Now Lady Tasker was seventy, and, with the exception of the Zoo,

a place she visited from time to time with troops of turbulent

great-nephews, the whole of North London was a sort of Camden Town to

her, that is to say, she had no objection to its existence so long as

it wasn't troublesome. It was half-past three when she said as much

to the Highgate policeman, who up to that time had been an ordinary

easy-going Conservative; by five-and-twenty minutes to four she had

made of him a fuming Radical. He was saying something about South

Square and Merton Lane. Lady Tasker addressed the bracing Highgate air

in one of those expressionless and semi-ventriloquial asides that,

especially in a mixed company, always made her ladyship very well worth

sitting next to.

"Merton Lane! Does the man suppose that conveys anything to me?... I

want to know how to get to Hampstead, not the names of the objects of

interest on the way!"

The newly-made Radical told her that there might be a taxi on the rank,

and turned away to cuff the ears of an urchin who was tampering with an

automatic machine. It was a wonder that Lady Tasker's glare, focussed

through the gold-rimmed glass on a point between his shoulder-blades,

did not burn a hole in his tunic.

Taxis at eightpence a mile, indeed, with the house at Ludlow already

full of those children of Churchill's, and three of Tony's little

girls eating their way through the larder in Cromwell Gardens, and

young Tommy, Emily's boy, who had just "pulled" his captaincy, arriving

at Southampton in the "Seringapatam" on Saturday with another batch for

her to take under her wing! Did people suppose she was made of money?...

The policeman's tunic was just beginning to scorch when Lady Tasker,

dropping the glass, turned away and set out for Hampstead on foot.

She might very well have been excused had she omitted to return Mrs.

Cosimo Pratt's call. Indeed she had vowed that very morning that

nothing should drag her up to Hampstead that day. But for twenty times

that Lady Tasker said "I will not," nineteen she repented and went,

taking out the small change of her magnanimity when she got there. And

after all, she would be killing two birds with one stone, for her niece

Dorothy also lived somewhere in this northern Great Karroo, and unless

she got these things over before the "Seringapatam" dropped anchor on

Saturday there was no knowing when next she would have an hour to call

her own. As she turned (after a brush with a second policeman, who

summed her up quite wrongly on the strength of her antiquated pelisse

and trailing old Victorian hat) down Merton Lane to the ponds, she told

herself again that she was a foolish old woman to have come at all.

For the Cosimo Pratts were not bosom friends of hers. True, they had

been, until six months ago, her neighbours at Ludlow, and for that

matter she had known young Cosimo's people for the greater part of

her life: but she had not forgotten the hearty blackguarding the young

couple had got, any time this last two years, from the rest of the

country-side. Small wonder. What else did they expect, after the way

in which they had made farm-labour too big for its jacket and beaters

hardly to be had for love or money? Not that Lady Tasker herself had

seen very much of their antics. Great-nieces and nephews had kept her

too busy for that, and she was moreover wise enough not to believe all

she heard. And even were it true, that, she now told herself, had been

in the country. They would have to behave differently now that they

had let the Shropshire house and had come to live in town. They could

hardly dance barefoot round a maypole in Hampstead, or stage-manage the

yearly Hiring-Fair for the sake of the "Daily Speculum" photographer

(as they had done in Ludlow), or group themselves picturesquely about

the feet of the oldest inhabitant while that shocking old reprobate

with the splendid head recited (at five shillings an hour) the stories

of old, unhappy, far-off things he had learned by heart from the

booklets they had printed at the Village Press. No: in London they

would almost certainly have to do as other people did, and Shropshire,

after its three years of social and artistic awakening, would no doubt

forget all about the æsthetic revival and would sink back into a

well-earned rest.

It was a Thursday afternoon in September, warm for the time of the

year, and a half-day closing for the shops. Had Lady Tasker remembered

the half-holiday she certainly would not have come. She hated crowds,

and, if you would believe her, had no illusions whatever about the

sanctity of our common nature and the brotherhood of man. She would

tell you roundly that there was far too much aimless good-nature in

the world, and that every sob wasted over a sinner was something taken

away from the man who, if he was a sinner too, had at least the decency

to keep up appearances. And so much for brotherhood. Great-nephewship,

of course, was another matter. Somebody had to look after all those

youngsters, and if her sister Eliza, the one at Spurrs, went into

a tantrum about every bud that was picked in the gardens and every

chair-leg that was an inch out of its place in the house, so much the

worse for Lady Tasker, who must walk because she had something else to

do with her money than to waste it on taxis.

She had been told by her niece Dorothy to look out for a clump of tall

willows and an ivied chimney; that was where the Pratts lived; but

Dorothy had spoken of the approach from the Hampstead side, not from

Highgate way. Lady Tasker got lost. She was almost dropping for want of

a cup of tea, and the Heath seemed all willows, and all the wrong ones.

No policeman, Radical or Conservative, was to be seen. Walking across

an apparently empty space, well away (as she thought) from a horde of

shouting boys, the old lady suddenly found herself enveloped in a game

of football. This completed her exhaustion. Near by, one of Messrs.

Libertys' carts was ascending a steep road at a slow walk; somehow or

other Lady Tasker managed to get her hand on the tail of it; and the

car gave her a tow. She was seventy after all.

As it happened, that was her first piece of luck in a luckless

afternoon. The cart drew off to the left; Lady Tasker trailed after

it; and suddenly it stopped before a high privet hedge with a closed

green door in the middle of it. Lady Tasker did not look for the ivied

chimney. On the door was painted in white letters "The Witan." She was

where she wanted to be.

Ordinarily Lady Tasker would have approved of the height of the privet

hedge, which was seven or eight feet; that was a nice, reassuring,

anti-social height for a hedge; but as it was she could not even put up

her hand to the bell. The carter rang it for the pair of them. Over the

hedge came the low murmur of voices and the clink of cups and saucers,

and then the door was opened. It was opened by the mistress of the

house. No doubt Mrs. Pratt had expected the cart, had heard its drawing

up, and had not waited for a maid to come. Her eyes sought the carman,

who had stepped aside. She spoke with some asperity.

"It's Libertys', isn't it?" she said. "Well, I've a very good mind to

make you take it back. It was promised for yesterday."

"Can't say, I'm sure, m'm."

"It's always the same. Every time I----"

Then she saw her visitor, and gave a little start.

"Why, it's Lady Tasker! How delightful! Do come in! And do just excuse

me--I shan't be a minute.... Why didn't this come yesterday? It was

promised faithfully----"

She stepped outside to scold the carman, leaving Lady Tasker standing

just within the green door.

The altercation was plainly audible:

"Very sorry, m'm. You see----"

"I will see, if it occurs again----"

"The orders is taken as they come, m'm----"

"They said the first delivery----"

"We wasn't loaded till one o'clock----"

"That's none of my business----"

"Very sorry, m'm----"

"Well, the next time it occurs----"

And so forth.

Now in reading what happened the next moment you must remember that

Lady Tasker was very, very tired. Had she been less tired she might

have wondered why one of the two maids she saw crossing to the

tea-table under the copper beech had not been allowed to take in

Mrs. Cosimo Pratt's parcel. And she would certainly have thought it

extraordinary that she should be left standing alone while Mrs. Cosimo

Pratt scolded the carrier, and wanted to know why the parcel had not

been brought yesterday. But, tired as she was, her eyes had already

rested on something that had momentarily galvanized even the weariness

out of her. It was this:--

Seven or eight people sat in basket-chairs or stood talking; and, under

the copper beech, as if Mrs. Pratt had just slid out of it, a hammock

of coloured string still moved, slung from the beech to a sycamore

beyond. Lady Tasker saw these things at once; she did not at once see

what it was that stood just beyond the hammock.

Then it moved, and Lady Tasker raised her glass.

No doubt you have seen the cover of Mr. Wells's "Invisible Man." It

will be remembered that all that can be seen of that afflicted person

is his clothes; and all that Lady Tasker at first saw of the Invisible

Man by the copper beech was his clothes. These were of light yellow

tussore, with a white double collar and a small red tie, sharp-edged

white cuffs and highly polished brown boots. At collar and cuffs the

man ended.

And yet he did not end, for the lenses of a pair of spectacles made

lurking lights in the shadow of the beech, a few inches above the white

collar.

The phantom wore no hat.

Then Lady Tasker, suddenly pale, dropped her glass. Between the collar

and the spectacles a white gash of teeth had appeared. The Invisible

Man had smiled, and at the same moment there had shown round the bole

of the beech a second smoky shape, this one without teeth, but with

white and mobile eyes instead.

Lady Tasker was in the presence of two Hindoos.

* * * * *

Now all her life, and long before her life for that matter, Lady Tasker

had been accustomed ... but no: that is not the way to put it. The

following table will save many words:--

PORTION OF TREE OF THE LENNARDS AND TASKERS

(COMMENTS BY LADY TASKER)

Tasker, Sir Richard, 3rd Bart.; Lennard, "Old John," "Spurrs,"

"The Brear," Ludlow Montgomery

("Good old family? I don't know ("Can't say I like the striking

about the 'good,' but they're family resemblances you meet up

certainly old.") | and down the valley; when you ask

| at a cottage-door for a glass of

| milk and see that nose----")

| |

+---------+--------+ +-----+----+-------+-+-------+--------+

| | | | | | | | |

Lucy Arthur Noel, = GRACE Susan Dick; Emily; Trixie; Eliza;

("The ("Don't 4th Bart.; (Lady | m. Ada m. Tony m. Sid _unmarried_

Brear ask _me_ d. 1900 Tasker) | Polperro: Woodgate, Dealtry ("Black

was how he _No Issue_ | Woods P.F.F. ("The pugs.")

always got into | and | groom,

open the India | Forests, | my dear,

to her, Office!") | 1873; | and far

but of | | d. 1886 | too good

course | | | | for her.")

if she +========+=============+ | | |

_preferred_ | | | ("Those children

to stay | | | of Trixie's:

away----") | | | colonies, assisted

| | Hard-up passages: I

| | young rather like

| | captains the chauffeur

| | and one: hope he

| | subalterns marries well")

Stanhope=====+======Dorothy | |

| Crowds of ("Can't keep

1. Noel Anglo-Indian count. I

("They called him babies, remember

that to please me: Lady all the

innocents!") Tasker's birthdays,

charges I can,

2. Jack but----")

3. (See page 448)

You see how it was, and had to be. Not only was Lady Tasker insular,

arrogant, and of opinion that Saint Paul made the mistake of his life

when he set out to preach the Gospel to all nations, but she made a

virtue of her narrowness and defect. Show her a finger-nail with a

purple half-moon, and you no longer saw a charming if acid-tongued old

English lady, who cut timber in order to pay for governesses for those

grand-children of Emily's and sent, under guise of birthday gifts,

useful little cheques to the descendants of her brother-in-law the

groom. Babu or Brahmin, all were the same to her. No defence is offered

of an attitude so indefensible. Such people do still exist. Let us sigh

for their narrowness of mind, and pass on.

The smile of the first Hindoo was for Mrs. Pratt, who had got her

row with the carman over and had reappeared behind Lady Tasker and

closed the door of The Witan again. Her face, pretty and finished as

a miniature, and the great chestnut-red helm of her hair, showed over

the slant of the box in her arms. "Do excuse me, just _one_ moment!"

she said, smiling at Lady Tasker as she passed; and she ran off into

the house, her mistletoe-berry white robe with its stencilling of

grey-green whipping about her heels as she did so. And fortunately, as

she ran in at the door, Cosimo Pratt came out of the French window, saw

Lady Tasker, and strode to her. He broke into rapid and hearty speech.

"You here! How delightful!--Amory!--I didn't hear you come! So kind

of you!--Amory, where are you?--How are you? Do let me get you some

tea!--Amory!----"

Lady Tasker spoke faintly.--"I should like," she said, "to go into the

house."

"Rather! Hang on to my arm.--Amory! Where is that girl?--Sure you won't

have tea outside? I can find you a nice shady place under the beech----"

Lady Tasker closed her eyes.--"Please take me in."

"Tube headache? I hate the beastly thing. I thought you were in Ludlow.

Charming of you----"

And he led Lady Tasker into the house.

This was a low building of stucco, with slatted window-shuts which,

like the sashes of the slightly bowed French window and of the two

windows beyond, were newly painted green. This painting seemed rather

to emphasize than to mitigate a certain dogseared look the place had,

not amounting to dilapidation, but enough to make it probable that

Cosimo Pratt had taken it on a repairing lease. The copper beech, the

high privet hedge and the willows beyond it, shut out both light and

air. The fan-lighted door had two electric bell buttons, with little

brass plates. The upper plate read, "Mr. Cosimo Pratt"; the lower one

"Miss Amory Towers (Studio)."

But Lady Tasker noticed none of these things. In the hall she sank

into the first chair she came to. "Tea, please," she said faintly; and

Cosimo dashed out to get it. He returned, and began to murmur something

sympathetic, but Lady Tasker made a little movement with her hand. She

didn't want him to "send Amory." She only wanted to rest her tired legs

and to collect her dispersed thoughts.

An eight-foot hedge, not to shut the populace out, but to shut Indians

in! And she, Lady Tasker, had been kept standing while some parcel

or other had been taken into the house--standing, and watching a

still-moving hammock with a smiling Invisible Man bending over it! Was

this England, or a Durbar?... And even yet her hostess didn't come

to ask her if she felt better!... Not that Lady Tasker was greatly

surprised at that. She knew that Mrs. Pratt was quite capable of

reasoning that the greatest respect is shown to a tired old lady when

no fuss is made about her tiredness. The Pratts were like that--full

of delicacies so subtle that plain folk never noticed them, but jumped

instead to the conclusion that they were bad-mannered. And it would not

in the least surprise Lady Tasker if, presently, Mrs. Pratt allowed

her to leave without a word about her indisposition. Of course: Lady

Tasker had a little forgotten the Pratts at Ludlow. That would be

it: "Good-bye--and do come again!" She could see Mrs. Pratt's pretty

brook-brown eyes did anybody (say a Japanese or an Ethiopian) point out

this so-called omission to her. She could see the surprise in them. She

could hear her earnest voice: "_Say_ these things!... Why, does she

suppose I was _glad_ then?"...

Yes, Lady Tasker had a little forgotten her Pratts.

It was an odd little hall in which she sat. It appeared to be an

approach to the studio of which the electric bell gave notice, for

it was continued by a narrower passage that led to a garden at the

back; and either the studio "properties" were gradually thrusting the

hatstand and hall table out of the fan-lighted front door, or else

these latter ordinary and necessary objects were fighting as it were

for admission. Thus, the chair on which Lady Tasker sat was of oak,

but it had a Faust-like look; beyond it stood a glass-fronted cupboard

of bric-à-brac, with a trophy of Abyssinian armour hanging over it;

and the whole of the wall facing Lady Tasker was hung with a tapestry

which, if it had been the only one of its kind in existence, would no

doubt have been very valuable. And two other objects not commonly to

be seen in ordinary halls were there. One of these stood on the narrow

gilt console table next to Lady Tasker's cup of tea. It was a plaster

cast, taken from the life, of a female foot. The other hung on the wall

above it. This also was a plaster cast, of the whole of a female arm

and shoulder, ending with a portion of the side of the neck and the

entire breast--of its kind an exquisite specimen. Many artists make or

buy such things, but Brucciani has nothing half so beautiful.

It was as Lady Tasker finished her tea that her gaze fell on the two

casts. Half negligently she raised her glass and inspected, first the

foot, and then the other piece. It is probable that her first remark,

uttered in a casual undertone to the air about her, was prompted by

mere association of ideas; it was "Hm! I wonder if Mrs. Pratt nursed

those twins herself!" Any other reflection that might have followed it

was cut short by a sudden darkening of the doorway by which she had

entered. Mrs. Pratt stood there. Lady Tasker had been wrong. She _had_

come to ask if she felt better. She did ask her, gathering up long

swathes of some newly unpacked white material she carried over her arm

as she did so.

"Sorry you were done up," she remarked. "Won't you have some more tea?"

Already Lady Tasker was rising.--"No more, thank you.--I was just

looking at these. What are they?" She indicated the casts.

The gesture that Mrs. Pratt gave she could probably no more have helped

giving than an eye can help winking when it is threatened with a blow.

Within one mistletoe-white sleeve an arm moved ever so slightly; very

likely a foot also moved within a curiously-toed Saxon-looking white

slipper; and she gave a confused and conscious and apologetic little

laugh.

"Oh, those silly things!" she said deprecatingly. "I really must move

them. But the studio is so full.... Do you know, it's a most horrid

feeling having them done--first the cold plaster poured on, and then,

when they take it off again--the mould--you know----"

Lady Tasker plainly did not understand. Perhaps she did not yet even

apprehend.--"But--but--," she said, "they're from a statue, aren't

they?"

Again Mrs. Pratt gave the pleased bashful little laugh. It was almost

as if she said it was very good of Lady Tasker to say so.

"No, they're from life," she said. "As a matter of fact they're me, but

I really must move them; they aren't so remarkable as all that.... Oh,

you're not going, are you?----"

For Lady Tasker had given a jump, and a movement as sudden and

sprightly as if she had only that moment got freshly out of her bed.

Nervously she put out her hand, while her hostess looked politely

disappointed.

"Oh, and I was hoping you'd come and join us in the garden! We've

Brimby there, the novelist, you know--and Wilkinson, the young

Member--and Mr. Strong, of the 'Novum'--and I should so much like to

introduce Mr. Suwarree Prang to you----"

"Oh, thank you so much--," sprang as effusively from Lady Tasker's lips

as if she had been a schoolgirl allowed for the first time to come down

to dinner, "--it's so good of you, but really I half hoped you'd be

out when I called--I only meant to leave cards--I'm going on to see my

niece, and really haven't a moment----"

"Oh, I'm sure Dorothy'd excuse you for once!----," Mrs. Pratt pressed

her.

"Oh, she wouldn't--I'm quite sure she wouldn't--she'd never forgive

me if she knew I'd been so near and hadn't called," said Lady Tasker

feverishly.... "How do I get to Dorothy's from here?"

"Oh, Mr. Wilkinson will take you, or Mr. Prang; but are you sure you

won't stay?"

Lady Tasker was so far from staying that she was already out of the

hall and walking quickly towards the green door in the eight-foot

hedge. "Thank you, thank you so much," she was murmuring hurriedly.

"I don't see your husband anywhere about--never mind--so good of

you--good-bye----"

"Come again soon, won't you?"

"Yes, yes--oh, yes!... No, no, please don't!" (Mrs. Pratt had made a

half-turn towards the hammock and the copper beech). "Straight across

the Heath you said, didn't you? I shall find it quite easily! Don't

come any further--good-bye----"

And, touching Mrs. Cosimo Pratt's extended fingers as timorously as she

might have touched those of the cast itself, she fairly broke into a

run. The door of The Witan closed behind her.

II

THE POND-ROOM

The truth was not very far to seek: Lady Tasker was too old for these

things. Nobody could have expressed this more effectively than Mrs.

Cosimo Pratt herself, had it entered the mind of Mrs. Pratt to conceive

that any human soul could be so benighted as the soul of Lady Tasker

was. "Those casts!" Mrs. Pratt might have cried in amazement--or

rather Miss Amory Towers might have cried, for there is nothing in the

Wedding Service about making over to your husband, along with your

love and obedience, the valuable goodwill of a professional name.

"Those poor casts!... Of course they may not be _very_ beautiful--,"

here the original of the casts might have modestly dropped her eyes,

"--but such as they are--goodness me! How _can_ people be so prurient,

Cosimo? Don't they see that what they really prove has nothing at all

to do with the casts, but--ahem!--a good deal to do with their own

imaginations? I don't want to use the word 'morbid,' but really!...

Well, thank goodness Corin and Bonniebell won't grow up like that!

Afraid of the beautiful, innocent human form!... Now that's what I've

always claimed, Cosimo--that that's the type of mind that's made all

the mischief we've got to set right to-day."

But for all that Lady Tasker was too old. Invisible Men in the garden

(or, if not actually invisible, at any rate as hard to be seen against

the leaves of the copper beech as a new penny would have been)--and in

the hall those extraordinary replicas! In the hall--the very forefront

of the house! It was to be presumed that Mrs. Pratt's foreign friends,

who were permitted to lean over her hammock, would not be denied. The

Witan itself, and, for all Lady Tasker knew, the rest of Mrs. Pratt

might be reduplicated in plaster in the dining-room, the drawing-room,

and elsewhere....

Had she not said it herself, Lady Tasker would never have believed

it....

What a--what a--what an extraordinary thing!----

Lady Tasker had fled from The Witan still under the influence of that

access of effusive schoolgirlishness in which she had told Mrs. Pratt

that she really must go; nor did she grow up again all at once. But

little by little, as she walked, she began to resume the burden of her

years. She became eighteen, twenty-five, thirty again. By the time she

reached the lower pond Arthur had just got that billet in the India

Office, and her brother Dick, of the Department of Woods and Forests,

had married Ada Polperro, daughter of old Polperro of Delhi fame, and

her sister Emily had got engaged to Tony Woodgate, of the Piffers.

(But those casts!)... Then as she took the path between the ponds she

remembered the children at Ludlow, the three little girls at Cromwell

Gardens, and the arrival on Saturday of the "Seringapatam." (But those

natives!)... The thought of the children settled it. Her curious lapse

into juvenescence was over. By the time she rang Dorothy's bell she was

the same Lady Tasker who changed the political opinions of policemen

and deprecated the wanderings of Saint Paul.

Dorothy's flat was as different as it could well be from that other

house which (Lady Tasker had already decided) had something odd and

furtive about it--stagnant yet busy, segregated yet too wide open. The

flat had one really brilliant room. This room did not merely overlook

the pond in front of it; it seemed actually to have asked the pond to

come inside. A large triple window occupied the whole of one end of

it; this window faced west; and not only did the September sun shine

brightly in, but the inverted sun in the water shone in also, doubling

(yet also halving) all shadows, illumining the ceiling, and setting

the cream walls a-ripple with the dancing of the wavelets outside.

Sprightly chintzes looked as if they also might begin to dance at any

moment; the china in Dorothy's cupboards surprised the eye that had not

expected this altered light; and presently, to complete the complexity,

the shadow of the sycamore in the little garden below would move round,

so that you would hardly be able to tell whether the ceaseless creeping

on the cream walls was glitter of ripples, pattern of leaves, or both.

Dorothy sat in her accordion-pleats by the window, surrounded by

letters. And pray do not think it mere coincidence in this story that

her letters were Indian letters. Some interests that the home-amateur

takes up as he might take up poker-work or the diversion of jig-saw

hold a large part of the hearts and lives of others, and so Dorothy,

as she did more or less every week, had been reading her cousin

Churchill's letter, and that of her little niece and namesake Dot, up

in Murree, and Eva Woodgate's, who had sent her a parcel from Kohat,

and others. She rose slowly as her aunt was announced, and put her

finger on the bell as she passed.

"How are you, auntie?" she said, kissing Lady Tasker on both cheeks.

"Give me your things. Somehow I thought you might come to-day, but

I'd almost given you up. Do look what Eva's sent me! Really, with her

own to look after, I don't know how she finds the time! Aren't they

sweet!----"

And she held them up.

Now Lady Tasker knew perfectly well the meaning of her niece's

accordion-pleating; but she was seventy and worldly-wise again now.

Therefore as she looked at the things she remarked off-handedly, "But

they're far too small."

"Too small!" Dorothy exclaimed. "Of course they aren't. Why, Noel

was only nine, and that's pretty big, and Jackie only just over

eight-and-a-half, though he put on weight while you watched him.

They're just right."

Lady Tasker reached for a chair. "But they _are_ for Jackie, aren't

they?"

Dorothy's blue eyes were as big as the plates in her

cupboards.--"Jackie! Good gracious, auntie!----"

"Eh?" said Lady Tasker, sitting down. "Not Jackie? Dear me. How stupid

of me. Of course, I did hear, but I've so many other things to think

of, and nobody'd suppose, to look at you----"

Dorothy ran to her aunt and gave her a kiss and a hug, a loud kiss and

a hug like two.

"You dear old thing!--Really, I'd begun to _hate_ all the horrid kind

people who asked me how I felt to-day and whether I shouldn't be glad

when it was over! What business is it of theirs? I nearly made Stan

sack Ruth last week, she looked so, and I positively refuse to have a

young girl anywhere near me!... But wasn't it sweet of Eva? I'll give

you some tea and then read you her letter. Indian or China?"

"China," Lady Tasker remarked.

"China, Ruth, and I'll have some more too. I don't know whether His

Impudence is coming in or not; he's gadding off somewhere, I expect....

But you weren't only _pretending_ just now, were you, auntie?----"

She put the plug of the spirit-kettle into the wall.

"Well, how are the Bits?" Lady Tasker asked....

(Perhaps "His Impudence" and "The Bits" require explanation. Both

expressions Dorothy had from her "maid," Ruth Mossop. "Maid" is

thus written because Ruth was a young widow, who, after a series

of disciplinary knockings-about by the late Mr. Mossop, was not

over-troubled with maternal anxiety for the four children he had left

her with. When asked by Dorothy whether she would prefer to be called

Mrs. Mossop or Ruth, Mrs. Mossop had chosen the latter name, giving

as her reason that it had been like Mr. Mossop's impudence to ask her

to accept the other name at all; and very many other memories also,

brooded on and gloomily loved, including the four children, had been

bits of Mr. Mossop's impudence. Stan had adopted the phrase, finding

in it chuckles of his own; and so His Impudence he had become, and Noel

and Jackie the fruits thereof.)

Dorothy put her fair head on one side, as if she considered the absent

Bits critically and dispassionately, and really thought that on the

whole she might venture to approve of them.

"Ra-ther little dears; but oh, Heaven, how _are_ we going to manage

with a third!"

Her aunt dissociated herself from the problem with a shrug.--"Well--if

Stan will persist in thinking that his dressing-room is merely a room

for him to dress in----"

"So I tell him," Dorothy murmured, with great meekness. "But--but

flats aren't made for children. We did manage to seize the estate

agent's little office for a nursery when all the flats were let, but

when Stan brings a man home we have to sleep him in the dressing-room

as it is--," (Lady Tasker shook her head, but the words "Wrong man"

were hardly audible), "--and a house will mean stair-carpets, and hall

furniture, and I don't know what else. Besides, Stan hasn't time to

look for one----"

"No?" said Lady Tasker drily.

"He really hasn't, poor boy," Dorothy protested. "And he's

after something really good this time--Fortune and Brooks, the

what-d'-you-call-'ems, in Pall Mall----"

"What about them?"

"Well, Stan's been told that they pay awfully good commissions, for

introductions, new accounts you know; Stan dines out, say, and makes

himself nice to somebody with whole stacks of money, and mentions

Fortune & Brooks's chutney and pickled peaches and things, and--and----"

"I know," remarked Lady Tasker, with not much more expression than if

she had been a talking-doll and somebody had pulled the string that

worked the speaking apparatus. She did know these dazzling schemes of

her smart and helpless nephew's--his club secretaryships, his projects

for journals that should combine the various desirable features of the

"Field" and "Country Life" and the "Sporting Times" and "Punch," his

pony deals, and his other innumerable attempts to make of his saunters

down Bond Street to St. James's and back _viâ_ the Junior Carlton and

Regent Street a source of income. Perhaps she knew, too, that Dorothy

knew of her knowledge, for she went on, "Well, well--let's hope there's

more in it than there was in the fishing-flies--now tell me what Eva's

got fresh."

"Oh, yes!" cried Dorothy, plunging her hand into her letters. "Eva sent

the things, but here's Dot's first--look at the darling's writing!----"

And from a sheet of paper with a regimental heading Dorothy began to

read:

"DEAREST AUNT DOROTHY,--

"were in murree and we got a servant that wigles his toes when we

speak to him and he loves baba and makes noises like him and there

are squiboos in the tres--"

--(she means squirrels)--

"--and ive got a parrot uncle tony bought me and uncle tony says

the monsoon will praps fale and the peple wont have anything to

eat but weve lots and i like this better than kohat the shops are

lovely but there are lots of flees and they bite baba and he cries

this is a long letter how are jackie and noel i got the photograf--"

--(that's the new one on the mantelpiece)--

"--were going to tifin at major hirsts little girls one is called

marjorie and were great friends----"

"Where's the other page got to? It was here----"

She found the other page, and continued the reading of the child's

letter.

Suddenly Lady Tasker interrupted her.

"Had Jack to borrow money to send them up there?"

"To Murree? I really don't know. Perhaps he had. But as adjutant of the

Railway Volunteers he'd have his saloon."

"H'm!... Anyway, the child oughtn't to be there at all. India's no

place for children."

"I know, auntie; but what can one do? They do come."

"H'm!... They didn't to me. Thank goodness I've done with love and

babies." (Dorothy laughed, perhaps at a mental vision of the houses in

Ludlow and Cromwell Gardens.) "Anyway, now they are here somebody's got

to look after them. They may as well be healthy...."

She mused, and Dorothy reached for other letters.

Lady Tasker's additions to her responsibilities usually began in this

way. Dorothy had very little doubt that presently little Dot also would

be handed like a parcel to some man or other coming home on leave, and

Lady Tasker would send to the makers for yet another cot.... Therefore,

pushing aside her last letter, she exclaimed almost crossly, "I _do_

think it's selfish of Aunt Eliza! There she is, with Spurrs all to

herself, and she never once thinks that Jack might like to send Dot to

England!"

"Neither would I if I had my time over again," said Lady Tasker

resolutely. "You needn't look like that--I wouldn't. Cromwell Gardens

is past praying for, and in another year there won't be a stick at

the Brear that's fit to be seen. The next batch I certainly intend to

charge for. I'm on the brink of the poor-house as it is."

This time it was Dorothy who mused. She was a calculating young woman;

the wife of His Impudence had to be; and she was far too shrewd to

suppose for a moment that her aunt could ever escape her destiny, which

was to be imposed upon by her own flesh and blood while hardening her

heart against the rest of the world. Dorothy, and not Stan, had had

to keep that flat going, and the flat before it; unless Fortune &

Brooks turned up trumps--a rather remote contingency--she would have to

continue to do so; and she was quite casuistical enough to argue that,

while Aunt Eliza might keep her old Spurrs, Aunt Grace might properly

be victimized because Dorothy loved Aunt Grace. Therefore there were

musings in Dorothy's wide-angle blue eyes ... musings that only the

sound of a key in the outer lock interrupted.

"Hallo, that's His Impudence," Dorothy exclaimed. "I do hope he hasn't

brought anybody. I shall simply rush out if he has."

Stan hadn't. He came in at the door drawing off a pair of lemon-yellow

gloves, said "Hallo, Aunt Grace," and rang the bell. He next said,

"Hallo, Dot! Been out? Beastly smelly in town. No, I've not had tea.

Look here, you've eaten all the hot cakes; never mind; bread and

butter'll do, if you've got some jam--no, honey. Got an invitation

for you, Dot, to lunch, with Ferrers on Monday; can't you buck up and

manage it?... Well, Aunt Grace, what brings you up here? Bit off your

beat, isn't it? Awfully rude of me, I know, but it is a long way. Glad

I came in."

"I've been to see the Cosimo Pratts," said Lady Tasker.

Dorothy looked suddenly up.

"Oh, auntie, you didn't tell me that!" she exclaimed.

A grin lighted up Stan's good-looking face.

"Oh? How many annas to the rupee are they to-day? By Jove, they are a

rum lot up there! Any new prime cuts?"

"Stan, you mustn't!" said Dorothy, peremptorily. "Please don't! Don't

listen to him, auntie; he's outrageous."

But His Impudence went on, with his mouth full of bread and butter.

"I've only seen the fore-quarter and the trotter, but you see I

haven't been over the house. Did they show you the Bluebeard's Chamber?

What is there there? By Jove, it's like Jezebel and the dogs.... But

I don't suppose they'll have me up again. There was some chap there,

and I got him by himself and told him he didn't know what he was

talking about; rotten of me, I know, but you should have heard him!

Anarchist--Votes for Women--all the lot; whew!... More tea, Ruth,

please----"

Lady Tasker felt the years beginning to ebb away from her again. She

had remembered the hammock and the Invisible Men.

"I hope he was--English?" she murmured.

"Who?"

"The man you say you were rude to."

"English? Yes. Why? English? Rather! No end of gas about the Empire.

Said it was on a wrong basis or something. Why do you ask?"

"I only wondered."

But Stan was perspicacious; he could see anything that was as closely

thrust under his nose as is the comparative rarity of the Englishman in

Hampstead. He laughed.

"Oh, that! We're used to that. We've all sorts up here.... By Jove, I

believe Aunt Grace has been thrown into the arms of a Jap or a nigger

or something! Well, if that doesn't put the lid on!... So of course

you wondered what I meant by the fore-quarter and Jezebel and the

dogs. Those are just some things they used to have.... Well, I'll tell

you what you can do about it next time, auntie. You talk to 'em about

Ludlow. That shuts 'em up. Sore spot, Ludlow; they're trying to forget

about Ye Olde Englysshe Maypole, and that row with old Wynn-Jenkins,

and old Griffin letting his hair grow and reciting those poems. They

look at you as if it never happened. But they didn't shut _me_ up."

"You seem to have been thoroughly rude," Lady Tasker remarked.

"Well, dash it all, they ask for it. She used to be some sort of a pal

of Dorothy's----"

"She's very clever, and she was always very kind to me," Dorothy

interpolated over her sewing.

"When, I should like to know? But never mind. I was going to say, Aunt

Grace, that I've had to put my foot down. I won't have the Bits meeting

those kids of Pratt's. It's perfectly awful; why, those children

know as much as I do--and I know a bit! They'll be wanting latchkeys

presently. That day I was up there I heard one of 'em say that little

boys weren't the same as little girls. I forget how she put it, but she

knew all right; think of that, at about four! I wish I could remember

the words, but it was a bit thick for four!----"

A restrained smile, perhaps at the thought of Stan putting his foot

down, had crossed Lady Tasker's face; no doubt it was part of the smile

that she presently said, toying with the little gold-rimmed glass,

"Quite right, Stan.... Anything fresh about Fortune & Brooks? Dorothy

told me."

Stan's feelings on any subject were never so strong but that at a

word he was quite ready to talk about something else. "Eh? Rather!"

he said heartily, and went straightway off at score.--New? Yes. He'd

seen old Brooks the day before; not a bad chap at all really; and they

quite understood one another, he and old Brooks. He'd told Stan things,

old Brooks had, (which Stan wasn't at liberty to disclose) about the

commissions they paid for really first-class introductions, things that

would astonish Lady Tasker!----

"You see," he explained, "as Brooks himself said, they can't afford to

advertise in the ordinary way; _infra dig_. They'd actually lose custom

if they put an ad. in the 'Daily Spec.' I don't mean that they don't

put a thing now and then into the right kind of paper, but just being

mentioned in general conversation, at dinners and tamashas and so on,

that's _their_ kind of advertisement! For instance--but just a minute,

and I'll show you----"

He jumped up and dashed out of the room. Lady Tasker took advantage of

his absence to give a discreet glance at Dorothy, but Dorothy's head

remained bent demurely over her work. Stan returned, carrying a small

parcel.

"Here we are," he said, unfastening the package: and then suddenly

his voice and manner changed remarkably. He took a small pot from

the parcel and set it on the palm of his left hand; he pointed at it

with the index-finger of his right hand; and a bright and poster-like

smile overspread his face. He spoke slightly loudly, and very, very

persuasively.

"Now I have here, Aunt Grace, one of our newest lines--Pickled Banyan.

Now I'm not going to ask you to take my word for it; I want you to try

it for yourself. It isn't what this man says or what that man says;

tasting's believing. Give me your teaspoon."

"My _dear_ Stan!" the astonished Lady Tasker gasped.

"We're selling a great many of this particular article, and are

prepared to stake our reputation on it," Stan went on. "Established

1780; more than One Hundred Gold Medals. Those are our credentials.

Those are what we lose.--Pass your spoon."

Lady Tasker was rigid. Perhaps Stan would have been better advised to

cast his spell over those who were going up in the world, and not on

those who, like themselves, were coming down or barely holding their

own. Again he went on, pointing engagingly at the small pot.

"But just try it," he urged, pushing the pot under his aunt's nose.

"It isn't what this man says or--I mean, it doesn't cost you anything

to try it. A free trial invited. Here's the recipe, look, on the

bottle--carefully selected Banyans, best cane sugar, lemon-juice

refined by a patent process, and a touch of tabasco. The makers'

guarantee on every label--none genuine without it--have a go!"

With a "Really, Stan!" Lady Tasker had turned away in her chair,

revolted. "And do you expect to go to a house again after an exhibition

like that?" she asked over her shoulder.

"Eh?" said Stan, a little discomfited. "Too much salesman about it,

d'you think? Brooks warned me about that. Fact is, he had a chap in as

a sort of object-lesson. This chap came in--I didn't know they had

schools and classes for this kind of thing, did you?--this chap came

in, and I was supposed to be somebody who didn't want the stuff at any

price, and he'd got to sell it to me whether I wanted it or not, and

old Brooks said to me, 'Now ask him how much the beastly muck is,' and

a lot of facers like that, and so we'd a set-to.... Then, when the

fellow had gone, he said he'd had him in just to show me how _not_ to

do it.... But he was an ingenious sort of beast, and I can't get his

talk out of my head. I'd thought of having a shot at it to-night, but

perhaps I'd better practise a bit more first. Thanks awfully for the

criticism, Aunt Grace. If you don't mind I'll practise on you as we go

along. I'm dining with a man to-night, but I'd better be sure of my

ground.--Now what about having the Bits in, Dot?"

"I think I hear them coming," said Dorothy, whose demureness had not

given as much as a flicker. Perhaps she was wondering whether she could

spare the sovereign His Impudence would presently ask her for.

The door opened, and Noel and Jackie stood there with a nurse behind

them. Noel walked stoutly in. Jackie, not yet very firm on his pins,

bumbled after him like an overladen bee.

III

THE "NOVUM"

Stan was quite right in supposing that the Cosimo Pratts wished

to forget all about the Ludlow experiment that had disturbed the

Shropshire country-side a year or more before, but he was wrong in

the reason he assigned them. They were not in the least ashamed of

it. As a stage in their intellectual development, the experiment had

been entirely in its place. Especially in Mrs. Pratt's career--as an

old student of the McGrath School of Art, a familiar (for a time) with

Poverty in cheap studios, the painter of the famous Feminist picture

"Barrage," and so forward--had this been true. Cosimo, in "The Life

and Work of Miss Amory Towers," a labour to which he devoted himself

intermittently, pointed out the naturalness and inevitability of the

sequence with real eloquence. Step had led to step, and the omission of

any one step would have ruined the whole.

But nobody with work still in them lingers long over the past. They

had dropped the task of regenerating rural England, or rather had

handed it over to others, only when it had been pointed out to them

that capacity so rare as theirs ought to be directed to larger ends.

One evening there had put in an appearance at one of the Ludlow

meetings--a meeting of the Hurdy-gurdy Octette, which afterwards gave

instrumental performances with such success at Letchworth, Bushey and

Golder's Green--Mr. Strong, the original founder and present editor of

the "Novum Organum," or, as it was usually called, the "Novum." Mr.

Strong, as it happened, was the man whom the scatter-brained Stan had

met at The Witan, and of whom he had expected that impossibility of any

man whomsoever--an admission that he did not know what he was talking

about. At that time Mr. Strong had been perambulating the country with

a Van, holding meetings and distributing literature; and whatever Mr.

Strong's other failings might have been, nobody had ever said of him

that he did not recognize a good thing when he saw it. The Cause itself

had served as an introduction between him and Cosimo; it had also been

a sufficient reason for his inviting himself to Cosimo's house for a

couple of days and remaining there for three weeks; and then he had

got rid of the Van and had come again. He was a rapturous talker, when

there was an end to be gained, and he had expressed himself as strongly

of the opinion that, magnificent a field for the sowing of the good

seed as the country-side was, there was simply stupendous propaganda

to be done in London. He knew (he had gone on) that Mrs. Pratt would

forgive him (he had a searching blue eye and an actor's smile) if he

appeared for a moment to speak disparagingly of what he might call the

mere graces of the Movement, (alluring as these were in Mrs. Pratt's

capable and very pretty hands); it was not disparagement really; he

only meant that these garlands would burgeon a hundred-fold if the

stern and thankless work was got out of the way first. Mr. Strong had

a valuable trick of suddenly making those searching blue eyes of his

more searching, and of switching off the actor's smile altogether; both

of these things had happened as he had gone on to point out that what

the Cause was really languishing for was a serious and responsible

organ; and then, and only then, when they had got (so to speak) the

diapason, there would be time enough for the trills and appoggiaturas

of the Hurdy-gurdy Band.

Before the end of Mr. Strong's second visit Cosimo had put up the

greater part of the money for the "Novum."

So you see just where the feather-pated Stan was wrong. The Cosimo

Pratts were not outfaced from anything; they had merely seen a new

and heralding light. They did not so much recede from the Rural

Experiment, and discussions of the Suffrage, and eating buns on the

floor at assemblies of the Poets' Club, and a hundred and twenty other

such things, as become as it were translated. They still shed over

these activities the benignity of their approval, but from on high

now. Amory could no longer be expected actually to "run" the Suffrage

Shop herself--Dickie Lemesurier did that; nor the "Eden" (the new

offshoot off the Lettuce Grill)--that she left to Katie Deedes; nor

the "Lectures on Love" Agency--that was quite safe in the hands of her

friends, Walter Wyron and Laura Beamish. Amory merely shed approval

down. She was _hors concours_. She ... but you really must read

Cosimo's book. You will find it all there (or at any rate a good deal

of it).

For Amory Pratt, in so far as Cosimo was the proprietor of the "Novum,"

was the proprietor of the proprietor of a high-class weekly review

that was presently going to put the two older parties out of business

entirely. She had more than a Programme now; she had a Policy. She had

crossed the line into the _haute politique_. Her At Homes were already

taking on the character of the political salon, and between herself

and the wives of ministers and ambassadors were differences, in degree

perhaps, but not in kind. And that even these differences should become

diminished she had taken on, ever since her settling-down at The Witan,

slight, but significant, new attitudes and condescensions. She was

kinder and more gracious to her sometime equals than before. She gave

them encouraging looks, as much as to say that they need not be afraid

of her. But it was quite definitely understood that when she took Mr.

Strong apart under the copper beech or retired with him into the studio

at the back of the house, she must on no account be disturbed.--Mr.

Strong, by the way, always dressed in the same Norfolk jacket, red tie

and soft felt hat, and his first caution to Cosimo and Amory had been

that Brimby, the novelist, was an excellent chap, but not always to be

taken very seriously.

Amory did not often put in an appearance at the "Novum's" offices.

This was not that she thought it more befitting that Mr. Strong should

wait on her, for she went about a good deal with Mr. Strong, and did

not always trouble him to come up to The Witan to fetch her. It was,

rather, if the truth must be told, that she found the offices rather

dingy. Her senses loved the newly-machined smell of each new issue of

the paper, but not the mingled odour of dust and stale gum and Virginia

cigarettes of the place whence it came. Moreover, the premises were

rather difficult to find. They lay at the back of Charing Cross Road.

You dodged into an alley between a second-hand bookseller's and a shop

where electric-light fittings were sold, entered a narrow yard, and,

turning to the right into a gas-lighted cavern where were stacked

hundreds and hundreds of sandwich-boards, some back-and-fronts, some

with the iron forks for the bearer's shoulders, you ascended by means

of a dark staircase to the second floor. There, at the end of a passage

which some poster-artist had half papered with the specimens of his

art, you came upon the three rooms. The first of these was the general

office; the second was Mr. Strong's private office; and the third was a

room which, the "Novum" having no need of it, Mr. Strong had thought he

might as well use as a rent-free bedroom as not. The door of this room

Mr. Strong always kept locked. It was more prudent. He was supposed to

live somewhere in South Kentish Town, and gave this address to certain

of his correspondents. The letters of these reached him sooner or

later, through the agency of a barber, in whose window was a placard,

"Letters may be addressed here."

Perhaps, too, the extraordinary people who visited Mr. Strong in the

way of business helped to keep Amory away. For an endless succession

of the queerest people came--contributors, and would-be contributors,

and friends of the Cause who "were just passing and thought they'd

look in," and artists seeking a paper with the courage to print really

stinging caricatures, and article-writers who were out of a job

only because they dared to tell the truth about things, and Russian

political exiles, and Armenians who wanted passages to America, and

Eurasians who wanted rifles, and tramps, and poets, and the boy from

the milkshop who brought in the bread and butter and eggs for Mr.

Strong's breakfast. And out of these strange elements had grown up

the paper's literary style. This was unique in London journalism:

philosophical, yet homely; horizon-wide of outlook, yet never without

hope that the shining thing in the gutter might prove to be a jewel;

and, despite its habitual omissions of the prefix "Mr." from the names

of statesmen, and its playful allusions to this personage's nose or

the waist-measurement of the other, with more than a little of the

Revelation of Saint John the Divine about it. "Damn" and "Hell" were

words the "Novum" commonly used. Once Amory had demurred at the use of

a word stronger still. But Mr. Strong had merely replied, "If I can

say it to you I think I can say it to them." He was no truckler to his

proprietors, and anyhow, the man whom the word had encarnadined was

only a colliery-owner.

The "Novum" had hardly been six weeks old when a certain desire on

Amory's part to make experiment of her power had, putatively at any

rate, lost it money. The little collision of wills had come about over

the question of whether the "Novum" should admit advertisements to

its columns or not. Now as most people know, that is a question that

seldom arises in journalism. A question far more likely to arise is

whether the advertisements can be got. But when a journal sets out to

do something that hitherto has not only not been done, but has not even

been attempted, you will admit that the case is special. The experience

of other papers is useless; their economics do not apply. What did

apply was the fact that Mrs. Pratt had been an artist, looked on sheets

of paper from another angle than that of the mere journalist and

literary man, and loved symmetry and could not endure unsightliness.

Besides, "No Compromise" was the "Novum's" motto, and what was the good

of having a motto like that if you compromised in the very form of

your expression?... A "shoulder-piece," "_The Little Mary Emollient_,"

had brought out all Mrs. Pratt's finer artistic instincts. Here was a

journal consecrated to a great and revolutionary cause, and the very

first thing to catch a reader's eye was, not only an advertisement,

but a facetious advertisement at that--a Pill, without a Pill's robust

familiarity--a commercial cackle issuing from the "Novum's" august

and oracular mouth.... For the first time in her life Mrs. Pratt had

wielded the blue pencil, tearing the rubbishy proof-paper in the energy

with which she did so. Mr. Strong's blue eyes, bluer for the contrast

with his red knot of a tie, had watched her face, but he had said

nothing. He was willing to humour her....

But when all was said and done he was an editor, and no sooner was

Amory's back turned than he had restored the announcement. The paper

had appeared, and there had been a row....

"Then I appeal to Pratt," Mr. Strong had said, with all the good-nature

in the world. "I take it the 'Novum's' a serious enterprise, and not

just a hobby?"

Cosimo had glanced a little timidly at his wife. Then he had replied

thoughtfully.

"I don't know. I'm not so sure. That is, I'm not so sure it oughtn't to

be a serious enterprise _and_ a hobby. The world's best work is always

done for love--that's another way of calling it a hobby--you see what

I mean--Nietzsche has something about it somewhere or other--or if he

hasn't Ruskin has----"

Any number of effective replies had been open to Mr. Strong, but he had

used none of them. Instead his eyes had given as it were a flick to

Amory's face. The proprietor's proprietor had continued indignantly.

"It ruins the whole effect! It's _unspeakably_ vulgar! After that

glowing, that impassioned Foreword--_this_! Hardly a month ago that

lovely apostrophe to Truth Naked--that beautiful image of her stark and

innocent on our banners but with a forest of bright bayonets bristling

about her--and now _this_! It's revolting!"

But Mr. Strong had himself written that impassioned Foreword, and knew

all about it. Again he had given his proprietor's wife that quietly

humouring look.

"Do you mean that the 'Novum's' going to refuse advertisements?"

"I mean that I blue-pencilled that one myself."

"And what about the others--the 'Eden' and the Suffrage Shop and

Wyron's Lectures?"

"They're different. They _are_ the Cause. You said yourself that the

'Novum' was going to be a sort of generalissimo, and these the brigades

of whatever they're called. They are, at any rate, doing the Work. Is

_that_ doing any Work, I should like to know?"

Mr. Strong had refrained from flippancy.--"I see what you mean," he

had replied equably. "At the same time, if you're going to refuse

advertisements the thing's going to cost a good deal more money."

"Well?" Amory had replied, as who might say, "Has money been refused

you yet?"

Strong had given a compliant shrug--"All right. That means I censor

the advertisements, I suppose. New industry. Very well. The 'Eden' and

Wyron's Lectures and Week-end Cottages and the Plato Press only, then.

I'll strike out that '_Platinum: False Teeth Bought_.' But I warn you

it will cost more."

"Never mind that."

And so the incident had ended.

But perhaps Mrs. Pratt's sensitiveness of eye was not the only cause

of the rejection of that offending advertisement. Another reason might

have lain in her present relation with her sometime fellow-student

of the McGrath School of Art, Dorothy Tasker. For that relation had

suffered a change since the days when the two girls had shared a shabby

day-studio in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. At that time, now five years ago,

Amory Towers had been thrust by circumstances into a position of

ignoble envy of her friend. She had been poor, and Dorothy's people

(or so she had supposed) very, very wealthy. True, poor Dorothy,

without as much as a single spark of talent, had nevertheless buckled

to, and, in various devious ways, had contrived to suck a parasitic

living out of the wholesome body of real art; none the less, Amory had

conceived her friend to be of the number of those who play at hardship

and independence with a fully spread table at home for them to return

to when they are tired of the game. But the case was entirely changed

now. Amory frankly admitted that she had been mistaken in one thing,

namely, that if those people of Dorothy's had more money, they had also

more claims upon it, and so were relatively poor. Amory herself was now

very comfortably off indeed. By that virtue and good management which

the envious call luck, she had now money, Cosimo's money, to devote to

the regeneration of the world. Dorothy, married to the good-tempered

and shiftless Stan, sometimes did not know which way to turn for the

overdue quarter's rent.

Now among her other ways of making ends meet Dorothy had for some years

done rather well out of precisely that kind of work which Amory refused

to allow the "Novum" to touch--advertisements. She had wormed herself

into the services of this firm and that as an advertisement-adviser.

But her contracts had begun in course of time to lapse, one or two

fluky successes had not been followed up, and two children had further

tightened things. Nor had Stan been of very much help. Amory despised

Stan. She thought him, not a man, but a mere mouth to be fed. Real men,

like Cosimo, always had money, and Amory was quite sure that, even if

Cosimo had not inherited a fortune from his uncle, he would still have

contrived to make himself the possessor of money in some other way.

Therefore Amory was even kinder to Dorothy than she was to Dickie

Lemesurier of the Suffrage Shop, to Katie Deedes of the "Eden," and

to Laura Beamish and Walter Wyron, who ran the "Lectures on Love."

But somehow--it was a little difficult to say exactly how, but there

it undoubtedly was--Dorothy did not accept her kindnesses in quite

the proper spirit. One or two she had even rejected--gently, Amory

was bound to admit, but still a rejection. For example, there had

been that little rebuff (to call it by its worst name for a moment)

about the governess. Amory had, in Miss Britomart Belchamber, the

most highly-qualified governess for Corin and Bonniebell that money

and careful search had been able to obtain; Dorothy lived less than a

quarter of an hour's walk away; it would have been just as easy for

Britomart to teach four children as to teach two; but Dorothy had

twisted and turned and had finally said that she had decided that she

couldn't put Amory to the trouble. And again, when the twins had had

their party, Amory would positively have _liked_ Noel and Jackie to

come and dance "Twickenham Ferry" in those spare costumes and to join

in those songs from the Book of Caroline Ditties; but again an excuse

had been made. And half a dozen similar things had driven Amory to the

conclusion, sadly against her will, that the Taskers were taking up

that ridiculous, if not actually hostile attitude, of the poor who hug

their pride. It was not nice between old friends. Amory could say with

a clear conscience that she had not refused Dorothy's help in the days

when the boot had been on the other leg. She was not resentful, but

really it did look very much like putting on airs.

But of course that stupid Stanhope Tasker was at the bottom of it all.

Amory did not so much mind his not having liked her from the first; she

would have been sorry to let a trifle like that ruffle her equanimity;

but it was evident that he did not in the least realize his position.

She was quite sure, in the first place, that he couldn't afford (or

rather Dorothy couldn't afford) to pay eighty pounds for that flat,

plus another twenty for the little office they had annexed and used

as a nursery. And in the next place he dressed absurdly above his

position. Cosimo dressed for hygiene and comfort, in cellular things

and things made of nonirritant vegetable fibre; but those absurdly

modish jackets and morning-coats of Stan's had, unless Amory was very

much mistaken, to be bought at the expense of real necessaries. And

so with their hospitality. In that too, they tried to cut a dash and

came very near to making themselves ridiculous. Amory didn't want to

interfere; she couldn't plan and be wise for everybody; she had her

own affairs to attend to; but she was quite sure that the Taskers

would have done better to regulate their hospitality as hospitality

was regulated at The Witan--that was, to make no special preparation,

but to have the door always open to their friends. But no; the Taskers

must make a splash. They must needs "invite" people and be a little

stand-offish about people coming uninvited. They were "At home" and

"Not at home" for all the world as if they had been important people.

But Amory would have thought herself very stupid to be taken in by all

this ceremony. For example, the last time she and Cosimo had been asked

to the flat to dinner she knew that they had been "worked off" only

because the Taskers had had the pheasants given by somebody, and very

likely the fish too. And it would have been just like Stan Tasker's

insolence had he asked them because he _knew_ that the Pratts did not

eat poor beasties that should have been allowed to live because of

their lovely plumes, nor the pretty speckled creatures that had done

no harm to the destroyer who had taken them with a hook out of their

pretty stream.

But, kind to her old friend as Amory was always ready to be, she did

not feel herself called upon to go out of her way to be very nice to

her friend's husband. He had no right to expect it after his rudeness

to Edgar Strong about the "Novum." For it had been about the "Novum"

that Stan had given Strong that talking-to. Much right (Amory thought

hotly) he had to talk! Just because he consorted with men who counted

their money in rupees and thought nothing of shouldering their

darker-skinned brothers off the pavement, he thought he was entitled

to put an editor into his place! But the truth, of course, was, that

that very familiarity prevented him from really knowing anything about

these questions at all. Because an order was established, he had not

imagination enough to see how it could have been anything different.

His mind (to give it that name) was of the hidebound, official type,

and too many limited intelligences of that kind stopped the cause

of Imperial progress to-day. Or rather, they tried to stop it, and

perhaps thought they were stopping it; but really, little as they

suspected it, they were helping more than they knew. A pig-headed

administration does unconsciously help when, out of its own excesses, a

divine discontent is bred. Mr. Suwarree Prang had been eloquent on that

very subject one afternoon not very long ago. A charming man! Amory

had listened from her hammock, rapt. Mr. Prang did the "Indian Review"

for the "Novum," in flowery but earnest prose; and as he actually was

Indian, and did not merely hobnob with a few captains and subalterns

home on leave, it was to be supposed that he would know rather more of

the subject than Mr. Stanhope Tasker!----

And Mr. Stanhope Tasker had had the cheek to tell Mr. Strong that he

didn't know what he was talking about!

Amory felt that she could never be sufficiently thankful for the chance

that had thrown Mr. Strong in her way. She had always secretly felt

that her gifts were being wasted on such minor (but still useful)

tasks as the "Eden" Restaurant and the "Love Lectures" Agency. But her

personal exaltation over Katie Deedes and the others had caused her no

joy. What had given her joy had been the immensely enlarged sphere of

her usefulness; that was it, not the odious vanity of leadership, but

the calm and responsible envisaging of a task for which not one in ten

thousand had the vision and courage and strength. And Edgar Strong had

shown her these things. Of course, if he had put them in these words

she might have suspected him of trying to flatter her; but as a matter

of fact he had not said a single word about it. He had merely allowed

her to see for herself. That was his way: to all-but-prove a thing--to

take it up to the very threshold of demonstration--and then apparently

suddenly to lose interest in it. And that in a way was his weakness

as an editor. Amory, whom three or four wieldings of the blue pencil

had sufficed to convince that there was nothing in journalism that an

ordinary intelligence could not master in a month, realized this. She

herself, it went without saying, always saw at once exactly what Mr.

Strong meant; she personally liked those abrupt and smiling stops that

left Mr. Strong's meaning as it were hung up in the air; but it was a

mistake to suppose that everybody was as clever as she and Mr. Strong.

"I's" had to be dotted and "t's" crossed for the multitude. But it was

at that point that Mr. Strong always became almost languid.

It was inevitable that the man who had thus revealed to her, after a

single glance at her, such splendid and unsuspected capacities within

herself, should exercise a powerful fascination over Amory. If he had

seen all this in her straight away (as he assured her he had), then he

was a man not lightly to be let go. He might be the man to show her

even greater things yet. He puzzled her; but he appeared to understand

her; and as both of them understood everybody else, she was aware of a

challenge in his society that none other of her set afforded her. He

could even contradict her and go unsacked. Prudent people, when they

sack, want to know what they are sacking, and Amory did not know.

Therefore Mr. Strong was quite sure of his job until she should find

out.

Another thing that gave Mr. Strong this apparently offhand hold over

her was the confidential manner in which he had warned her not to

take Mr. Brimby, the novelist, too seriously. For without the warning

Amory, like a good many other people, might have committed precisely

that error.... But when Mr. Brimby, taking Amory apart one day, had

expressed in her ear a gentle doubt whether Mr. Strong was quite

"sound" on certain important questions, Amory had suddenly seen. Mr.

Strong had "cut" one of Mr. Brimby's poignantly sorrowful sketches of

the East End--seen through Balliol eyes--and Mr. Brimby was resentful.

She did not conceal from herself that he might even be a little envious

of Mr. Strong's position. He might have been wiser to keep his envy to

himself, for, while mere details of routine could hardly expect to get

Amory's personal attention, there was one point on which Mr. Strong

was quite "sound" enough for Amory--his sense of her own worth and of

how that worth had hitherto been wasted. And Mr. Strong had not been

ill-natured about Mr. Brimby either. He had merely twinkled and put

Amory on her guard. And because he appeared to have been right in this

instance, Amory was all the more disposed to believe in his rightness

when he gave her a second warning. This was about Wilkinson, the Labour

Member. He was awfully fond of dear old Wilkie, he said; he didn't know

a man more capable in some things than Wilkie was; but it would be

foolish to deny that he had his limitations. He wasn't fluid enough;

wanted things too much cut-and-dried; was a little inclined to mistake

violence for strength; and of course the whole point about the "Novum"

was that it _was_ fluid....

"In fact," Mr. Strong concluded, his wary blue eyes ceasing suddenly

to hold Amory's brook-brown ones and taking a reflective flight past

her head instead, "for a paper like ours--I'm hazarding this, you

understand, and keep my right to reconsider it--I'm not sure that a

certain amount of fluidity isn't a Law...."

Amory nodded. She thought it excellently put.

IV

THE STONE WALL

Amory sometimes thought, when she took her bird's-eye-view of the

numerous activities that found each its voice in its proper place in

the columns of the "Novum," that she would have allowed almost any of

them to perish for lack of support rather than the Wyron's "Lectures

on Love." She admitted this to be a weakness in herself, a sneaking

fondness, no more; but there it was--just that one blind spot that mars

even the clearest and most piercing vision. And she always smiled when

Mr. Strong tried to show this weakness of hers in the light of a merit.

"No, no," she always said, "I don't defend it. Twenty things are more

important really, but I can't help it. I suppose it's because we know

all about Laura and Walter themselves."

"Perhaps so," Mr. Strong would musingly concede.

Anybody who was anybody knew all about Laura Beamish and Walter Wyron

and a certain noble defeat in their lives that was to be accounted as

more than a hundred ordinary victories. That almost historic episode

had just shown everybody who was anybody what the world's standards

were really worth. Hitherto the Wyrons have been spoken of both as a

married couple and as "Walter Wyron" and "Laura Beamish" separately;

let the slight ambiguity now be cleared up.

Mrs. Cosimo Pratt became on occasion Miss Amory Towers for reasons that

began and ended in her profession as a painter; and everybody who was

anybody was as well aware that Miss Amory Towers, the painter of the

famous feminist picture "Barrage," was in reality Mrs. Cosimo Pratt,

as the great mass of people who were nobody knew that Miss Elizabeth

Thompson, the painter of "The Roll Call," was actually Lady Butler.

But not so with the Wyrons. Reasons, not of business, nor yet of fame,

but of a burning and inextinguishable faith, had led to their noble

equivocation. Deeply seated in the hearts both of Walter and of Laura

had lain a passionate non-acceptance of the merely parroted formula of

the Wedding Service. So searching and fundamental had this been that

by the time their various objections had been disposed of little had

remained that had seemed worth bothering about; and in one sense they

had not bothered about it. True, in another sense they had bothered,

and that was precisely where the defeat came in; but that did not dim

the splendour of the attempt. To come without further delay to the

point, the Wyrons had married, under strong protest, in the ordinary

everyday way, Laura submitting to the momentary indignity of a ring;

but thereafter they had magnificently vindicated the New Movement (in

that one aspect of it) by not saying a word about the ceremony of their

marriage to anybody--no, not even to the people who were somebody. Then

they had flown off to the Latin Quarter.

It had not been in the Latin Quarter, however, that the true character

of their revolt had first shown. Perhaps--nobody knows--their relation

had not been singular enough there. Perhaps--there were people base

enough to whisper this--they had feared the singularity of "letting

on." It is easy to do in the Boul' Mich' as the Boul' Mich' does.

The real difficulties begin when you try to do in London what London

permits only as long as you do it covertly.

And if there had been a certain covertness about their behaviour

when, after a month, they had returned, what a venial and pardonable

subterfuge, to what a tremendous end! Amory herself, up to then, had

not had a larger conception. For while the Wyrons had secretly married

simply and solely in order that their offspring should not lie under

a stigma, their overt lives had been one impassioned and beautiful

protest against any assumption whatever on the part of the world of a

right to make rules for the generation that was to follow. No less a

gospel than this formed the substance of those Lectures of Walter's;

great as the number of the born was, his mission was the protection

of a greater number still. The best aspects both of legitimacy and

of illegitimacy were to be stereoscoped in the perfect birth. And

he now had, in quite the strict sense of the word, a following. The

same devoted faces followed him from the Lecture at the Putney Baths

on the Monday to that at the Caxton Hall on the Thursday, from his

ascending the platform at the Hampstead Town Hall on the Tuesday to his

addressing of a garden-party from under the copper-beech at The Witan

on the Sunday afternoon. And in course of time the faithfulness of the

followers was rewarded. They graduated, so to speak, from the seats in

the body of the building to the platform itself. There they supported

Laura, and gave her a countenance that she no longer needed (for she

had earned her right to wear her wedding-ring openly now), and flocked

about the lecturer afterwards, not as about a mere man, but rather as

seeing in him the physician, the psychologist, the expert, the helper,

and the setter of crooked things straight that he was.

As a lecturer--may we say as a prophet?--Walter had a manner original

and taking in the extreme. Anybody less sustained by his vision

and less upheld by his faith might have been a little tempted to

put on "side," but not so Walter. Perhaps his familiarity with the

stage--everybody knew his father, Herman Wyron, of the New Greek

Theatre--had taught him the value of the large and simple statement

of large and simple things; anyhow, he did not so much lecture to his

audiences as accompany them, chattily and companionably, through the

various windings of his subject. With his hands thrust unaffectedly

into the pockets of his knickers, and a sort of sublimated "Well, here

we are again" expression on his face, he allayed his hearers' natural

timidity before the magnitude of his mission, and gave them a direct

and human confab. on a subject that returned as it were from its cycle

of vastness to simple personal experience again. His every sentence

seemed to say, "Don't be afraid; it's nothing really; soon you'll be

as much at your ease in dealing with these things as I am; just let me

tell you an anecdote." No wonder Laura held her long and muscular neck

very straight above her hand-embroidered yoke. Everybody understood

that unless she adopted some sort of an attitude her proper pride in

such a married lover must show, which would have been rather rubbing

it in to the rest of her sex. So she booked dates for new lectures

almost nonchalantly, and, when the platform was invaded at the end of

the Lecture, or Walter stepped down to the level of those below, she

was there in person as the final demonstration of how well these things

actually would work as soon as Society had decided upon some concerted

action.

Corin and Bonniebell, Amory's twins, did not attend Walter's Lectures.

It was not deemed advisable to keep them out of bed so late at night.

But Miss Britomart Belchamber, the governess, could have passed--had

in fact passed--an examination in them. It had been Amory who, so to

speak, had set the paper. For it had been at one of the Lectures--the

one on "_The Future Race: Are We Making Manacles?_"--that Miss

Belchamber had first impressed Amory favourably. Amory had singled

her out, first because she wore the guarantee of Prince Eadmond's

Collegiate Institution--the leather-belted brown sleeveless djibbah

with the garment of fine buff fabric showing beneath it as the fruit

of a roasted chestnut shows when the rind splits--and secondly because

of her admirable physique. She was splendidly fair, straight as an

athlete, and could shut up her long and massive limbs in a wicker chair

like a clasp-knife; and for her movements alone it was almost a sin

that Walter's father could not secure her for the New Greek Society's

revival of "Europa" at the Choragus Theatre. And she was not too quick

mentally. That is not to say that she was a fool. What made Amory sure

that she was not a fool was that she herself was not instinctively

attracted by fools, and it was better that Miss Belchamber should be

ductile under the influence of Walter's ideas than that she should have

just wit enough to ask those stupid and conventional and so-called

"practical" questions that Walter always answered at the close of the

evening as patiently as if he had never heard them before. And Miss

Belchamber told the twins stories, and danced "Rufty Tufty," with them,

and "Catching of Quails," and was really cheap at her rather stiff

salary. Cosimo loved to watch her at "Catching of Quails." If the

children did not grow up with a love of beauty after that, he said,

he gave it up. (The twins, by the way, unconsciously served Amory as

another example of Dorothy Tasker's unreasonableness. As the mother

of Noel and Jackie, Dorothy seemed rather to fancy herself as an

experienced woman. But Amory could afford to smile at this pretension.

There was a difference in age of a year and more between Noel and

Jackie. No doubt Dorothy knew a little, but she, Amory, could have told

her a thing or two).

On a Wednesday afternoon about a fortnight after Lady Tasker's visit

to The Witan, Amory walked the garden thoughtfully. The weather was

growing chilly, the hammock had been taken in, and her feet in the

fallen leaves made a melancholy sound. Cosimo had left her half an hour

before; certain points had struck him in the course of conversation

which he thought ought to be incorporated in the "_Life and Work_";

and it was a rule at The Witan that nothing must ever be allowed to

interfere with the impulse of artistic creation. For the matter of

that, Amory herself was creating now, or at any rate was at the last

preparatory stage that immediately precedes creation. Presently she

would have taken the plunge and would be deep in the new number of the

"Novum." For the moment she was thinking of Mr. Strong.

As she tried to clear up exactly what place Mr. Strong had in her

thoughts she was struck by the dreadful tendency words and names

and definitions have to attach themselves to vulgar and ready-made

meanings--a tendency so strong that she had even caught herself more

than once jumping to a common conclusion. To take an example, though

a rather preposterous one. Had Dorothy, with one of her ridiculous

advertisements waiting to be done, confessed to her that instead of

setting about it she was thinking of a male person with a pair of

alert blue eyes and a curiously mobile and clean-cut mouth (not that

it was likely that Dorothy would have had the candour to make such a

confession)--well, Amory might have smiled just like anybody else. She

was not trying to make herself out any better than others. She was

candid about it, however, which they were often not.

Still, the trouble about her feeling for Mr. Strong was to find a word

for it that had not been vulgarized. She was, of course, exceedingly

interested in him, but that was not saying very much. She "liked" him,

too, but that again might mean anything. Her difficulty was that she

herself was so special; and so on second thoughts she might have been

right in giving an interpretation to Dorothy's actions, and Dorothy

quite wrong in giving the same interpretation to hers merely because

the data were the same.

Nor had Mr. Strong himself been able to help her very much when, a

couple of days before, she had put the question to him, earnestly and

without hateful false shame.

"What _is_ this relation of ours?" she had asked him, point-blank and

fearlessly.

"Eh?" Mr. Strong had replied, a little startled.

"There _must_ be a relation of some sort between every two people who

come into contact. I'm just wondering exactly what ours _is_."

Then Mr. Strong had knitted his brows and had said, presently, "I

see.... Have you read '_The Tragic Comedians_?'"--Amory had not, and

the copy of the book which she had immediately ordered had not come

yet. And then she too had knitted her brows. She had caught the trick

from him.

"I suppose that what it really comes to is knowing _yourself_," she had

mused; and at that Mr. Strong had given her a quick approving look,

almost as if he said that if she put in her thumb in the same place

again she might pull out a plum very well worth having.

"And not," Amory had continued, curiously heartened, "anything about

the other person at all."

"Good, good," Mr. Strong had applauded under his breath; "have you

Edward Carpenter's book in the house, by the way?... Never mind: I'll

send you my copy."

He had sent it. It was in Amory's hand now. She had discovered that

it had a catching and not easily identifiable smell of its own, of

Virginia cigarettes and damp and she knew not what else, all mingled;

and somehow the smell seemed quite as much an answer to the question

she had asked as anything in the book itself.

Nor, despite Walter's special knowledge of these indications, could

she go to the Wyrons for diagnosis and advice. For one thing, there

was her own position of high patronage to be considered; for another,

splendidly daring as the Wyrons' original protest had been, the

Lectures had lately begun to have a little the air of a shop, over the

counter of which admittedly valuable specifics were handed, but with a

kind of "_And_ the next article, please?" suspicion about it. Besides,

the Wyrons, having no children, had of necessity to "chic" a little in

cases where children formed a complicating element. Besides ... but

anyway, Amory wasn't going either to Laura Beamish or to Walter Wyron.

She made a charming picture as she walked slowly the length of the

privet hedge and then turned towards the copper beech again. Mr. Strong

had said that he liked her in that dress--an aluminium-grey one, very

simple and very expensive, worn with a handsome Indian shawl, a gift

of Mr. Prang's, the mellow colour of which "led up" to the glowing

casque of her hair; and she had smiled when Mr. Strong had added that

Britomart Belchamber's rough tabards and the half-gym costume in which

she danced "Rufty Tufty" would not have suited her, Amory, at all.

Probably they wouldn't--not as a regular thing. Cosimo liked those,

especially when the wearer was largish; indeed, it was one of Cosimo's

humours to pose as Britomart's admirer. But Amory was small, and never

shut her limbs up like a multiple-lever in a basket chair, but drew

her skirt down a foot or so below her toes instead whenever she sat

down. She fancied, though Mr. Strong had never used the word, that the

"Novum's" editor found Miss Belchamber just a little hoydenish.

Amory wished that something would bring Mr. Strong up that afternoon.

It was one of the days on which the editing of the "Novum" could

take care of itself, and besides, they would actually be editing

it together. For the next number but one--the forthcoming one was

already passed--was to be their most important utterance yet. It was

to indicate clearly, firmly and once for all, their Indian policy. The

threatened failure of the monsoon made the occasion urgent, and Mr.

Suwarree Prang himself had explained to Amory only the night before

precisely what the monsoon was, and how its failure would provide, from

the point of view of those who held that the present wicked regime of

administration by the strong hand was at last tottering to its fall, a

providential opportunity. It had struck Amory as wondrously romantic

and strange that a meteorological condition halfway round the world,

in a place she had never seen, should thus change the course of her

quiet life in Hampstead; but, properly considered, no one thing in

this wonderful world was more wonderful than another. It was Life,

and Life, as she remembered to have read somewhere or other, is for

the Masters of it. And she was beginning to find that after all these

things only required a little confidence. It was as easy to swim in six

miles deep of water, like that place in Cosimo's atlas of which the

name escaped her for the moment, as it was in six feet. And Mr. Prang

had talked to her so long and so vividly about India that she sometimes

found it quite difficult to realize that she had never been there.

Still wishing that Mr. Strong would come, she slowly left the garden

and entered the house. In the hall she paused for a moment, and a

tender little smile softened her face. She had stopped before the

exquisite casts of the foot and the arm. Pensively she took the foot up

from the console table, and then, coming to a resolution, she took the

arm down from its hook on the wall. After all, beautiful as she had to

admit them to be, the studio, and not the hall, was the proper place

for them.

With the foot and Edward Carpenter in her left hand, and the plaster

arm hugged to her right breast, she walked along the passage and sought

the studio.

It was called the studio, and there certainly were canvases and

easels and other artists' paraphernalia there, but it was less used

for painting than as a room for sitting and smoking and tea and

discussion. It was a comfortable apartment. Rugs made islands on the

thick cork floor-covering, and among the rugs were saddlebag chairs, a

long adjustable chair, and a wide couch covered with faded tapestry.

The room was an annex of corrugated iron lined with matchboarding,

but electric-light fittings depended from the iron ties overhead,

and in place of an ordinary hearth was a sort of stage one, with an

imitation log of asbestos, which, when you put a match to it, broke

into a licking of blue and yellow gas-jets. The north window occupied

the whole of the garden end, and, facing it, was the large cartoon

for Amory's unfinished allegorical picture, "_The Triumph of Humane

Government_." High up and just within the door was the bell that

answered to the button outside.

Amory was putting down the casts on a Benares tray when the ringing of

this bell startled her. But as it rang in the kitchen also, she did not

move to answer it. She stood listening, the fingers of one hand to her

lips, those of the other still resting on the plaster shoulder. Then

she heard a voice, and a moment later there came a tap at the door.

It was Mr. Strong.

He advanced, and did a thing he had not done before--lifted the hand

she extended to his lips and then let it drop again. But Amory was not

surprised. It was merely a new and natural expression of the homage he

had never concealed, and even had Amory been vain enough to suppose

that it meant anything more, the briskness of the "Good afternoon" that

followed it would have disabused her. "Glad I found you," Mr. Strong

said. "I wanted to see you. Cosimo in?"

Her husband was always Cosimo to him, but in speaking to herself he

used no name at all. It was as if he hesitated to call her Amory, and

refused to call her Mrs. Pratt. Even "Miss Towers" he had only used

once, and that was some time ago.

Amory's fingers left the cast, and Mr. Strong walked towards the

asbestos log.--"May I?" he said, drawing forth a packet of Virginia

cigarettes; and afterwards he put the match with which he lighted one

of the cigarettes to the log. Amory drew up a small square footstool,

and put her elbows on her knees and her interwoven fingers beneath her

chin. Mr. Strong examined the end of his cigarette, and thrust his chin

down into his red tie and his hands deep into his trousers pockets.

Then he seemed to plunge into thought.

Suddenly he shot a glance at Amory, and said abruptly, "I suppose

you've talked over the Indian policy with Cosimo?"

It was nice and punctilious of him, the way he always dragged Cosimo

in, and Amory liked it. She felt sure that the editor of the "Times,"

calling on the Prime Minister's wife, would not ignore the Prime

Minister. But to-day she was a little abstracted--dull--she didn't know

exactly what; and so she replied, without moving, "Would you like him

here? He's busy with the '_Life_.'"

"Oh no, don't trouble him then."

There was a pause. Then, "I did talk to him about it. And to Mr.

Prang," Amory said.

"Oh. Hm. Quite so," said Mr. Strong, looking at the toes of his brogues.

"Yes. Mr. Prang was here last night," Amory continued, looking at the

points of her own slippers.

"Yes."

Again Mr. Strong's chin was sunk into his red tie. He was rising and

falling slowly on his toes. His eyes moved ruminatively sideways to the

rug at Amory's feet.

"Yes. Yes. I've been wondering----" he said thoughtfully.

"Well?"

"Oh, nothing really. I dare say I'm quite wrong. You see, Prang----"

"What?" Amory asked as he paused again.

There was a twinkle in the eyes that rose to Amory's. Mr. Strong gave a

slight shrug.--"Well--Prang!----" he said with humorous deprecation.

Amory was quick.--"Oh!--You don't mean that Mr. Prang isn't sound?"

"Sound? Perfectly, perfectly. And a most capable fellow. Only I've

wondered once or twice whether he isn't--you know--just a little _too_

capable.... You see, we want to use Prang--not to have Prang using

_us_."

Amory could not forbear to smile. If that was all that was troubling

Mr. Strong she thought she could reassure him.

"I don't think you'd have been afraid of that if you'd been here

last night," she replied quietly. "We were talking over England's

diabolical misrule, and I never knew Mr. Prang so luminous. It was

pathetic--really. Cosimo was talking about that Rawal Pindi case--you

know, of that ruffianly young subaltern drawing down the blinds and

then beating the native.--'But how do they take it?' I asked Mr.

Prang, rather scornfully, you know; and really I was sorry for the poor

fellow, having to apologize for his country.--'That's it,' he said

sadly--it was really sad.--And he told me, frankly, that sometimes the

poor natives pretended they were killed, and sometimes they announce

that they're going to die on a certain day, and they really _do_

die--they're so mystic and sensitive--it was _most_ interesting....

But what I mean is, that a gentle and submissive people like that--Mr.

Prang admits that's their weakness--I mean they _couldn't_ use _us_!

It's our degradation that we aren't gentle and sensitive too. You see

what I mean?"

"Oh, quite," Mr. Strong jerked out. "Quite."

"And that's why I call Mr. Prang an idealist. There must be something

_in_ the East. At any rate it was splendid moral courage on Prang's

part to say, quite openly, that they couldn't do anything without the

little handful of us here, but must simply go on suffering and dying."

There fell one of the silences that usually came when Mr. Strong lost

interest in a subject. Merely adding, "Oh, I've not a word to say

against Prang, but----," he began to rise and fall on his toes again.

Then he stepped to the Benares table where the casts were. But he made

no criticism of them. He picked the foot up, and put it down again. "I

like it," he said, and returned once more to the asbestos hearth. The

silence fell again.

Amory, sitting on the footstool with her knees supporting her elbows

and her wrists supporting her chin, would have liked to offer Mr.

Strong a penny for his thoughts. She had had an odd, warm little

sensation when he had picked up that cast of the perfect foot. She

supposed he must know that it was her foot, but so widely had his

thoughts been ranging that he had merely put it down again with an

abstracted "I like it." Amory was not sure that any other woman

than herself would not have been piqued. Any other woman would have

expected him either not to look at the thing, or else to say that it

was small, or to ask whether the real one was as white, or something

foolish like that. But Amory was superior to such things. She lived on

higher levels. On these levels such an affront to the pure intellect

as a flirtation could not exist. Free Love as a logical and defensible

system--yes, perhaps; or a combination so happy of marriage and

cohabitation as that of the Wyrons'--yes again; but anything lower

she left to the stupid people who swallowed the conventions whole,

including the convention of not being found out.--So she merely

wondered about their relation again. Obviously, there must _be_ a

relation. And yet his own explanation had been quite insufficient; it

had been no explanation at all to ask her whether she had read "_The

Tragic Comedians_" or whether she had Edward Carpenter in the house.

No doubt it was flattering to her intelligence to suppose that she

could "flash" at his meaning without further words on his part, but it

was also a little irritating when the flash didn't come. And, now that

she came to think of it, except that he allowed it to be inferred that

he found Britomart Belchamber a bit lumpish, she didn't know what he

thought, not merely of herself, but of women at all.

And yet there was a passed-through-the-furnace look about him that

might have piqued any woman. It was not conceivable that his eyes had

softened only over inspired passages in proof, or that the tenderest

speeches his lips had shaped had been the "Novum's" rallying-cries

to the devoted band of the New Imperialists. Amory was sure that his

memory must be a maze of things, less spacious perhaps, but far more

interesting than these. He looked widely now, but must have looked

close and intense too. He pronounced upon the Empire, but, for all he

was not married, must have probed deep into the palpitating human heart

as well.

Amory was just thinking what a gage of intimacy an unembarrassed

silence can be when Mr. Strong broke it. He lighted another cigarette

at the end of the last, turned, threw the end on the asbestos log, and

stood looking at the purring blue and yellow jets. No doubt he was full

of the Indian policy again.

But as it happened it was not the Indian policy--"Oh," Mr. Strong said,

"I meant to ask you--Who was that fellow who came up here one day?"

This was so vague that when Amory said "What fellow?" Mr. Strong

himself saw the vagueness, and laughed.

"Of course: 'How big is a piece of wood?'--I mean the fellow who came

to the Witan in a morning-coat?"

This was description enough. Amory's back straightened a little.

"Oh, Stanhope Tasker! Oh, just the husband of a friend of mine. I don't

think you've met her. Why?"

Surely, she thought, Mr. Strong was not going to tell her that

"Stanhope Tasker was an excellent fellow in his way, but----," as he

had said of Mr. Brimby, Mr. Wilkinson and Mr. Prang!----

"Oh, nothing much. Only that I saw him to-day," Strong replied

offhandedly.

"He's often about. He isn't a very busy man, I should say," Amory

remarked.

"Saw him in Charing Cross Road as I was coming out of the office," Mr.

Strong continued. "I don't think he saw me though."

"After his abominable manners to you that day I should think he'd be

ashamed to look you in the face."

For a moment Mr. Strong looked puzzled; then he remembered, and laughed

again.

"Oh, I didn't mind that in the least! Rather refreshing in fact. Far

more likely he didn't notice me because he had his wife with him. I

think you said he was married?"

Amory was just about to say that Mr. Strong gave Stan far more

magnanimity than he deserved when a thought arrested her. Dorothy in

Charing Cross Road! As far as she was aware Dorothy had not been out of

Hampstead for weeks, and even then kept to the less frequented parts of

the Heath. It wasn't likely....

Her eyes became thoughtful.

"Oh? That's funny," she said.

"What, that he shouldn't see me? Oh no. They seemed far more interested

in electric-light fittings."

Amory's eyes grew more thoughtful still--"Oh!" she said; and added,

"Did you think her pretty?"

"Hm--in a way. Very well dressed certainly; they both were. But I don't

think these black Spanish types amuse me much," Mr. Strong replied.

Dorothy a black Spanish type!

"Oh, do tell me what she had on!" said Amory brightly.

She rather thought she knew most of Dorothy's dresses by this time.

A black Spanish type!

The task of description was too much for Mr. Strong, but he did his

best with it. Amory was keenly interested. But she pocketed her

interest for the present, and said quite banteringly and with an almost

arch look, "Oh, I should have thought Mrs. Tasker exactly your type!"

Again the quick motion of Mr. Strong's blue eyes suggested an audible

click--"Oh? Why?" he asked.

"Oh, there's no 'why' about it, of course. It's the impression of

you I had, that's all. You see, you don't particularly admire Miss

Belchamber----"

"Oh, come! I think Miss Belchamber's an exceedingly nice girl, only----"

"Well, Laura Beamish, then. But I forgot; you don't go to Walter's

Lectures. But I wonder whether you'd admire Laura?"

"If she's black and Spanish you think I should?" He paused. "Is she?"

"No. Brown and stringy rather, and with eyes that open and shut very

quickly.... But I'm very absurd. There's no Law about these things

really. Only, you see, I've no idea of the kind of woman you _do_

admire?"

She said it smilingly, but that did not mean that she was not perfectly

candid and natural about it too. Why not be natural about these things?

Amory knew people who were natural enough about their preferred

foods and clothing and houses; was a woman less than an entrée, or

a bungalow, or a summer overcoat? Besides, it was so very much more

intrinsically interesting. Walter Wyron had made a whole Lecture on

it--Lecture No. II, "_Types and Tact_," and Walter had barely touched

the fringe of the subject. Amory wanted to go a little deeper than

that. But she also wanted to get away from those vulgarized words and

ready-made conclusions, and to have each case considered on its merits.

Surely it ought to be possible to say that the presence of a person

affected you pleasantly, or unpleasantly, without sniggering inferences

of a _liaison_ in the one case or of a rupture in the other!

Therefore it was once more just a little irritating that Mr. Strong,

instead of telling her what type he did admire, should merely laugh and

say, "Well--not Mrs. Tasker." If Amory had a criticism at all to make

of Mr. Strong it was this habit of his of negatives, that sometimes

almost justified the nickname Mr. Brimby had given him, of "Stone Wall

Strong." So she dropped one hand from her chin, allowing it to hang

loose over her knee while the other forearm still kept its swan's-neck

curve, and said abruptly, "Well--about the Indian Number. Let's get

on."

"Ah, yes," said Mr. Strong. "Let's get on."

"What had we decided?"

"Only Prang's article so far."

"But you say you have your doubts about it?"

Mr. Strong hesitated. "Only about its selling-power," he said with a

little shrug. "We must sell the paper, you see. It's not paying its way

yet."

"Well, I'm sure that's not Mr. Prang's fault," Amory retorted. "He's

practically made the export circulation."

"You mean the Bombay circulation? Yes, I suppose he has. I don't deny

it."

"You can't deny it. Since Prang began to write for us we've done

awfully well in Bombay."

To that too, Mr. Strong assented. Then Amory, after a moment's pause,

spoke quietly. She did not like to think of her editor as jealous of

his own contributors.

"I know you don't like Mr. Prang," she said, looking fixedly at the

asbestos log.

"I!" began Stone Wall Strong. "Why, you know I think he's a first rate

fellow, if only----"

This time, however, Amory really did intend to get it out of him. For

once she would have one of those hung-up sentences completed.

"If only what?" she said, looking up at him.

"Oh, I don't know--as you said a moment ago, there's no 'why' about

these things----"

"But I did give you my impression. You don't give me yours."

"You did, I admit. Yes, I admit you did.... What is it you want to

know, then?"

"Only why you seem so doubtful about Mr. Prang."

"Ah!" said Mr. Strong....

Those who knew Edgar Strong the best said that he was a man who, other

things being equal, would rather go straight than not. Even when the

other things were not quite equal, he still had a mild preference for

straightness. But if other people positively insisted that he should

deviate from straightness, very well; that was their lookout. He had

been a good many things in his time--solicitor's clerk, free-lance

journalist, book-pedlar, election-agent's minion, Vanner, poetic

vagabond, and always an unerring "spotter" of the literary son of the

farming squire the moment he appeared in sight; and the "Novum" was the

softest job he had found yet. If the price of his keeping it was that

he should look its owner's wife long and earnestly in the eyes, as if

in his own there lay immeasurable things, not for him to give but for

her to take if she list, so be it; he would sleep none the less well

in his rent-free bedroom behind the "Novum's" offices afterwards. His

experience of far less comfortable sleeping-quarters had persuaded him

that in this imperfect world a man is entitled to exactly what he can

get.

His eyes, nevertheless, did not seek Amory's. Instead, roving round the

room to see if nothing less would serve (leaving him still with the

fathomless look in reserve for emergencies), they fell on the Benares

tray and the casts. And as they remained there he suddenly frowned.

Amory's own eyes followed his; and suddenly she felt again that little

creeping thrill. A faint colour and warmth, new and pleasurable, came

into her cheeks.

Then with a little rush, her discovery came upon her....

She _had_ got something from Mr. Strong at last!

Her head drooped a little away from him, and the hand that had hung

laxly over her knee dropped gently to the rug. It was a delicious

moment. So all these weeks and weeks Mr. Strong _had_ cared that that

foot, that arm, had been exposed to the gaze of anybody who might have

entered the house! He had not said so; he did not say so now; but

that was it! More, he had cared so much that it had quite distorted

his judgment of Mr. Prang. And all at once Amory remembered something

else--a glance Edgar Strong had given her, neither more nor less

eloquent than the look he was bending on the casts now, one afternoon

when she had lain in the hammock in the garden and Mr. Prang, bending

over her, had ventured to examine a locket about her throat....

So _that_ was at the bottom of his reserve! _That_ was the meaning of

his "buts"!...

Amory did not move. She wished it might last for hours. Mr. Strong had

taken a step towards the casts, but, changing his mind, had turned away

again; and she was astonished to find how full of meaning dozens of his

past gestures became now that she had the key to them. And she knew

that the casts _were_ beautiful. Brucciani would have bought them like

a shot. And she seemed to see Mr. Strong's look, piteous and frowning

both at once, if she should sell them to Brucciani, and Brucciani

should publish them to hang in a hundred studios....

The silence between them continued.

But speak she must, and it would be better to do so before he did; and

by and bye she lifted her head again. But she did not look directly at

him.

"It was very foolish," she murmured with beautiful directness and

simplicity.

Mr. Strong said nothing.

"But for weeks I've been intending to move them."

Mr. Strong shrugged his shoulders. It was as if he said, "Well better

late than never ... but you see, _now_."

"Yes," breathed Amory, softly, but aloud.

The next moment Mr. Strong was himself again. He returned to his

station by the asbestos log.

"Well, there's Prang's article," he said in his business voice. "Am I

to have it set up?"

"Perhaps we'd better see what Cosimo says first," Amory replied.

She did not know which was the greater delicacy in Mr. Strong--the

exquisite tact of the glance he had given at the casts, or the quiet

strength with which he took up the burden of editing the "Novum" again.

V

THREE SHIPS

A white October mist lay over the Heath, and the smell of burning

leaves came in at the pond-room window of Dorothy Tasker's flat. But

the smell was lost on Dorothy. All her intelligence was for the moment

concentrated in one faculty, the faculty of hearing. She was sure

Jackie had swallowed a safety-pin, and she was anxiously listening for

the click with which it might come unstuck.

"Shall I send for the doctor, m'm?" said Ruth, who stood holding

the doorknob in her aproned hand. She had been called away from her

"brights," and there was a mournful relish of Jackie's plight on her

face.

"No," said Dorothy.... "Oh, I _know_ there were twelve of them, and now

there are only eleven!... _Have_ you put one of these things into your

mouth, Jackie?"

"He put it up his nose, mumsie, like he did some boot-buttons once,"

said Noel cheerfully.

"But he couldn't do that.... _Have_ you swallowed it, Jackie?"

"Mmm," said Jackie resolutely, as who should say that that which his

hand (or in this case his mouth) found to do he did with all his might.

"Oh dear!" sighed Dorothy, leaning back in her chair....

She supposed it was the still white weather that weighed on her

spirits; she hoped so, for if it was not that it was something worse.

Even dreary weather was better than bankruptcy. She had sent her

pass-book to the bank to be balanced; until it should come back she

refused to look at the pile of tradesmen's books that stood on her

writing-desk; and borrowing from her aunt was not borrowing at all, but

simply begging, since Aunt Grace regarded the return of such loans as

the last of affronts.

And (she sighed again) she had been _so_ well-off at the time of her

marriage! Why, she had had well over a thousand a year from Hallowell

and Smith's alone!... But Stan had had a few debts which had had to

be settled, and Stan's knowledge of the style in which things ought

to be done had been rather a drawback on that trip they had taken to

the Riviera, for his ideas of hotels had been a little splendacious,

and of dinners to "a few friends" rather daring; and, with one thing

and another, the problem of how to satisfy champagne tastes on a beer

income had never been really satisfactorily solved by Stan, poor old

boy. And he never, never grumbled at home, not even when the cold

beef came on three evenings together, which was harder on him than it

was on most people. He did what he could to earn, too. It wasn't his

fault that the standard of efficiency in the Army was so impracticably

high, nor that he had been packed off to try his luck in Canada with

the disadvantage of being a remittance-man, nor that, at the age of

twenty-seven, when his father had died, he had had to turn to and

compete for this job or that with a horde of capable youngsters years

his juniors and with fewer hampering decencies. It was his father's

fault and Aunt Susan's really, for having sent him to Marlborough

and Sandhurst without being able to set him properly on his feet

afterwards. Such victims of circumstances, on a rather different level,

made husbands who stopped at home and cleaned the knives and took the

babies out in the perambulator. In Stan's case the natural result had

been to make a young man fit only to join as a ranker or to stand with

his back to a mirror in a suspect card-room.

"Shall I take him away, m'm?" Mrs. Mossop asked--("And prepare his

winding-sheet," her tone seemed to add).

"Yes, do," Dorothy replied, with a glance at Ruth's blackened hands.

"And please make yourself fit to be seen, Ruth. You know you oughtn't

to be doing all that on the very day I let Norah out."

She knew that her rebuke had set Ruth up in the melancholy enjoyment

of resentment for half a week, but she was past caring. Ruth rose an

inch in height at being chidden for the faithful performance of her

most disagreeable duties; she turned; and as she bore the Bits away

the mighty roar into which Jackie broke diminished in volume down the

passage.

Dorothy sighed, that all her troubles should thus crowd on her at once.

Her eyes fell again on the tradesmen's books. It hardly seemed worth

while to pay them, since they would only come in again next week, as

clamorous and urgent as ever. They were thrust through the letterbox

like letters; Dorothy knew very well the thud with which they fell on

the floor; but she could never help running out into the hall when they

came. She had tried the plan of dispensing with books altogether and

paying for everything in cash as she got it, but that had merely meant,

not one large worry a week, but harassing little ones all the week

through.

Oh, why had she squandered, or allowed Stan to squander, those good

round sovereigns of Hallowell and Smith's!----

Still--there is measure in everything--she had not sent her pass-book

to the bank in order to learn whether she had a balance. That would

have been too awful. It was the amount of her margin that she wanted,

and feared, to know. For presently there would be the doctor to pay,

and so many guineas a week at the Nursing Home, and the flat going on

just the same, and poor old Stan pathetically hoping that a casual

dinner-table puff in a Marlborough voice would result in fat new

ledger-accounts for Fortune and Brooks' and magnificent commissions for

himself. If only she could get just a little ahead of her points! But

the money went out just slightly quicker than it came in. Stan carved

it as it were in twopences off the cold beef, the Bits swallowed it in

pennorths with their breadcrumbs and gravy, and directly the strain

eased for a little, down swooped the rent and set everything back again

exactly where it had been three months before.

And the Income Tax people had actually sent Stan a paper, wanting to

know all about his income from lands, hereditaments, etc., and warning

him that his wife's income must be accounted as part of his own!

But it must not be supposed that Dorothy had allowed things to come to

this pass without having had an idea. She had an idea, and one that she

thought a very good one. Nevertheless, an idea is one thing, and the

execution thereof at the proper time quite another. For example, the

proper moment for the execution of this idea of Dorothy's was certainly

now, or at any rate at the Christmas Quarter (supposing she herself was

up and about again by that time and had found a satisfactory subtenant

for the flat). But the person against whom her idea was designed--who,

by the way, happened to be her unsuspecting and much-loved aunt, Lady

Tasker--was a very present difficulty. Dorothy knew for a fact that

what would be admirably convenient for herself at Christmas could not

possibly be convenient to her aunt until, at the very earliest, next

summer. That was the crab--the intervening period of nine months. She

knew of no mandragora that would put herself, Stan and her Bits of

Impudence gently to sleep, to wake up again to easier times.

Oh, why had she spent those beautiful thick sovereigns of Hallowell and

Smith's so recklessly!--

The mist lay flat over the pond outside, making in one corner of

it a horrible scum, from which the swans, seeking their food,

lifted blackened necks. There was never a ripple on the pond-room

walls to-day. Slowly Dorothy rose. Moping was useless; she must do

something. She crossed to her writing-desk and took from one of its

drawers a fat file, concertina-ed like her own accordion-pleated

skirts; and she sat down and opened it fan-wise on her knee. It was

full of newspaper-cuttings, draft "ideas" for advertisements, and

similar dreary things. She sighed again as her listless fingers began

to draw them out. She had not thought at one time that she would ever

come to this. By a remarkable piece of luck and light-heartedness and

ingenuity she had started at Hallowell and Smith's at the top of the

tree; the brains of underlings had been good enough to cudgel for such

scrap-stuff as filled her concertina-file; but that was all changed

now. Light come, light go; and since the lapse of her contracts she had

been glad not only to devise these ignoble lures for the public, but

to draw them also. They formed the pennies-three-farthings that came

in while Stan carved the twopences from the joint. She had thought the

good times were going to last for ever. They hadn't. She now looked

enviously up to those who had been her own subordinates.

With no heart in her task at all, Dorothy set about the drafting of an

advertisement.

She was just beginning to forget about swallowed safety-pins, and poor

luckless Stan, and guineas for her Nursing Home, and the prospect of

presently having seven mouths, big and little, to feed--she was even

beginning to cease to hear the clamour of the Bits in the room along

the passage--when there came a ring at the bell. Her fair head did not

move, but her blue eyes stole abstractedly sideways as Ruth passed the

pond-room door. Then a man's voice sounded, and Dorothy dropped her

pen....

"Mrs. Tasker," she had heard, with the "a" cut very short and two "s's"

in her name....

The next moment Ruth had opened the pond-room door, and, in tones that

plainly said "You needn't think that I've forgotten about just now,

because I haven't," announced: "Mr. Miller."

Now it was curious that Dorothy had just been thinking about Mr.

Miller. Mr. Miller was Hallowells' Publicity Manager, and the time had

been when Dorothy had had Mr. Miller completely in her pocket. She

had obtained that comfortable contract of hers from Mr. Miller, and

if during the latter part of its continuance she had taken her duties

somewhat lightly and her pleasures with enormous gusto, she was not

sure that Mr. Miller had not done something of the same kind. But the

firm, which could excuse itself from a renewal of her own contract, for

some reason or other could not get rid of Mr. Miller; and now here was

Mr. Miller unexpectedly in Dorothy's flat--seeking her, which is far

better for you than when you have to do the seeking. He stood there

with his grey Trilby in his hand and his tailor-made deltoids almost

filling the aperture of the doorway.

"There, now, if I wasn't right!" said Mr. Miller with great

satisfaction, advancing with one hand outstretched. "I fixed it all up

with myself coming along that you'd be around the house. I've had no

luck all the week, and I said to myself as I got out of the el'vator

at Belsize Park, 'It's doo to change.' And here I find you, right on

the spot. I hope this is not an introosion. How are you? And how's Mr.

Stan?"

He shook hands heartily with Dorothy, and looked round for a place in

which to put his hat and stick.