Part 2 — PART II

I THE PIGEON PAIR

Amory had been at a great deal of trouble to gather all the opinions she could get about the education of her twins, Corin and Bonniebell; but it was not true, as an unkind visitor who had been once only to The Witan had said, that they were everybody’s children. Just because Amory had taken Katie Deedes’ advice and had had their hair chopped off short at the nape like a Boutet de Monvel drawing—and had not disdained to accept the spelling-books which Dickie Lemesurier had given them (books in which the difficult abstraction of the letter “A” was visualized for their young eyes as “Little Brown Brother,” “B” as “Tabby Cat,” and so on)—and had listened to Mr. Brimby when he had said what a good thing it would be to devote an hour on Friday afternoons to the study of Altruism and Camaraderie—and, in a word, had not been too proud and egotistical to make use of a good suggestion wherever she found it—because she had done these things, it did not at all follow that she had shirked her duties. If she did not influence them directly, having other things to do, she influenced those who did influence them, which came to the same thing. She influenced the Wyrons, for example, and nobody could say that the Wyrons had not made a particularly careful study of children. They had, and Walter had founded at least two Lectures directly on the twins and their education.

But the Wyrons, who had submitted to the indignity of marriage for the sake of the race, laboured and lectured under an obvious disadvantage; they had no children of their own. And so Amory had to fill up the gaps in their experience for herself. Still, it was wonderful how frequently the Wyron’s excogitations and the things Amory had found out for herself coincided. They were in absolute accord, for example, about the promise of the immediate future and the hope that lay in the generation to come. The Past was dead and damned; the Present at best was an ignoble compromise; but the Morrow was to be bright and shining.

“Walter and I,” Laura sometimes said sadly, “aren’t anything to brag about. There is much of the base in us. Our lives aren’t what they should be. We’re in the grip of inherited instincts too. We strive for the best, but the worst’s sometimes too much for us. It’s like Moses seeing the Promised Land from afar. We’re just in the position of Moses. But these young Aarons——”

Amory thought that very modest and dignified of poor old Laura. She frequently thought of her as ‘poor old Laura,’ but of course she didn’t mean her actual age, which was only two years more than Amory’s own. And that was very good, if a little sad, about Moses. The Wyrons did look forth over a Canaan they weren’t very likely ever to tread.

Lately—that is to say since that secret and tremendous moment between herself and Edgar Strong in the studio—Amory had fallen into the habit of musing long over the sight of the twins at lessons, at play, or at that more enlightened combination that makes lessons play and play lessons. Sometimes Mr. Brimby, the novelist, had come up to her as she had mused and had asked her what she was thinking about.

“Your little Pigeon Pair, eh?” he had said. “Ah, the sweetness; ah, lucky mother! Grey books have to be the children of some of us; ah, me; yours is a pleasanter path!”

Then he would fondle the little round topiary trees of their heads. Amory was almost as sorry for Mr. Brimby as she was for Laura. His books sold only moderately well, and she had more than once thought she would like the “Novum” to serialize one of them—the one with the little boy rather like Corin and the little girl rather like Bonniebell in it—if Mr. Brimby didn’t want too much money for it.

Edgar Strong, on the other hand, never fondled the children, and Amory’s heart told her why. How could he be expected to do anything but hate those poor innocents who had come between him and his desire? He must have realized that only the twins had frustrated that flight to Paris. Of course he was polite about it; he said that he was not very fond of children at all; but Amory was not deceived. She was, in a way, flattered that he did not fondle them. It was such an eloquent abstention. But it would have been more eloquent still had he come to the Witan and not-fondled them oftener.

Therefore it was that Amory looked on Corin and Bonniebell as the precious repositories of her own relinquished joys, and heirs to a happier life than she herself had known. She dreamed over them and their future. Laura Wyron was quite right: by the time they had grown up the fogs of cowardice and prejudice and self-seeking would have disappeared for ever. Perhaps even by that time, as in Heaven, there would be no more marrying nor giving in marriage. Things would have adjusted themselves out of the rarer and sweeter and more liberal atmosphere. Corin, grown to be twenty, would one day meet with some mite who was still in her cradle or not yet born, and the two would look at one another with amazement and delight, and the Ideal Love would be born in their eyes, and Corin would recite a few of those brave and pure and unashamed things out of “Leaves of Grass” to her, and—well, and there they would be.... And Bonniebell, too, would do the same, on a Spring morning very likely, simply clad, cool and without immodest blushes—yes, she too would see somebody, and she would say, gladly and simply, “I am here” (for there would be no reason, then, why she should wait for the youth to speak first), and—well, and there they would be too. And it would be Exogamy, or whatever the word was that Walter used. Either would go forth from the family on the appointed day—or perhaps only Corin would go, and Bonniebell remain behind—but anyway, one, if not both of them would go forth, and rove the morning-flushed hills, alone and free and singing and on the look-out for somebody, and they would look just like pictures of young Greeks, and nobody would laugh, as they did at the poor lady who walked in Greek robes down the Strand....

And Amory herself? Alas! She would be left with the tribe. She would be old then—say fifty-something on the eleventh of October. And Edgar would be old too. They would have to recognize that their youth had been spent in the night-time of ignorance and suspicion. They would only be able to think of those spirited young things quoting “Leaves of Grass” to one another and wondering what had happened to them....

No wonder Amory was sometimes pensive....

Mr. Wilkinson, the Labour Member, had been to all intents and purposes asked not to fondle the twins. He was a tall spare man with a great bush of pepper-and-salt hair, a Yorkshire accent, and an eye that hardly rested on any single object long enough to get more than a fleeting visual impression of it. He wrote on the first and third weeks of the month the “Novum’s” column of “Military Notes,” and on the alternate weeks filled the same column with officially inspired “Trade Union Echoes.” Between these two activities of Mr. Wilkinson’s there was a connexion. He, in common with everybody else at the Witan, was loud in decrying the jobberies and vested interests of Departments, with the War Office placed foremost in the shock of his wrath. But the Trade Unions were another matter, and never a billet-creating measure came before Parliament but he strove vehemently to have its wheels cogged in with those of the existing Trade Union machine. That is to say, that while in theory he was for democratic competitive examination, in practice he found something to be said for jobbery, could the fitting Trade Unionist but be found. He was, moreover, a firebrand by temperament, and this is where the connexion between the “Military Matters” and the “Echoes” appears. Trade Unionists he declared, ought to learn to shoot. The other side, with their cant about “Law and Order,” never hesitated to call out the regular troops; therefore, until the Army itself should have been won over by means of the leaflets that were disseminated for the purpose, they ought in the event of a strike to be prepared to throw up barricades, to shoot from cellar-windows, and to throw down chimney-stacks from the house-tops. Capitalist-employed troops would not destroy more property than they need; in a crooked-streeted town the advantage of long-range fire would be gone; and Mr. Wilkinson was prepared to demonstrate that a town defended on his lines could hold out, in the event of Industrial War pushed to an extreme, until it was starved into surrender.—These arguments, by the way, had impressed Mr. Prang profoundly.

Now (to come back to the twins) on Corin’s fourth birthday Mr. Wilkinson, moved by these considerations, had given him a wooden gun, and in doing so had committed a double error in Amory’s eyes. His first mistake had been to suppose that even if, under the present lamentable (but nevertheless existing) conditions of militarism, Corin should ever become a soldier at all, he would be the uncommissioned bearer of a gun and not the commissioned bearer of a sword. And his second mistake had been like unto it, namely, to think that, in the case of a proletariat uprising say in Cardiff or York, Corin would not similarly have held some post of weight and responsibility on the other side. Corin shoot up through the street-trap of a coal-hole or pot somebody from behind a chimney-stack!... But Amory admitted that it must be difficult for Mr. Wilkinson to shake off the effects of his upbringing. That upbringing had been very different from, say, Mr. Brimby’s. Mr. Brimby had been at Oxford, and in nobly stooping to help the oppressed brought as it were a fragrant whiff of graciousness and culture with him. Mr. Wilkinson was a nobody. He came from the stratum of need, and, when it came to fondling the twins, must not think himself a Brimby.... Therefore, Amory had had to ask him to take the gun back (a deprivation which had provoked a mighty outcry from Corin), and to give him, if he must give him something, a Nature book instead.

Katie Deedes and Dickie Lemesurier were both permitted to fondle the twins, though in somewhat different measure. This difference of measure did not mean that either Katie or Dickie suffered from a chronic cold that the twins might have contracted. Here again the case was almost as complicated as the case of Mr. Wilkinson. Cases had a way of being complicated at The Witan. It was this:—

Both of these ladies, as Amory had assured Mr. Brimby, were “quite all right.” She meant socially. No such difference was to be found between them in this respect as that which yawned between Mr. Brimby and Mr. Wilkinson. Indeed as far as Dickie was concerned, Amory had given a little apologetic laugh at the idea of her having to place and appraise a Lemesurier of Bath at all. The two girls had equally to work for their living, and—but perhaps it was here that the difference came in. There are jobs and jobs. It was a question of tone. Dickie, running the Suffrage Book Shop, enjoyed something of the glamour of Letters; but Katie, as manageress of the Eden Restaurant, was, after all, only a caterer. It was not Amory’s fault that Romance had pronounced arbitrarily and a little harshly on the relative dignity of these occupations. She could not help it that books are books and superior, while baked beans are only baked beans, necessary, but not to be talked about. If Dickie had, by her calling, a shade more consideration than was strictly her due, while Katie, by hers, was slightly shorn of something to which she would otherwise have been entitled, well, it was not Amory who had arranged it so.

But between books and baked beans the twins did not hesitate for an instant. They saw from no point of view but their unromantic own.

Dickie, overhauling the remainder stock at the Suffrage Shop, was able to bring them a book from time to time; but Katie, whose days were spent in a really interesting place full of things to eat, brought them sweetened Proteids, and cold roasted chestnuts, and sugared Filbertine, and sometimes a pot of the Eden Non-Neurotic Honey for tea. And because the flesh was stronger in them than Amory thought it ought to be (at any rate until the day should come when they must leave the tribe with a copy of “Leaves of Grass” in their hands), they adored Katie and thought very much less of Dickie.

Now this belly-guided preference was a thing to be checked in them; and one day Amory had asked Katie (quite nicely and gently) whether she would mind not bringing the children things that spoiled their appetites, not to speak of their tempers when they clamoured for these comestibles at times when they were not to be had. Then, one afternoon in the nursery, Amory actually had to repeat her request. Half an hour later, when the children had been brought down into the studio for their after-tea hour, she learned that Katie had left the house. It was Corin himself who informed her of this.

“Auntie Katie was crying,” he said. “About the vertisements,” he added.

“Ad-vertisements, dear,” Amory corrected him. “Say ad-vertisements, not vertisements.”

“Ad-vertisements,” said Corin sulkily. “But—” and he cheered up again,”—she was, mother.”

“Nonsense,” said Amory. “And you’re not to say ‘Auntie’ to Katie. It isn’t true. Your Auntie is your father’s or your mother’s sister, and we haven’t any.... And now you’ve played enough. Say good-night, both of you, and take Auntie Dickie’s book, and ask Miss Belchamber to read you the story of the Robin and her Darling Eggs, and then you must have your baths and go to bed.”

“I want the tale about Robin Hood, that Mr. Strong once told me,” Corin demurred.

“No, you must have the one about the dear Dickie Bird, who had a wing shot off by a cruel man one day, and had to hide her head under the other one, so that when her Darling Eggs were hatched out the poor little birds were all born with crooked necks—you remember what I told you about the fortress in a horrible War, when the poor mothers were all so frightened that all the little boys and girls were born lame—it’s the same thing—”

“Were there guns, that went bang?” Corin demanded. He had forgotten that the story contained this really interesting detail.

“Yes.”

“Great big ones?” Corin’s eyes were wide open.

“Very big. It was very cruel and anti-social.”

But Corin’s momentary interest waned again.—“I want Robin Hood,” he said sullenly.

“Now you’re being naughty, and I shall have to send you to bed without any nice reading at all.”

“I want Robin Hood.” The tone was ominous....

“And I want some chestnuts,” Bonniebell chimed in, her face also puckering....

And so Amory, who had threatened to send them bookless to bed, must keep her word. It is very wrong to tell falsehoods to children. She dismissed them, and they went draggingly out, their Boutet de Monvel hair and fringed éponge costumes giving them the appearance of two luckless pawns that had been pushed off the board in some game of chess they did not understand.

Amory thought it very foolish of Katie to take on in this way. She might have known that her advertisements had not been refused without good reason. Amory had fully intended to explain all about it to Katie, but she really had had so many things to do. Nor ought it to have needed explaining. Surely Katie could have seen for herself that Dickie’s Bookshop List, with its names of Finot and Forel and Mill and the rest, was a distinction and an embellishment to the paper, while her own Filbertines and Protolaxatives were a positive disfigurement. The proper place for these was, not in the columns of the “Novum,” but in the “Please take One” box at the Eden’s door.... But if Katie intended to sulk and cry about it, well, so much the worse.... (To jump forward a little: Katie did elect to sulk. Or rather, she did worse. She was so ill-advised as to go behind Amory’s back and to speak to Cosimo himself about the advertisements. With that Katie’s goose—or perhaps one should say her Anserine—was cooked. Amory did not allow that kind of thing. She certainly did not intend to explain anything after that. It was plain as a pikestaff that Katie was jealous of Dickie. Amory was bitterly disappointed in Katie. Of course she would not forbid her the house; she was still free to come to The Witan whenever she liked; but—somehow Katie only came once more. She found herself treated so very, very kindly.... So she gulped down a sob, fondled the twins once more, and left.)

Miss Britomart Belchamber saw enough of the twins not to wish to fondle them very much. Amory was not yet absolutely sure that she fondled Cosimo instead, but she was welcome to do so if she could find any satisfaction in it. Cosimo fondled the twins to a foolish extreme. Mr. Prang could never get near enough to them to fondle them. Both Corin and Bonniebell displayed a most powerful interest in Mr. Prang, and would have stood stock-still gazing at him for an hour had they been permitted; but the moment he approached them they fled bellowing.

And in addition to these various fondlings there were casual fondlings from time to time whenever the more favoured of the “Novum’s” contributors were asked to tea.

But the Wyrons remained, so to speak, the ex-officio fondlers, and perhaps childless Laura felt a real need to fondle at her heart. It was she who first asked Amory whether she hadn’t noticed that, while Mr. Brimby and Dickie frequently fondled the twins separately, more frequently still they did so together.

“No!” Amory exclaimed. “I hadn’t noticed!”

“Walter thinks they would be a perfect pair,” Laura mused....

II THE ’VERT

Stan saw very little in the scheme that Dorothy darkly meditated against her aunt. He seldom saw much in Dorothy’s schemes. Perhaps she did not make quite enough fuss about them, but went on so quietly maturing them that her income seemed to be merely something that happened in some not fully explained but quite natural order of events. Stan thought it rather a lucky chance that the money usually had come in when it was wanted, that was all.

But of his own job he had quite a different conception. That took thought. This appeared plainly now that he was able to dismiss his own past failures with a light and almost derisive laugh.

“I don’t know whatever made me think there was anything in them,” he said complacently one night within about ten days of Christmas. He had put on his slippers and his pipe, and was drowsily stretching himself after a particularly hard “comic film” day, in the course of which he had been required to fall through a number of ceilings, bringing the furniture with him in his downward flight. He had come home, had had a shampoo and a hot bath, and the last traces of the bags of flour and the sacks of soot had disappeared.

“I don’t think now they’d ever have come to very much.”

“Hush a moment,” said Dorothy, listening, her needle arrested half-way through the heel of one of his socks.... “All right. I thought I heard him—Yes?”

She could face young girls now. The third Bit had turned out to be yet another boy.

“I mean,” Stan burbled comfortably, “there wouldn’t have been the money in them I thought there would. Now take those salmon-flies, Dot. Of course I can tie ’em in a way. But what I mean is, it’s a limited market. Not like the boot-trade, I mean, or soap, or films. Everybody wears boots and sees films. There’s more scope, more demand. But everybody doesn’t carry a salmon-rod. Comparatively few people do. And the same with big-game shooting. Or deer-stalking. Everybody can’t afford ’em.”

“No, dear,” said Dorothy, her eyes downcast.

“Then there was Fortune and Brooks,” Stan continued with a great air of discovery. “I see their game now. You see it, too, don’t you?—They just wanted orders. New accounts. That’s what they wanted. If I could have put ’em on to a chap who’d have spent say five hundred a year on Chutney and things—well, what I mean is, where would they be without customers like that?”

“Nowhere, dear,” said the dutiful Dorothy.

“Exactly. Nowhere. That’s what I was leading up to. They wouldn’t be anywhere. They just wanted to be put on to these things. And it’s just struck me how I should have looked going out to dinner somewhere, strange house very likely, and I’d said to somebody I’d perhaps met for the first time, ‘Don’t think much of these salted almonds; our hostess ought to try the F. and B. Brand, a Hundred Gold Medals, and see that the blessed coupon isn’t broken.’—Eh? See what I mean?”

“I was never very keen on the idea,” Dorothy admitted gravely.

“No, and I’m blessed if I see why I was, now,” Stan conceded cheerfully....

She loved this change in him which a real job with real money had brought about. Poor old darling, she thought, it must have been pretty rotten for him before, borrowing half-crowns from her in the morning, which he would spend with an affected indifference on drinks and cab fares in the evening. And he should speak with a new authority if he wished. Not for worlds would she have smiled at His Impudence’s new air of being master in his own house. He should be a Sultan if he liked—provided he didn’t want more than one wife.

Moreover, his bringing in of money had been a relief so great that even yet she had hardly got out of the habit of reckoning on her own earnings only. It had taken her weeks to realize that now the twopences came in just a little more quickly than they went out, and that she could actually afford herself the luxury of keeping Mr. Miller waiting for his Idea, or even of not giving it to him at all. She really had no Idea to give him. She was entirely wrapped up now in her plot against Lady Tasker.

That plot, summarized from several conversations with Stan, was as follows:—

“You see, there’s the Brear, with all that land, Aunt Grace’s very own. The Cromwell Gardens lease is up in June, and it’s all very well for auntie to say she doesn’t hate London, but she does. She spends half a rent, with one and another of them, in travelling backwards and forwards, and she’s getting old, too.—Then there’s us. We can’t go on living here, and the Tonys will be home just as Tim’s leave’s up, and they’re sure to leave their Bits behind. Very well. Now the Tims and the Tonys can’t afford to pay much, but they can afford something, and I think they ought to pay. They’re sure to want those boys to go into the Army, and they’d have to pay for that anyway.—So there ought to be a properly-managed Hostel sort of place, paying its way, and a fund accumulating, and Aunt Gracie at the head of it, poor old dear, but somebody to do the work for her.—I don’t see why we shouldn’t clear out that old billiard-table that nobody ever uses, and throw that and the gun-room into one, and make that the schoolroom, and have a proper person down—a sort of private preparatory school for Sandhurst and Woolwich, and the money put by to help with the fees afterwards. It would be much easier if we all clubbed together. And I should jolly well make Aunt Eliza give us at least a thousand pounds—selfish old thing.”

“Frightful rows there’d be,” Stan usually commented, thinking less of Dorothy’s plan than of his own last trick-tumble. “Like putting brothers into the same regiment; always a mistake. And we’re all rather good at rows you know.”

“Well, they’re our own rows anyway. We keep ’em to ourselves. And we do all mean pretty much the same thing when all’s said. I’m going to work it all out anyway, and then tackle Aunt Grace.... I shall manage it, of course.”

She did not add that her Lennards and Taskers and Woodgates would sink their private squabbles precisely in proportion as the outside attacks on their common belief rendered a closing-up of the ranks necessary. But she had been to The Witan and had kept her eyes open there, and knew that there were plenty of other Witans about. If stupid Parliament, with its votes and what not, couldn’t think of anything to do about it, that was no reason why she should not do something, and make stingy old Aunt Eliza pay for the training of her Bits into the bargain.

She had not seen Amory since that day when the episode of the winter woollies had made her angry, for, though Amory had called once at the Nursing Home soon after the birth of the third Bit, Dorothy had really not felt equal to the hair-raising tale of the twins all over again, and had sent a message down to her by the nurse. There was this difference between this tragic recital of Amory’s and the fervour with which Ruth Mossop always hugged to her breast the thought of the worst that could happen—that Ruth had known brutality, and so might be forgiven for getting “a little of her own back”; but Amory had known one hardish twelvemonths perhaps, a good many years ago and when she had been quite able to bear it, and had since magnified that period of discomfort by a good many diameters. Amory, Dorothy considered, didn’t really know she was born. She was unfeignedly sorry for that. Whatever measure of contempt was in her she kept for Cosimo.

For she considered that Cosimo was at the bottom of all the trouble. If Stan, at his most impecunious and happy-go-lucky, could still stalk about the house saying “Dot, I won’t have this,” or “Look here, Dorothy, that has got to stop,” it seemed to her that Cosimo, with never a care on his mind that was not his own manufacture, might several times have prevented Amory from making rather a fool of herself. But it seemed to Dorothy that kind of man was springing up all over the place nowadays. Mr. Brimby was another of them. Dorothy had read one of Mr. Brimby’s books—“The Source,” and hadn’t liked it. She had thought it terribly dismal. In it a pretty and rich young widow, who might almost have been Amory herself, went slumming, and spent a lot of money in starting a sort of Model Pawn Shop, and by and by there came a mysterious falling-off in her income, and she went to see her lawyer about it, and learned, of course, that her source of income was that very slum in which she had stooped to labour so angelically.... Dorothy didn’t know very much about pawnshops, but then she didn’t believe that Mr. Brimby did either; and if her interest in them ever should become really keen, she didn’t think she should go to Oxford for information about them. And Mr. Brimby himself seemed to feel this “crab,” as Stan would have called it, for after “The Source” he had written a Preface for a book by a real and genuine tramp.... And it had been Amory who had recommended “The Source” to Dorothy. She had said that it just showed, that with vision and thought and heart and no previous experience (“no prejudice” had been her exact words), there need be none of these dreadful grimy establishments, with their horrible underbred assistants who refused a poor woman half a crown on her mattress and made a joke about it, but airy and hygienic rooms instead, with rounded corners so that the dust could be swept away in two minutes (leaving a balance of at least twenty-eight minutes in which the sweeper might improve himself), and really courtly-mannered attendants, full of half crowns and pity and Oxford voice, who would give everybody twice as much as they asked for and a tear into the bargain.

And Amory knew just as much about real pawnshops as did Dorothy and Mr. Brimby.

For the life of her Dorothy could not make out what all these people were up to.

And—though this was better now that Stan was earning—the thought of the money that was being squandered at The Witan had sometimes made her ready to cry. For at the Nursing Home she had had one other visitor, and this visitor had opened her eyes to the appalling rate at which Cosimo’s inheritance must be going. This visitor had been Katie Deedes. Katie too, was an old fellow-student of Dorothy’s; it had not taken Dorothy long to see that Katie was full of a grievance; and then it had all come out. There had been some sort of a row. It had been simply and solely because Katie ran a Food Shop. Amory thought that infra dig. And just because Katie had given the children a few chestnuts Amory had practically said so.

“I shan’t go there again,” Katie had said, trying on Dorothy’s account to keep down her tears. “I didn’t marry a man with lots of money, and turn him round my finger, and make him write my Life and Works, and then snub my old friends! And none of the people who go there are really what she thinks they are. She thinks they go to see her, but Mr. Brimby only goes because Dickie does, and because he wants to sell the “Novum” something or other, and Mr. Strong of course has to go, and Mr. Wilkinson goes because he wants Cosimo to stop the “Novum” and start something else with him as editor, and Laura goes because they get things printed about Walter’s Lectures, and I don’t know what those Indians are doing there at all, and anyway I’ve been for the last time! I’m just as good as she is, and I should like to come and see you instead, Dorothy, and of course I won’t bring your babies chestnuts if you don’t want.... But I’m frightfully selfish; I’m tiring you out.... May an A B C girl come to see you?”

And Katie had since been. There is no social reason why the manager of a Vegetarian Restaurant may not visit the house of a film acrobat.

As it happened, Katie came in that very night when the weary breadwinner was painstakingly explaining to his thoughtful spouse his reasons for doubting whether he would ever have got very rich had he remained one of Fortune and Brooks’ well-dressed drummers. Katie had a round face and puzzled but affectionate eyes, and Stan was just beginning to school his own eyes not to rest with too open an interest on her Greenaway frocks and pancake hats. Katie for her part was intensely self-conscious in Stan’s presence. She felt that when he wasn’t looking at her clothes he was, expressly, not-looking at them, and that was worse.... But she couldn’t have worn a hobble skirt and an aigrette at the “Eden.”... Stan had told Dorothy that when he knew Katie better he intended to get out of her the remaining gruesome and Blue-Beard’s-Chamber details which the hoof and the forequarter seemed to him to promise.

“Poor little darlings!” Dorothy exclaimed compassionately by and by—Katie had been relating some anecdote in which Corin and Bonniebell had played a part. “I do think it’s wrong to dress children ridiculously! The other day I saw a little girl—she must have been quite six or seven—and she’d knickers like a little boy, and long golden hair all down her back! What is the good of pretending that girls are boys?”

“Awful rot,” Stan remarked with a mighty stretch. “I say, I’m off to bed; I shall be yawning in Miss Deedes’ face if I don’t. Is there any arnica in the house, Dot?... Good night——”

“Good night,” said Katie; and as the door closed behind the master of the house she settled more comfortably in her chair. “Now that he’s stopped not-looking at me we can have a good talk,” her gesture seemed to say; “how does he expect I can get any other clothes till I’ve saved the money?”...

They did talk. They talked of the old days at the McGrath, and who’d married who, and who hadn’t married who after all, and, in this connection, of Laura Beamish and Walter Wyron, whom they had both known.... And it just showed how little glory and fame were really worth in the world. For Dorothy, who had been living in London all this time, had not heard as much as a whisper of that memorable revolt of the Wyrons against the Marriage Service, and, though she did know vaguely that Walter lectured, had not the ghost of an idea of what his lectures were about. She had been too busy minding her own petty and private and selfish affairs. Katie couldn’t believe it. She thought Dorothy was joking.

“You’ve never heard of Walter’s Lecture on ‘Heads or Tails in the Trying Time,’ nor his ‘Address on the Chromosome’?” she gasped....

“No; do tell me. What is a Chromosome?”

“A Chromosome? Why, it’s a—it’s a—well, you know when you’ve a cell—or a nucleus—or a gland or something—but it isn’t a gland—it’s the—but you do astonish me, Dorothy!”

“But surely you’re joking about Walter and Laura?” Dorothy exclaimed in her turn.

“Indeed I’m not! Why, I thought everybody knew!...”

“(It’s all right—he won’t come in again). But why did they pretend not to be married?” Dorothy asked in amazement.

“I don’t know—I mean I forget for the moment—it seemed perfectly clear the way Walter explained it—you ought to go and hear him——”

“But what difference could being married—I mean not being married—make?”

“Ah!” said Katie, with satisfaction at having found her bearings again. “Walter’s got a whole Lecture on that. It always thrills everybody. Amory thinks it’s almost his best—after the ‘Synthetic Protoplasm’ one, of course—that’s admitted by everybody to be quite the best!“[1]

“Proto ... but I thought those were a kind of oats!” said poor Dorothy, utterly bewildered.

“Oats!” cried Katie in a sort of whispered shriek. “Why, it’s—it’s—but I don’t know even how to begin to explain it! Do you mean to say you haven’t read about these things?”

“No,” murmured Dorothy, abashed.

“Not Monod, nor Ellen Key, nor Sebastian Faure, nor Malom!——”

“N-o.” Dorothy felt horribly ashamed of herself.

“But—but—those lovely little boys of yours!——”

She gazed wide-eyed at the disconcerted Dorothy....

It was the humiliating truth: Dorothy had never heard of the existence of a single one of these writers and leaders of thought. She had borne Noel in black ignorance of what they had had to say about the Torch of the Race, and Jackie and the third Bit for all the world as if they had never set pen to paper. Monod had not held her hand, nor Faure been asked for his imprimatur; Key had hymned Love superfluously, and the Synthesists, equally superfluously, its supersession. For a moment she anxiously hoped that it was all right, and then, as Katie went on, the marvel of it all overwhelmed her again.

The dictum that desirable children could be born only out of wedlock! That stupendous suggestion of Walter’s to millionaires who did not know what to do with their money, that, for the improvement of the Race, they should endow with a thousand pounds every poor little come-by-chance that weighed eleven pounds at birth! That other proposal, that twenty years could straightway be added to woman’s life and beauty by a mere influencing of her thoughts about the Chromosome—whatever it was!... Poor uncultured Dorothy did not know whether she was on her head or her heels. She had never dreamed, until Katie told her, that before marrying Stan she ought to have gone to the insect-world, or to the world of molluscs and crustacæ, to learn how they maintained the integrity of their own highest type—whether by pulling their wings off after the flight, or devouring their husbands, or—or—or what! She had heard of the moral lessons that can be learned of the ant, but it had not struck her that she and Stan might, by means of a little more study and care, have lifted up the economy of their little flat to the level of the marvellously-organized domesticity you see when you kick over a stone.

But Katie’s hesitations and great gaps of confessed ignorance gave her a little more courage. Katie was at pains to explain that all that she herself knew about it all was that these things were what they said, and Dorothy must go to Walter and the books for the rest.

“They’re all very expensive books, and I may not really have understood them,” she said wistfully. “They must be awfully deep and so on if they’re so dear—twelve and fifteen and twenty shillings! But I did try so hard, and sometimes it seemed quite reasonable and plain, especially when the print was nice and big.... Close print always seems so frightfully learned.... And I know I’ve explained it badly; I haven’t Walter’s gift of putting things. Amory has, of course. When she and Walter have a really good set-to it makes one feel positively abject about one’s ignorance. I doubt if Cosimo can always quite follow them, and I’m quite sure Mr. Strong can’t—I know he’s only hedging when he says, ‘Ah, yes, have you read Fabre on the Ant or Maeterlinck on the Bee?’—and I believe he just glances at the review books that come to the “Novum” instead of really studying them, as Walter and Amory do. And it’s very funny about Mr. Strong,” she rattled artlessly on. “Sometimes I’ve thought that it isn’t just that Amory doesn’t know what they all go to The Witan for, but that everybody else does know. They all seem to want it to themselves. Of course if Mr. Wilkinson wants Cosimo to stop the “Novum,” and to start something else for him, it’s only natural that he and Mr. Strong should be a little jealous of one another; but Dickie and Mr. Brimby are jealous of the Wyrons, and I suppose I was jealous of Dickie too—and everybody seems jealous of everybody, and Amory of Cosimo, and Amory’s always interfering between Britomart Belchamber and the twins’ lessons, and that can’t be a very good thing for discipline, but Britomart’s like me in being rather stupid, and I wish I’d her screw—she gets nearly twice as much as I do. The only people who don’t seem jealous of anybody are those Indians. They’re always affable. I suppose it’s rather nice for them, so far from their own country, having a house to go to....”

But here Dorothy’s humility and self-distrust ended. The moment it came to India, she shared her aunt’s deplorable narrow-mindedness and propensity to make a virtue of her intolerance. It seemed to her that it was one thing for the Tims and Tonys, in India, to have to employ a native interpreter (and to be pretty severely rooked by him) when they had their Urdu Higher Proficiency to pass, but quite another for these same natives to come over here, and to learn our law and language, and our excellent national professions, and our somewhat mitigated ways of living up to them. No, she was not one whit better than her hide-bound old aunt, and she did not intend to have too practical a brotherly love taught at that meditated foundation at the Brear....

She became silent as she thought of that foundation again, and presently Katie rose.

“I suppose I couldn’t see him in his cot?” she said wistfully.

Dorothy smiled. Katie meant the youngest Bit.

“Well ... I’m afraid he’s in our room, you see...,” she said.

Katie had been thinking of The Witan. She coloured a little.

“Sorry,” she murmured; and then she broke out emphatically.

“I like coming to see you, Dorothy. I don’t feel so—such a fool when I’m with you.... And do tell me where you got that frock, and how much it was; I must have another one as soon as I can raise the money! I do wish I could make what Britomart Belchamber makes! Two-twenty a year! Think of that!... But of course Prince Eadmond teachers do come expensive——”

More and more it was coming to seem to Dorothy that the whole thing was terrifically expensive.

III THE IMPERIALISTS

They were great believers in the Empire, they on the “Novum.” Indeed, they were the only true Imperialists, since they recognized that ideas, and not actions, were by far and away the most potent instruments in the betterment of mankind. Everybody who was anybody knew that, a mere sporadic outbreak here and there (such as the one in Manchuria) notwithstanding, war had been virtually impossible ever since the publication of M. Bloch’s book declaring it to be so. What, they asked, was war, more than an unfortunate miscalculation on the part of the lamb that happened to lie down with the lion? And what made the miscalculation so unfortunate? Why, surely the possession by the lion of teeth and claws. Draw his teeth and cut his claws, and the two would slumber peacefully together. So with the British lion. He only fought because he had things ready to fight with. Philosophically, his aggressions were not much more than a kind of sportive manifestation of the joy of life, that happened, rather inconsequentially, to take the form of the joy of death. Take away the ships and guns, then, and everything would be all right.

These views on the Real Empire were in no way incompatible with Mr. Wilkinson’s desire to see all Trade Unionists armed. For a war at home, about shorter hours and higher wages, would at any rate be a war between equals in race. It was wars between unequals that had made of the Old Empire so hideous a thing. Amory herself had more than once stated this rather well.

“I call it cowardice,” she had said. “Every fine instinct in us tells us to stick up for the weaker side. It makes my blood boil! Think of those gentle and dusky millions, all being, to put it in a word, bullied—just bullied! We all know the kind of man who goes abroad—the conventional ‘adventurer.’ (I like ‘adventurer!’) He’s just a common bully. He drinks disgustingly, and swears, and kicks people who don’t get out of his way—but he’s always careful to have a revolver in his pocket for fear they should hit him back!... And he makes a tremendous fuss about his white women, but when it comes to their black or brown ones ... well, anyway, I think he’s a brute, and we want a better class of man than that for our readers!”

And that was briefly why, at the “Novum,” they tried to reduce armaments at home, and gave at least moral encouragement to the other side whenever there was a dust-up abroad.

But it had been some time ago that Amory had said all this, and her attitude since then had undergone certain changes. One of these changes had been her acquisition of the Romantic Point of View; another had been that suspended state of affairs between herself and Mr. Strong. The first of these curtailed a good deal of the philosophy in which Mr. Strong always seemed anxious to enwrap the subject (in order, as far as Amory could see, to avoid action). It also made a little more of the position of women, white, black or brown, and especially when rolled up in carpets, in Imperial affairs. And the second, that hung-up relation between Edgar Strong and herself, had left her constantly wondering what would have happened had she taken Mr. Strong at his word and fled to Paris with him, and exactly where they stood since she had not done so.

For naturally, things could hardly have been expected to be the same after that. Since Edgar had ceased to come quite so frequently to The Witan, Amory had thought the whole situation carefully over and had come to her conclusion. Perhaps the histories of les grandes maitresses and the writings of Key had helped her; or, more likely, Key in Sweden (or wherever it was) and herself in England had arrived at the same conclusion by independent paths. That conclusion, stated in three words, was the Genius of Love.

It was perfectly simple. Why had Amory Towers, the painter of that picture (“Barrage”) so enthusiastically acclaimed by the whole of Feminist England, now for so long ceased to paint? What had become of the Genius that had brought that picture into being? It is certain that Genius cannot be stifled. Deny it one opportunity and it will break out somewhere else—in another art, in politics, in leadership in one form or another, or it may be even in crime.

Even so, Amory was conscious, her own Genius had refused to be suppressed. It had found another outlet in politics, directed in a recumbent attitude from a sofa.

Yet that had landed her straightway in a dilemma—the dilemma of Edgar and the twins, of Paris on seven francs a day and the comforts Cosimo allowed her, of a deed that was to have put even that of the Wyrons into the shade and a mere settling down to the prospect of seeing Edgar when it pleased him to put in an appearance.

She had not seen this protean property of Genius just at first. That could only have been because she had not examined herself sufficiently. She had been introspective, but not introspective enough.

And lest she should be mistaken in the mighty changes that were going on within herself, at first she had tried the painting again. Her tubes were dry and her brushes hard, but she had got new ones, and one after another she had taken up her old half-finished canvases again. A single glance at them had filled her with astonishment at the leagues of progress, mental and emotional, that she had made since then. She had laughed almost insultingly at those former attempts. That large canvas on the “Triumph of Humane Government” was positively frigid! And Edgar had liked it!... Well, that only showed what a power she now had over Edgar if she only cared to use it. If he had liked that chilly piece of classicism, he would stand dumb before the canvas that every faculty in her was now straining to paint. She began to think that canvas out....

It must be Eastern, of course; nay, it must be The East—tremendously voluptuous and so on. She would paint it over the “Triumph.” It should be bathed in a sunrise, rabidly yellow (they had no time for decaying mellowness in those vast and kindling lands to which Amory’s inner eye was turned)—and of course there ought to be a many-breasted what-was-her-name in it, the goddess (rather rank, perhaps, but that was the idea, a smack at effete occidental politeness). And there ought to be a two-breasted figure as well, perhaps with a cord or something in her hand, hauling up the curtain of night, or at any rate showing in some way or other that her superb beauty was actually responsible for the yellow sunrise....

And above all, she must get herself into it—the whole of herself—all that tremendous continent that Cosimo had not had, that her children had not had, that her former painting had left unexpressed, that politics had not brought out of her....

The result of that experiment was remarkable. Two days later she had thrown the painting aside again. It was a ghastly failure. But only for a moment did that depress her; the next moment she had seen further. She was a Genius; she knew it—felt it; she was so sure about it that she would never have dreamed of arguing about it; she had such thoughts sometimes.... And Genius could never be suppressed. Very well; the Eastern canvas was a total failure; she admitted it. Ergo, her Genius was for something else than painting.

That was all she had wanted to know.

For what, then? No doubt Edgar Strong, who had enlightened her about herself before, would be able to enlighten her again now. And if he would not come to see her, she must go and see him. But already she saw the answer shining brightly ahead. She must pant, not paint; live, not limn. Her Genius was, after all, for Love.

True, at the thought of those offices in Charing Cross Road she had an instinctive shrinking. Their shabbiness rather took the shine out of the voluptuousnesses she had tried, and failed, to get upon her canvas. But perhaps there was a fitness in that too. Genius, whether in Art or in Love, is usually poor. If she could be splendid there she could be so anywhere. No doubt heaps and heaps of grand passions had transfigured grimy garrets, and had made of them perfectly ripping backgrounds....

So on an afternoon in mid-January Amory put on her new velvet costume of glaucous sea-holly blue and her new mushroom-white hat, and went down to the “Novum’s” offices in a taxi. It seemed to her that she got there horribly quickly. Her heart was beating rapidly, and already she had partly persuaded herself that if Edgar wasn’t in it might perhaps be just as well, as she had half-promised the twins to have tea with them in the nursery soon, and anyway she could come again next week. Or she might leave Edgar a note to come up to The Witan. There were familiar and supporting influences at The Witan. But here she felt dreadfully defenceless.... She reached her destination. Slowly she passed through the basement-room with the sandwich-boards, ascended the dark stairs, and walked along the upper corridor that was hung with the specimens of poster-art.

Edgar was in. He was sitting at his roll-top desk, with his feet thrust into the unimaginable litter of papers that covered it. He appeared to be dozing over the “Times,” and had not drunk the cup of tea that stood at his elbow with a sodden biscuit and a couple of lumps of sugar awash in the saucer.—Without turning his head he said “Hallo,” almost as if he expected somebody else. “Did you bring me some cigarettes in?” he added, still not turning. And this was a relief to Amory’s thumping heart. She could begin with a little joke.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t know you wanted any.”

There was no counterfeit about the start Mr. Strong gave. So swiftly did he pluck his feet away from the desk that twenty sheets of paper planed down to the floor, bringing the cup of tea with them in their fall.

But Mr. Strong paid no attention to the breakage and mess. He was on his feet, looking at Amory. He looked, but he had never a word to say. And she stood looking at him—charming in her glaucous blue, the glint of rich red that peeped from under the new white hat, and her slightly frightened smile.

“Haven’t you any?” she said archly.

At that Mr. Strong found his tongue.

“Excuse me just a moment,” he muttered, striding past her and picking up something from his desk as he went. “Sit down, won’t you?” Then he opened the door by which Amory had entered, did something behind it, and returned, closing the door again. “Only so that we shan’t be disturbed,” he said. “They go into the other office when they see the notice.—I wasn’t expecting you.”

Nor did he, Amory thought, show any great joy at her appearance. On the contrary, he had fixed a look very like a glare on her. Then he walked to the hearth. A big fire burned there behind a wire guard, and within the iron kerb stood the kettle he had boiled to make tea. He put his elbows on the mantelpiece and turned his back to her. Again it was Mr. Brimby’s sorrowing Oxford attitude. Amory had moved towards his swivel chair and had sat down. Her heart beat a little agitatedly. He remembered!...

He spoke without any beating about the bush,—“Ought you to have done this?” he said over his shoulder.

She fiddled with her gloves.—“To have done what?” she asked nervously.

“To have come here,” came in muffled tones back. It was evident that he was having to hold himself in.

Then suddenly he wheeled round. This time there was no doubt about it—it was a glare, and a resolute one.

But he had not been able to think of any new line. It was the one he had used before. He made it a little more menacing, that was all.

“I’m only flesh and blood—,” he said quickly, his hands ever so slightly clenching and unclenching and his throat apparently swallowing something.

Her heart was beating quickly enough now.—“But—but—,” she stammered,—“if you only mean my coming here—I’ve been here lots of times before——”

He wasted few words on that.

“Not since——” he rapped out. He was surveying her sternly now.

“But—but—,” she faltered again, “—it’s only me, Edgar—I am connected with the paper, you know—that is to say my husband is——”

“That’s true,” he groaned.

“And—and—I should have come before—I’ve been intending to come—but I’ve been so busy——”

But that also he brushed aside for the little it was worth. “Must you compromise yourself like this?” he demanded. “Don’t you see? I’m not made of wood, and I suppose your eyes are open too. Prang may be here at any moment. He’ll see that notice on the door and wait ... and then he’ll see you go out. You oughtn’t to have come,” he continued gloomily. “Why did you, Amory?”

Once more she quailed before the blue mica of his eye. Her words came now a bit at a time. The victory was his.

“Only to—to see—how the paper was going on—and to—to talk things over—,” she said.

“Oh!” He nodded. “Very well.”

He strode forward from the mantelpiece and approached the desk at which she sat.

“I suppose Cosimo wants to know; very well. As a matter of fact I’m rather glad you’ve come. Look here——”

He grabbed a newspaper from the desk and thrust it almost roughly into her hands.

“Read that,” he said, stabbing the paper with his finger.

The part in which he stabbed it was so unbrokenly set that it must have struck Katie Deedes as overwhelmingly learned.—“There you are—read that!” he ordered her.

Then, striding back to the mantelpiece, he stood watching her as if he had paid for a seat in a playhouse and had found standing-room only.

Amory supposed that it must be something in that close and grey-looking oblong that was at the bottom of his imperious curtness. She was sure of this when, before she had read half a dozen lines, he cut it with a sharp “Well? I suppose you see what it means to us?”

“Just a moment,” she said bewilderedly; “you always did read quicker than I can——”

“Quicker!—” he said. “Just run your eye down it. That ought to tell you.”

She did so, and a few capitals caught her eye.

“Do you mean this about the North-West Banks?” she asked diffidently.

“Do I mean——! Well, yes. Rather.”

“I do wish you’d explain it to me. It seems rather hard.”

But he did not approach and point out particular passages. Instead he seemed to know that leaden oblong by heart. He gave a short laugh.

“Hard? It’s hard enough on the depositors out there!... They’ve been withdrawing again, and of course the Banks have had to realize.”

“Yes, I saw that bit,” said Amory.

“A forced realization,” Mr. Strong continued. “Depreciation in values, of course. And it’s spreading.”

It sounded to Amory rather like smallpox, but, “I suppose that’s the Monsoon?” she hazarded.

“Partly, of course. Not altogether. There’s the rupee too, of course. At present that’s at about one and twopence, but then there are these bi-metallists.... So until we know what’s going to happen, it seems to me we’re bound hand and foot.”

Amory was awed.—“What—what do you think will happen?” she asked.

Edgar gave a shrug.—“Well—when a Bank begins paying out in pennies it’s as well to prepare for the worst, you know.”

“Are—are they doing that?” Amory asked in a whisper. “Really? And is that the bi-metallists’ doing—or is it the Home Government? Do explain it to me so that I can visualize it. You know I always understand things better when I can visualize them. That’s because I’m an artist.—Does it mean that there are long strings of natives, with baskets and things on their heads to put the pennies in, all waiting at the Banks, like people in the theatre-queues?”

“I dare say. I suppose they have to carry the pennies somehow. But I’m afraid I can’t tell you more than’s in the papers.”

Amory’s face assumed an expression of contempt. On the papers she was quite pat.

“The papers! And how much of the truth can we get from the capitalist press, I should like to know! Why, it’s a commonplace among us—one is almost ashamed to say it again—that the ‘Times’ is always wrong! We have no Imperialist papers really; only Jingo ones. Is there no way of finding out what this—crisis—is really about?”

This was quite an easy one for Mr. Strong. Many times in the past, when pressed thus by his proprietor’s wife for small, but exact, details, he had wished that he had known even as much about them as seemed to be known by that smart young man who had once come to The Witan in a morning coat and had told Edgar Strong that he didn’t know what he was talking about. But he had long since found a way out of these trifling difficulties. Lift the issue high enough, and it is true of most things that one man’s opinion is as good as another’s; and they lifted issues quite toweringly high on the “Novum.” Therefore in self-defence Mr. Strong flapped (so to speak) his wings, gave a struggle, cleared the earth, and was away in the empyrean of the New Imperialism.

“The ‘Times’ always wrong. Yes. We’ve got to stick firmly to that,” he said. “But don’t you see, that very fact makes it in its way quite a useful guide. It’s the next best thing to being always right, like us; we can depend on its being wrong. We’ve only got to contradict it, and then ask ourselves why we do so. There’s usually a reason.... So there is in this—er—crisis. Of course you know their argument—that a lot of these young native doctors and lawyers come over here, and stop long enough to pick up the latest wrinkles in swindling—the civilized improvements so to speak—and then go back and start these wildcat schemes, Banks and so on, and there’s a smash. I think that’s a fair statement of their case.—But what’s ours? Why, simply that what they’re really doing is to give the Home Government a perfectly beautiful opportunity of living up to its own humane professions.... But we know what that means,” he added sadly.

“You mean that it just shows,” said Amory eagerly, “that we aren’t humane at all really? In fact, that England’s a humbug?”

Mr. Strong smiled. He too, in a sense, was paying out in pennies, and so far quite satisfactorily.

“Well ... take this very crisis,” he returned. “Oughtn’t there to be a grant, without a moment’s loss of time, from the Imperial Exchequer? I’m speaking from quite the lowest point of view—the mere point of view of expediency if you like. Very well. Suppose one or two natives are scoundrels: what about it? Are matters any better because we know that? Don’t the poverty and distress exist just the same? And isn’t that precisely our opportunity, if only we had a statesman capable of seeing it?... Look here: We’ve only got to go to them and say, ‘We are full of pity and help; here are a lot of—er—lakhs; lakhs of rupees; rupee one and twopence: you may have been foolish, but it isn’t for us to cast the first stone; it’s the conditions that are wrong; go and get something to eat, and don’t forget your real friends by and by.’—Isn’t that just the way to bind them to us? By their gratitude, eh? Isn’t getting their gratitude better than blowing them from the muzzles of guns, eh? And isn’t that the real Empire, of which we all dream? Eh?...”

He warmed up to it, while keeping one ear open for anybody who might come along the passage; and when he found himself running down he grabbed the newspaper again. He doubled it back, refolded it, and again thrust it under Amory’s nose.... There! That put it all in a nutshell, he said! The figures spoke for themselves. The Home Government, he said, knew all about it all the time, but of course they came from that hopeless slough of ineptitude that humorists were pleased to call the “governing classes,” and that was why they dragged such red herrings across the path of true progress as—well, as the Suffrage, say.... What! Hadn’t Amory heard that all this agitation for the Suffrage was secretly fomented by the Government itself? Oh, come, she must know that! Why, of course it was! The Government knew dashed well what they were doing, too! It was a moral certainty that there was somebody behind the scenes actually planning half these outrages! Why? Why, simply because it got ’em popular sympathy when a Minister had his windows smashed or a paper of pepper thrown in his face. They were only too glad to have pepper thrown in their faces, because everybody said what a shame it was, and forgot all about what fools they’d been making of themselves, and when a real—er—crisis came, like this one, people scarcely noticed it.... But potty little intellects like Brimby’s and Wilkinson’s didn’t see as deep as that. It was only Edgar Strong and Amory who saw as deep as that. That was why they, Edgar and Amory, were where they were—leaders of thought, not subordinates....

“Just look rather carefully at those figures,” he concluded....

Nevertheless, lofty as these flights were, they had a little lost their thrill for Amory. She had heard them so very, very often. She had trembled in the taxi in vain if this was all that her stealthy coming to the “Novum’s” offices meant. Nor had she put on her new sea-holly velvet to be told, however eloquently, that Wilkinson and Brimby were minor lights when compared with Edgar and herself, and that the “Times” was always wrong. Perhaps the figures that Edgar had thrust under her nose as if he had been clapping a muzzle on her meant something to the right person, but they meant nothing to Amory, and she didn’t pretend they did. They were man’s business; woman’s was “visualizing.” The two businesses, when you came to think of it, were separate and distinct. Whoever heard of a man wrapping himself up in a carpet and being carried by Nubians into his mistress’s presence? Whoever heard of a man’s face launching as much as an upriver punt, let alone fleets and fleets of full-sized ships? And whoever heard of the compelling beauty of a man’s eyes, as he lay on a sofa with one satiny upper-arm upraised, simply making—making—a woman come and kiss him?... It was ridiculous. Amory saw now. Even Joan of Arc must have put on her armour, not so much because of all the chopping and banging of maces and things (which must have been very noisy), but more with the idea of inspiring.... Yes, inspiring: that was it. There was a difference. Why, even physically women and men were not the same, and mentally they were just as different. For example, Amory herself wouldn’t have liked to blow anybody from the mouth of a gun, but she wasn’t sure sometimes that Edgar wouldn’t positively enjoy it. He had that hard eye, and square head, and capacity for figures....

She wasn’t sure that her heart didn’t go out to him all the more because of that puzzle of noughts and dots and rupees he had thrust into her hands....

And so, as he continued (so to speak) to gain time by paying in pennies, and to keep an ear disengaged for the passage, it came about that Edgar Strong actually overshot himself. The more technical and masculine he became, the more Amory felt that it was fitting and feminine in her not to bother with these things at all, but just to go on inspiring. She still kept her eyes bent over the column of figures, but she was visualizing again. She was visualizing the Channel steamer, and the Latin Quarter, and satiny upper-arms. And the taxi-tremor had returned....

Suddenly she looked softly yet daringly up. She felt that she must be Indian—yet not too Indian.

“And then there’s suttee,” she said in a low voice.

“Eh?” said Strong. He seemed to scent danger. “Abolished,” he said shortly.

But here Amory was actually able to tell Edgar Strong something. She happened to have been reading about suttee in a feminist paper only a day or two before. No doubt Edgar read nothing but figures and grey oblongs.

“Oh, no,” she said softly but with a knowledge of her ground. “That is, I know it’s prohibited, but there was a case only a little while ago. I read it in the ‘Vaward.’ And it was awful, but splendid, too. She was a young widow, and I’m sure she had a lovely face, because she’d such a noble soul.—Don’t you think they often go together?”

But Edgar did not reply. He had walked to a little shelf full of reference books and books for review, and was turning over pages.

“And the whole village was there,” Amory continued, “and she walked to the pyre herself, and said good-bye to all her relatives, and then——”

Edgar shut his book with a slap.—“Abolished in 1829,” he said. “It’s a criminal offence under the Code.”

Amory smiled tenderly. Abolished!... Dear, fellow, to think that in such matters he should imagine that his offences and Codes could make any difference! Of course the “Vaward” had made a mere Suffrage argument out of the thing, but to Amory it had just showed how cruel and magnificent and voluptuous and grim the East could be when it really tried.... And then all at once Amory thought, not of any particular poem she had ever read, but what a ripping thing it would be to be able to write poetry, and to say all those things that would have been rather silly in prose, and to put heaps of gorgeous images in, like the many-breasted what-was-her-name, and Thingummy—what-did-they-call-him—the god with all those arms. And there would be carpets and things too, and limbs, not plaster ones, but flesh and blood ones, as Edgar said his own were, and—and—and oh, stacks of material! The rhymes might be a bit hard, of course, and perhaps after all it might be better to leave poetry to somebody else, and to concentrate all her energies on inspiring, as Beatrice inspired Dante, and Laura Petrarch, and that other woman Camoens, and Jenny Rossetti, and Vittoria Colonna Michael Angelo. She might even inspire Edgar to write poetry. And she would be careful to keep the verses out of Cosimo’s way....

“Abolished!” she smiled in gay yet mournful mockery, and also with a touch both of reproach and of disdain in her look.... “Oh well, I suppose men think so....”

But at this he rounded just as suddenly on her as he had done when he had told her that she ought not to have come to the office. Perhaps he felt that he was losing ground again. You may be sure that Edgar Strong, actor, had never had to work as hard for his money as he had to work that afternoon.

“Amory!” he called imperiously. “I tell you it won’t do—not at this juncture! I’d just begun to find a kind of drug in my work; I’ve locked myself up here; and now you come and undo it all again with a look! I see we must have this out. Let me think.”

He began to pace the floor.

When he did speak again, his phrases came in detached jerks. He kept looking sharply up and then digging his chin into his red tie again.

“It was different before,” he said. “It might have been all right before. We were free then—in a way. It was different in every way.... (Mind your dress in that tea).... But we can’t do anything now. Not at present. There’s this crisis. That’s suddenly sprung upon us. There’s got to be somebody at the wheel—the ‘Novum’s’ wheel, I mean. I hate talking about my duty, but you’ve read the ‘Times’ there. The ‘Times’ is always wrong, and if we desert our posts the whole game’s up—U. P. Prang’s no good here. Prang can’t be trusted at a pinch. And Wilkinson’s no better. Neither of ’em any good in an emergency. Weak man at bottom, Wilkinson—the weakness of violence—effeminate, like these, strongword poets. We can’t rely on Wilkinson and Prang. And who is there left? Eh?”

But he did not wait for an answer.

“Starving thousands, and no Imperial Grant.” His voice grew passionate. “Imperial Grant must be pressed for without delay. What’s to happen to the Real Empire if you and I put our private joys first? Eh? Answer me.... There they are, paying in pennies—and us dallying here.... No. Dash it all, no. May be good enough for some of these tame males, but it’s a bit below a man. I won’t—not now. Not at present. It would be selfish. They’ve trusted me, and——,” a shrug. “No. That’s flat. I see my nights being spent over figures and telegrams and all that sort of thing for some time to come.... Don’t think I’ve forgotten. I understand perfectly. I suppose that sooner or later it will have to be the Continent and so on—but not until this job’s settled. Not till then. Everything else—everything—has got to stand down. You do see, don’t you, Amory? I hope you do.”

As he had talked there had come over Amory a sense of what his love must be if nothing but his relentless sense of duty could frustrate it even for a day. And that was more thrilling than all the rest put together. It lifted their whole relation exactly where she had tried to put it without knowing how to put it there—into the regions of the heroic. Not that Edgar put on any frills about it. On the contrary. He was simple and plain and straight. And how perfectly right he was! Naturally, since the “Times” and its servile following of the capitalist Press would not help, Edgar had to all intents and purposes the whole of India to carry on his shoulders. It was exactly like that jolly thing of Lovelace’s, about somebody not loving somebody so much if he didn’t love Honour more. He did love her so much, and he had as much as said that there would be plenty of time to talk about the Continent later. Besides, his dear, rough, unaffected way of calling this heroic work his “job!” It was just as if one of those knights of old had called slaying dragons and delivering the oppressed his “job!”

Amory was exalted as she had never been exalted. She turned to him where he stood on the hearth, and laved him with a fond and exultant look.

“I see,” she said bravely. “I was wretchedly selfish. But remember, won’t you, when you’re fighting this great battle against all those odds, and saying all those lovely things to the Indians, and getting their confidence, and just showing all those other people how stupid they are, that I didn’t stop you, dear! I know it would be beastly of me to stop you! I shouldn’t be worthy of you.... But I think you ought to appoint a Committee or something, and have the meetings reported in the ‘Novum,’ and I’m sure Cosimo wouldn’t grudge the money. Oh, how I wish I could help!——”

But he did not say, as she had half hoped he would say, that she did help, by inspiring. Instead, he held out his hand. As she took it in both of hers she wondered what she ought to do with it. If it had been his foot, and he had been the old-fashioned sort of knight, she could have fastened a spur on it. Or she might have belted a sword about her waist. But to have filled his fountain-pen, which was his real weapon, would have been rather stupid.... He was leading her, ever so sympathetically, to the door. He opened it, took from it the notice that had kept Mr. Prang away, and stood with her on the landing.

“Good-bye,” she said.

He glanced over his shoulder, and then almost hurt her hands, he gripped them so hard.

“Good-bye,” he said, his eyes looking into hers. “You do understand, don’t you, Amory?”

“Yes, Edgar.”

Even then he seemed loth to part from her. He accompanied her to the top of the stairs.—“You’ll let me know when you’re coming again, won’t, you?” he asked.

“Yes. Good-bye.”

And she tore herself away.

At the first turning of the stairs Amory stood aside to allow a rather untidy young woman to pass. This young woman had a long bare neck that reminded Amory of an artist’s model, and her hands were thrust into the fore-pockets of a brown knitted coat. She was whistling, but she stopped when she saw Amory.

“Do you know whether Mr. Dickinson, the poster artist, is up here?” she asked.

“The next floor, I think,” Amory replied.

“Thanks,” said the girl, and passed up.

IV THE OUTSIDERS

“No, not this week,” Dorothy said. “Dot wrote a fortnight ago. This one’s from Mollie. (You remember Mollie, Katie? She came to that funny little place we had on Cheyne Walk once, but of course she was only about twelve then. She’s nearly nineteen now, and so tall! They’ve just gone to Kohat).—Shall I read it, auntie?”

And she read:—

“‘I’m afraid I wrote you a hatefully skimpy letter last time—,’” h’m, we can skip that; here’s where they started: “‘It was the beastliest journey that I ever made. To begin with, we were the eighteenth tonga that day, so we got tired and wretched ponies; we had one pair for fifteen miles and couldn’t get another pair for love or money. We left Murree at two o’clock and got to Pindi at nine. The dust was ghastly. Mercifully Baba slept like a lump in our arms from five till nine, so he was all right. We had from nine till one to wait in Pindi Station, and had dinner, and Baba had a wash and clean-up and a bottle, and we got on board the train and off. Baba’s cot, etc.; and we settled down for the night. Nurse and Baba and Mary and I were in one carriage and Jim next door. I slept beautifully till one o’clock, and then I woke and stayed awake. The bumping was terrific, and it made me so angry to look down on the others and see them fast asleep! I had an upper berth. Baba slept from eleven-thirty till six-thirty! So we had no trouble at all with him——

“Well, and so they got to Kohat. (I hope this isn’t boring you, Katie.)”

“‘It was most beautifully cool and fresh, and we had the mess tonga and drove to the bungalow. The flowering shrubs here would delight Auntie Grace. I’ve fallen in love with a bush of hibiscus in the compound, but find it won’t live in water, but droops directly one picks it. The trees are mostly the palmy kind, and so green, and the ranges of hills behind are exactly like the Red Sea ranges. The outside of our bungalow is covered with purple convolvulus, and the verandah goes practically all round it. Jim’s room is just like him—heads he’s shot, study, dressing-room, and workshop, all in one, and it’s quite the fullest room in the house. Beyond that there’s my room, looking out over the Sinai Range——’

“Then there are the drawing and dining-rooms——”

“‘The curtains are a pale terra-cotta pink over the door and dark green in the bay-windows, with white net in front. The drawing-room is all green. The durrie (that’s the carpet) is green, with a darker border, and the sofa and chairs and mantelpiece-cover and the screen behind the sofa all green. There’s another bay-window, with far curtains of green and the near ones chintz, an awfully pretty cream spotted net with a green hem let in. That makes three lots, two in the window itself and a third on a pole where the arch comes into the room. Then over the three doors there are chintz curtains, cream, with a big pattern of pink and green and blue, just like Harrods’ catalogue——’

“Can’t you see it all!—H’m, h’m!... Then on the Sunday morning they got the mess tonga and went out to Dhoda, with butterfly-nets, and Jim went fishing—h’m, h’m—and she says—

“‘It’s just like the Old Testament; I shouldn’t have been in the least surprised to meet Abraham and Jacob. It’s the flatness of it, and the flocks and herds. There are women with pitchers on their heads, and a man was making scores of bricks with mud and straw—exactly like the pictures of the Children of Israel in “Line upon Line.” And about a hundred horses and mules and donkeys and carts all stopped at midday, because it was so hot, and it was just what I’d always imagined Jacob doing. But inside cantonments it isn’t a bit Biblical, but rather too civilized, etc.’

(“Isn’t Katie patient, listening to all this, auntie!”)

“‘But you can’t go far afield at Kohat. At Murree you could always get a three or four mile walk round Pindi Point, but here it’s just to the Club and back. We go to the Central Godown and the Fancy Godown to shop. The Central is groceries, and the Fancy toothpowder, Scrubb’s Ammonia, etc. On Saturday they were afraid Captain Horrocks had smallpox, and so we all got vaccinated, but now that we’ve all taken beautifully it seems it isn’t smallpox after all, and we’ve all got swelled arms, but Captain Horrocks is off the sick-list to-morrow. Colonel Wade is smaller than ever. Mrs. Wade is coming out by the “Rewa.” Mrs. Beecher came to tea on Sunday——’

(“Is that our Mrs. Beecher, when Uncle Dick was at Chatham, auntie?”)—

“‘—and I forgot to say that Dot’s parrots stood the journey awfully well, but they’ve got at the loquat trees and destroyed all the young shoots. Jim saw us safely in and is now off on his Indus trip. The 56th are going in March, and the 53rd come instead. I’m sure the new baby’s a little darling; what are you going to call him?——’

“And so on. I do think she writes such good letters. Now let’s have yours, Aunt Grace (and that really will be the end, Katie).”

And Lady Tasker’s letters also were “put in.”

It was a Sunday afternoon, at Cromwell Gardens. Stan was away with his film company for the week-end, and Dorothy had got Katie to stay with her during his absence and had proposed a call on Lady Tasker. They had brought the third Bit with them, and he now slept in one of the cots upstairs. Lady Tasker sat with her crochet at the great first-floor window that looked over its balcony out along the Brompton Road. On the left stretched the long and grey and red and niched and statued façade of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the failing of the western flush was leaving the sky chill and sharp as steel and the wide traffic-polished road almost of the same colour. Inside the lofty room was the still glow of a perfect “toasting-fire,” and Lady Tasker had just asked Katie to be so good as to put more coal on before it sank too low.

Katie Deedes had made no scruple whatever about changing her coat in more senses of the words than one. She had bought a navy-blue costume and a new toque (with a wing in it), and since then had got into the way of expressing her doubts whether Britomart Belchamber’s hockey legs and Dawn of Freedom eye were in the truest sense feminine. Nay, that is altogether to understate the change in Katie. She had now no doubt about these things whatever. As Saul became Paul, so Katie now not only reviled that which she had cast off, but was even prepared, like the Apostle at Antioch, to withstand the older Peters of Imperialism to their faces, did she detect the least sign of temporizing in them. And this treason had involved the final giving-way of every one of her old associates. She was all for guns and grim measures; and while she looked fondly on Boy Scouts in the streets and talked about “the thin end of the wedge of Conscription,” she scowled on the dusky-skinned sojourners within London’s gates, and advocated wholesale deportations.

And in all this Katie Deedes was only returning to her own fold, though her people were not soldiers, but lawyers. For the matter of that, her father’s cousin was a very august personage indeed, for whose comfort, when he travelled, highly-placed railway officials made themselves personally responsible, and whose solemn progress to Assize was snapshotted for the illustrated papers and thrown on five hundred cinema screens. In the past Katie had been privileged to call this kingpost of the Law “Uncle Joe.”...

And then Mr. Strong had got hold of her....

And after Mr. Strong, Mr. Wilkinson....

And according to Mr. Wilkinson, the most ferocious of the hanging-judges had been a beaming humanitarian by comparison with Sir Joseph. Mr. Wilkinson had the whole of Sir Joseph’s career at his fingers’ ends: the So-and-So judgment—this or that flagrant summing up—the other deliberate and wicked misdirection to the jury. Sir Joseph’s heart was black, his law bunkum, and he had only got where he was by self-advertisement and picking the brains of men a hundred times fitter for heaven than himself....

Therefore Katie, hearing this horrible tale, had quailed, and had straightway given away this devil who was the sinister glory of her house. She had agreed that he was a man whom anybody might righteously have shot on sight, and had gathered her Greenaway garments about her whenever she had passed within a mile of Sir Joseph’s door....

But now he was “Uncle Joe” again, and—well, it must have been rather funny. For Katie’s impressionable conscience had given her no rest day or night until she had sought Uncle Joe out and had made a clean breast of it all before him. Katie had fancied she had seen something like a twinkle in those sinful old eyes, but (this was when she mentioned the name of the “Novum”) the twinkle had vanished again. Oh, yes, Sir Joseph, had heard of the “Novum.” Didn’t a Mr. Prang write for it?...

And thereupon Katie had given Mr. Prang away too....

But in the end Sir Joseph had forgiven her, and had told her that she had better not be either a revolutionary, nor yet the kind of Conservative that is only a revolutionary turned inside-out, but just a good little girl, and had asked her how she was getting on, and why she hadn’t been to see her Aunt Anne, and whether she would like some tickets for a Needlework Exhibition; and now she was just beginning to forget that he had ever been anything but “Uncle Joe,” who had given her toys at Christmas, and Sunday tickets for the Zoo whenever she had wanted to go there on that particularly crowded day.

Dorothy had had something of this in her mind when she had brought Katie to Cromwell Gardens that Sunday afternoon. From Katie’s new attitude to her own Ludlow project was not so far as it seemed. If she could lead the zealous ’vert to such promising general topics as Boy Scouts, Compulsory Service, and the preparation of boys for the Army (topics that Katie constantly brought forward by denunciation of their opposites), her scheme would certainly not suffer, and might even be advanced.

And, as it happened, no sooner had Dorothy tucked her last letter back into its envelope than Katie broke out—earnestly, proselytizingly, and very prettily on the stump.

“There you are!” she exclaimed. “That’s all exactly what I mean! Why, any one of those letters ought to be enough to convince anybody! Here are all these stupid people at home, ready to believe everything a native tells them, going on as they do, and hardly one of them’s ever set foot out of England in his life! Of course the Indians know exactly what they want, but don’t you see, Dorothy—,” very patiently she explained it for fear Dorothy should not see, “—don’t you see that it’s all so much a matter of course to Mollie and those that they can actually write whole letters about window-curtains! I love that about the window-curtains! It’s all such an old story to them! They know, you see, and haven’t got to be talking about it all the time in order to persuade themselves! There it is!—But these other people don’t know anything at all. They don’t even see what a perfect answer window-curtains are to them! They go on and on and on—you do see what I mean, Dorothy?——”

“Yes, dear,” said Dorothy, mildly thinking of the great number of people there were in the world who would take no end of trouble to explain things to her. “Go on.”

And Katie continued to urge upon her friend the argument that those know most about a country who know most about it.

Katie had got to the stage of being almost sure that she remembered Mollie’s coming into the studio in Cheyne Walk one day, when Lady Tasker, who had not spoken, suddenly looked up from her crochet and said, “Look, Dorothy—that’s the girl I was speaking about—coming along past the Museum there.”

Dorothy rose and walked to the window.—“Where?” she said.

“Passing the policeman now.”

Dorothy gave a sudden exclamation.—“Why,” she exclaimed, “—come here, Katie, quick—it’s Amory Towers!—It is Amory, isn’t it?”

Katie had run to the window, too. The two women stood watching the figure in the mushroom-white hat and the glaucous blue velvet that idled forlornly along the pavement.

“Do you mean Mrs. Pratt?” said Lady Tasker, putting up her glass again. “Are you quite sure?”

Once before in her life, in the days before her marriage, Amory Towers had done the same thing that she was doing now. Then, seeking something, perhaps a refuge from herself, she had walked the streets until she was ready to drop with fatigue, watching faces passing, passing, for ever passing, and slowly gathering from them a hypnotic stupor. Sometimes, for hour after hour, she had seen nothing but eyes—eyes various in shape and colour as the pebbles on a beach, sometimes looking into hers, sometimes looking past her, sometimes tipped with arrow-heads of white as they turned, sometimes only to be seen under their lids as a finger-nail is seen within the finger of a glove. And at other times, weary of her fellow-beings and ceasing to look any more at them, she had seen nothing but doors and windows, or fan-lights, or the numbers of houses, or window-boxes, or the patterns of railings, or the serried shapes of chimneys against the sky. She had been looking, and yet not looking, for Cosimo Pratt then; she was looking, and yet not looking, for Edgar Strong now. Had she met him she had nothing new to say to him; she only knew that he had taken weak possession of her mind. She was looking for him in South Kensington because he had once told her, when asked suddenly, that he lived in Sydney Street, S. W., and frequently walked to the Indian section of the Imperial Institute in order to penetrate into the real soul of a people through its art; and she was not looking for him, because one day she had remembered that he had said before that he lived in South Kentish Town—which was rather like South Kensington, but not the same—and something deep down within her told her that the other was a lie.

But yet her feet dragged her to the quarter, as to other quarters, and she talked to herself as she walked. She told herself that her husband did not understand her, and that it would be romantic and silencing did she take a lover to her arms; and she could have wept that, of all the flagrant splendours of which she dreamed, London’s grey should remain her only share. And she knew that the attendants of the Imperial Institute had begun to look at her. Once she had spoken to one of them, but when she had thought of asking him whether he knew a Mr. Strong who came there to study Indian Art, her heart had suddenly failed her, and the question had stayed unspoken. Nevertheless, she had feared that the man had guessed her thought, and must be taking stock of her face against some contingency (to visualize which passed the heavy time on) that had a Divorce Court in it, and hotel porters and chambermaids who gave evidence, and the Channel boat, and two forsaken children, and grimy raptures in the Latin Quarter, and its hectic cafés at night....

And so she walked, feeling herself special and strange and frightened and half-resolved; and thrice in as many weeks Lady Tasker, sitting with her crochet at her window, had seen her pass, but had not been able to believe that this was the woman, with a husband and children, on whom she had once called at that house with the secretive privet hedge away in Hampstead.

“It is Amory!” Dorothy exclaimed. “Is she coming here?”

Lady Tasker spoke reflectively.—“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But—will you fetch her in? I should like to see her.”

“If you like, auntie,” said Dorothy, though a little reluctantly.

But Lady Tasker seemed to change her mind. She laid down her crochet and rose.

“No, never mind,” she said. “I’ll fetch her myself.”

And the old lady of seventy passed slowly out of the room, and Katie and Dorothy moved away from the window.

Lady Tasker was back again in five minutes, but no Amory came with her. She walked back to her chair, moved it, and took up her work again.—“Switch the table light on,” she said.

“Was it Amory?” Dorothy ventured to ask after a silence.

“Yes,” Lady Tasker replied.

“And wouldn’t she come in?”

“She said she was hurrying back home.”

That raised a question so plain that Dorothy thought it tactful to make rather a fuss about finding some album or other that should convince Katie that she really had met the Mollie who had written the letter about the window-curtains. Lady Tasker’s needle was dancing rather more quickly than usual. Dorothy found her album, switched on another light, and told Katie to make room for her on her chair.

Amory, dawdling like that, and then, when spoken to, to have the face to say that she was hurrying back home!——

It was some minutes later that Lady Tasker said off-handedly, “Has she any children besides those twins?”

“Amory?” Dorothy replied, looking up from the album. “No.”

“How old is she?” Lady Tasker asked.

“Thirty-two, isn’t she, Katie?”

“About that.”

“Is she very—athletic?” Lady Tasker next wanted to know.

“Not at all, I should say.”

“I mean she doesn’t go in for marathon races or Channel swimming or anything of that kind?”

“Amory? No,” said Dorothy, puzzled.

“And you’re sure of her age?” the old lady persisted.

“Well—she may only be thirty-one.”

“I don’t mean is she younger. Is she older than that?”

“No—I know by my own age.”

“H’m!” said Lady Tasker; and again her needle danced....

Dorothy was explaining to Katie that Mollie was fair, about her own colour, but of course the hair never came out right in a photograph, when Lady Tasker suddenly began a further series of questions.

“Dorothy——”

“Yes?”

“Did she—develop—early?”

“Who—Amory? I don’t know. Did she, Katie? Of course she was quite the cleverest girl at the McGrath.”

“Ah!... What did she do at the McGrath?”

“Why, painted. You’re awfully mysterious, auntie! It was soon after she left the McGrath that she painted ‘Barrage’—you’ve heard of her feminist picture that made such a stir!”

“Ah, yes. Yes. I didn’t see it, but I did hear about it. I don’t know anything about art.—Had she any affair before she married young Pratt?”

“No. I’m sure of that. I knew her so well.” Dorothy was quite confident on that point, and Katie agreed. Lady Tasker’s questions continued.

And then, suddenly, into this apparently aimless catechism the word “doctor” came. Dorothy gave a start.

“Aunt Grace!... Do you mean Amory’s ill?” she cried.

Lady Tasker did not look up from her crochet.—“Ill?” she said. “I’ve no reason to suppose so. I didn’t say she was ill. There’s no illness about it.... By the way, I don’t think I’ve asked how Stan is.”

But for the curiously persistent questions, Dorothy might have seized the opportunity to hint that Stan was made for something more nationally useful than getting himself black and blue by stopping runaway horses for the film or running the risk of double pneumonia by being fished out of the sea on a January day—which was the form his bread-winning was taking on that particular week-end. But the Ludlow design was for the moment forgotten. She would have liked to ask her aunt straight out what she really meant, but feared to be rude. So she turned to the album again, and again Katie, turning from turban to staff-cap and from staff-cap to pith helmet, urged that those were the people who really knew what they were talking about—surely Dorothy saw that!——