-rounds and cocoanut-shies; and, of course, when

Van Eeden on Dreams came up for discussion, or Galton on Heredity, or

Pater on the Renaissance, or the clear-eyed Weiniger on the Relation

of the Sexes, she was again entirely at home. On the heights or in the

depths she felt the real throb of Humanity's heart. But those dreadful

middle grades! Those terrible estate-agents and booking-clerks and

bank-cashiers and brewers' travellers of whom the world seemed to be

so full! As so many phenomena in the science of vision--solid objects

for colour to possess and light to fall upon--she admitted they had

their uses; but she was entirely uninterested in them otherwise. Of all

the fine things Cosimo had done in the past, she thought he had done

nothing finer nor more full of profound meaning than when he had once

given a crossing-sweeper a shilling, taken the broom from his hand,

and for an hour swept the crossing himself. It took true nobility to

do that. Mr. Geake could not have done it, nor Mr. Wellcome, nor the

egregious young man in the green knitted waistcoat who had advised

her to take care of her eyes, and had then told her that the Crystal

Palace was a "funny place to go for a squeeze"--Mr. Edmondson.

All talking at once, Amory and her half-dozen guests trooped back up

the narrow stairs.

"Well, here we are----" they announced themselves.

"Donkey's years since we've seen you, Amory----"

"How are you?"

"How's Life and Work?"

"This is Bielby, Amory ... don't suppose you know him ... we just

brought him along----"

"You should see the view from here in the day-time, Bielby ...

stunning!----"

"Chuck your things down ... mind Laura's guitar----"

They threw their hats and coats and cloaks into the window-seat, and

filled the room as they stood talking, laughing and straightening their

hair. Amory asked Cosimo for a match, and approached the two candles

that stood in the brass sticks on the gate-legged table.

"Oh, don't light up!" three or four broke out at once; "the firelight's

so jolly!"

"No?"

"Positively sinful to spoil this effect!----"

"Pull the chairs up round the fire--the floor'll do for me----"

"Me too----"

"I'll lean against your knees, Dorothy----"

"Oh, now I've left my handkerchief in my pocket! Lend me yours,

Cosimo----"

"Well, Amory----!"

They settled about the hearth, Cosimo Pratt with his shoulder-blades

against Dorothy's knees, Walter Wyron propping up Laura Beamish, Katie

Deedes and Mr. Bielby on chairs, Dickie Lemesurier with the firelight

shining on her peacock-feather yoke at one end of the fender, Amory

curled up against the coal-box at the other.

"I say--Amory's hair!----" Walter Wyron broke rapturously out, as Amory

settled into her place.

"Quite unpaintable, Walter," said Laura Beamish, peering over the edge

of her hand.

"Suppose so--but _isn't_ it Venetian!----"

"Just put that green plate with the oranges in her lap----"

"Oh ... magnificent!"

It did indeed make an astonishing glow.

"Well," said Cosimo Pratt presently, when each had applied his or her

adjective to Amory's appearance, "and how's Jellies and Mrs. 'Ill,

Amory?"

You would not now have known Amory for the same girl who had conversed

with Mr. Edmondson on the progress of illustrated journalism and

statelily inclined her head when the awful Mr. Wellcome had offered

her a liqueur-glass of the famous old Spanish brandy. She gave a low

rippling laugh. She snuggled contentedly up against the coal-box.

"What! hasn't Dorothy told you?" she ejaculated. If Dorothy hadn't

told, that was really rather nice of Dorothy.

"No," said Cosimo, turning his huge black-coffee-coloured eyes on her,

all anticipation.

"Jellies is engaged!" Amory announced, with another low laugh.

Cosimo started dramatically. "_No!_"

Amory nodded. She could always rely on Cosimo.

"You don't say so! Oh, _do_ tell me! Do you think----" a short pause,

"--he's worthy of her?"

"Just look at Cosimo's face!" bubbled Laura Beamish. It bore an

expression of the deepest mock gravity.

"_Do_ tell me!" Cosimo implored....

Mrs. 'Ill was the woman who came in twice a week to do up the studio;

Jellies (so called because she worked at the Jelly Factory across the

river) was her daughter. Cosimo spoke again, in tragic tones.

"At least tell me whether he's 'in' or 'out'!" he begged.

"Bielby's out of this; tell Bielby, Amory," several voices said at

once; and Amory's pretty golden eyes sought Mr. Bielby. She explained.

Jellie's fiancé (she said) was 'in'--in prison. It had been (said

Amory), oh, so killing! He had snatched a jacket from outside a

second-hand clothes' shop, and had run away with it and had put it on:

but he had not had time to remove the wooden hanger--Mr. Bielby knew

those wooden hangers they hang coats on?--well, he'd not had time to

remove the hanger before a policeman had collared him, and there he

had been, swearing the coat was his, with the wire hook sticking up at

the back of his neck! Fancy--just fancy!--the psychological situation!

Really, somebody ought to write to William James about it!--'Orris

('Orris Jackman his name was--after orris-root, Amory supposed) vowing

that he'd bought the coat weeks ago, and then the policeman putting his

finger through the hook and hauling him away!...

"And Mrs. 'Ill----" Amory rippled on to Mr. Bielby----

"Oh yes--tell him about Mrs. 'Ill and the Creek!" they cried.

"Mrs. 'Ill, you see, Mr. Bielby, keeps what she calls a Creek--that's

a _crèche_! (We _must_ all go and see it one of these days!) It's in

the World's End Passage, next door to a fried fish shop, and there are

twenty babies, and the woman at the fried fish shop keeps an eye on

them when Mrs. 'Ill comes in here on Wednesdays and Saturdays, that is,

unless Jellies happens to be out of work----"

"But the hens are the best, Amory--tell him about the hens----" they

prompted.

With that Amory was fairly launched. Mrs. 'Ill (she said) not only took

charge of other people's babies; she kept hens also, in a sort of back

scullery, and at tea-time they sat in her lap and ate winkles off her

plate, and she said she felt towards them just as if they were her own!

Hens and babies--_Figurez vous!_--And there was always a christening

party or something at the Creek, to which the hens went too, and--(they

_must_ listen to this!)--at one party they'd had, last Christmas,

nobody'd been to bed for two nights, and Mrs. 'Ill had explained that

they'd had to cut it short because of 'Ill having been dead only a

week!----

"Oh, but about 'Ill--he hasn't heard about 'Ill----"

"Well, her name isn't 'Ill at all, you see. That didn't come out till

her husband died. His real name was Berry, or Barry, or something, and

he signed the register 'Barry' when he was married. But it seems he'd

been in the Army and deserted, and was afraid of being caught, so he

called himself Hill. But (here's Westermarck for you!) when his first

baby was going to be born his conscience seems to have been troubled

(it would make a lovely psychological story, Mrs. 'Ill with the child

and Mr. 'Ill with the conscience), and so he made a sort of bet with

himself, that if it was a boy he'd give himself up, and if it was a

girl he'd just go on being Mr. 'Ill and a deserter. And of course it

was Jellies, and so Mrs. 'Ill's Mrs. 'Ill...."

There was nothing of the snob about Amory. These were the people among

whom she had moved during her painting of Saturday night scenes and

street markets, and she did not pretend that they were not. And she

had an undeniable gift for such narrations. Laura Beamish, who tried

to cap her with some story of a Charing Cross flower-girl and a black

eye, fell by comparison quite flat; and even Katie Deedes's tale of

her mother's entrée-cook did not gain quite the same applause. And

Walter Wyron's, about the ex-sergeant who had looked after his father's

house-boat, was an old one. Yes, Amory liked people to be one thing or

the other.

But she did not tell any stories about Mr. Wellcome and Mr. Geake.

From these and similar stories to the larger issues of Democracy was

but a step, and as Dorothy rose and opened the flask of Chianti, the

step was taken. The Fabian Nursery and the S.D.F. came all in the

stride.... The space within the fender became half full of banana-skins

and orange peel; the fire-light shone up on the eager faces; and Amory,

in the half-shadow by the coal-box, fed her eyes on effects.

What ripping drawing there was in Dickie Lemesurier's neck as it issued

from its square-cut, peacock's-feather-embroidered frame! What a

perfectly glorious colour Walter's snuff-coloured corduroys took in the

glow (only glaze on glaze of burnt-sienna could ever get it!) And how

stunning was the shadow of Cosimo's hand over his handsome chin as he

put the cigarette into his mouth!... Cosimo's hair clung like tendrils

about his temples and over the back of his soft grey collar; Amory had

made at one time and another a dozen drawings of his splendid throat;

she hoped to make a dozen more. She was very proud of having Cosimo

for a friend. He set down appearances at their proper value, no more.

He was quite free from those stupid old-fashioned prejudices that, in

so arrogantly setting apart certain subjects as undiscussable between

young men and young women, had so delayed the real freedom that, for

all that, was coming. She laughed as Cosimo, who had just put a lump

of coal on the fire with his fingers, asked Dorothy whether he might

wipe them on her stockings, and made some remark about Spring Novelties

when Dorothy said that he might not. It was only Cosimo. Everybody

understood. There was just that touch of gentle womanliness in Cosimo

(Amory thought) that perfects and finishes a man.

In watching Cosimo and the others, but especially Cosimo, Amory had a

little disregarded the conversation. She was recalled to it by a sudden

exclamation from Katie Deedes--

"Oh no--carnations for Dickie, and just green leaves for Amory----"

"Late ones, slightly turning," Laura Beamish suggested, peering

critically over her hand again as she strove to compass a mental image

of Amory wearing the leaves.

"Or green grapes," Walter Wyron suggested, peering also.

"Amory, do take down your hair!" they suddenly implored.

Amory grumbled sweetly. It was such a bother to put it up again, she

said. But Cosimo, starting from his seat against Dorothy's knees,

cried, "Oh yes, Amory!" and took a fresh place by her feet. "With

the firelight through it it should be just unbelievable!" he cried

excitedly.... So Amory's hands went to the great red-gold fir cone; she

shook down the heavy plaits; and Cosimo's fingers parted and disposed

them.

"How's that? Wait--just a minute--it wants just one touch--there!" he

said, drawing back.

Cries of admiration broke out. Amory was as hidden by it as a weeping

elm is hidden by its leaves.

"Oh--green leaves, most decidedly!" cried Walter Wyron with conviction.

"Amory, you really _must_ paint yourself so--none of us could do

it--_what_ a sonnet Rossetti would have written!"

"_Or_ Swinburne----"

"_Or_ Baudelaire----!"

"_Or_ Verlaine!"

Rapt they gazed for some moments longer....

"Green leaves for Amory, then, and carnations for Dickie.... What's

Dorothy?"

"Oh, Dot's a tea-rose----"

"Periwinkle, to go with her eyes----"

"'_Pervenche_' they always call it in the Catalogues, don't they, Dot?

Must have superior terms for Catalogues!"

"And amethyst earrings----"

"No, pearls----"

"I say amethyst!"

"I say pearls!"

"Pooh! Pearls are obviously Laura's wear!"

"Laura! My dear chap! Why, what were emeralds made for if they weren't

made for Laura?..."