IV “Il Faut Qu’ Une Porte—”
Now that Cosimo was back in town again for the second time (he had stayed a week the first time, and had then departed again for Christmas, coming back the first week in the New Year) his manner puzzled Amory a little. Sometimes he seemed changed, sometimes (barring the hair) exactly as before. Sometimes he told Amory all about his business, and sometimes seemed more than ordinarily interested in hers—almost as if he had her a little on his mind and would have liked to be rid of some responsibility. Then, hardly more than three weeks after the previous cutting, he got his hair cut again. It was cooler so, he said—this on a distinctly raw January day.
The cutting altered his appearance surprisingly. Amory thought the change very much for the worse. The tendrilled clusters had “massed” so beautifully before; she had sometimes given them a light touch or two with her fingers, taking an æsthetic delight in the way they “came.” He had reminded her a little of the Antinöus. But now he reminded her of nothing save of a young human animal of the opposite sex. He wore starched white collars too, and went about in a hat.... On the other hand, he mended Amory’s door so that it was no longer possible to intrude a hand and to slip the latch. It wasn’t the thing, he said. What did it matter? Amory asked; but Cosimo only replied that he didn’t like the idea at all.
The door, however, gave way again; and this time Cosimo made a thorough job of it, taking it from its hinges and laying it on the floor while he screwed a stout batten on the back that remedied its warping once for all. This was late on a Saturday evening; in order to bring the bent door flush with the batten Amory had to sit down on one end of it; and the lamp stood on the floor between them as Cosimo, kneeling, screwed. The lamp was not so near, however, as to be a source of danger if Amory (as she had so often done before) took down her hair. She did take it down. Cosimo, the top of his cropped head turned to Amory, continued to screw.
“There!” he said at last. “I think that’ll make you safe, Amory.”
“Thanks most awfully, Cosimo,” Amory replied quietly.
“I’ve intended to do that ever since that night you were out at Covent Garden,” Cosimo continued. “If I could have got in, anybody else could, of course. Anyway, you’re all right now. You can get up.”
“Thanks,” said Amory again.... “I’m sure I don’t know what I’m safe from,” she added. “Jellies’ young man might burgle me, I suppose; but he’s ’in’ again.”
“No! Really?” said Cosimo, so eagerly that Amory wondered whether he was glad to change the subject. “I say! What is it this time?”
“Oh, they found no fewer than ten bicycles in his place, all bright green, newly enamelled. And he isn’t a cycle dealer. I suppose they drew conclusions.”
“By Jove!” Cosimo exclaimed. “When was that?”...
Amory was quite sure that that too was part of the change in Cosimo. He wanted to be on a topic that was—like the mended door—“safe.” He had risen on his knees and straightened his back; Amory had thought he was about to rise altogether; but she herself did not move, and he sat down again, cross-legged, on the other end of the door. He asked further questions about Jellies, Orris, and the ten bicycles. Amory, shaking back her thick, raw-gold mane, answered him quite freely; and then Cosimo returned to the subject of the door again.
“It ought to have new hinges too, really,” he grunted, “but I suppose it’s too late to get them to-night. Look how rusty that one is.”
Amory leaned forward, and together they inspected the hinge. Then she gave a little laugh. It was almost a reckless little laugh.
“Oh, it will do,” she said lightly. “I shouldn’t bother about it. Leave it till to-morrow. You can just prop it up for to-night.”
“Prop it up!” repeated Cosimo. “Oh no. Wouldn’t do at all.”
Then, all at once, apparently, Amory saw. She laughed again.
“Oh!... Good gracious, Cosimo, how ridiculous you are! Why, I thought you were joking at first! As if anybody but you ever came up here nowadays—and even you only once in awhile!” Then, with another reckless little laugh, she added, “Why, what difference could a door make?”
“A good deal, or else why have ’em?” Cosimo retorted. He did not seem comfortable.
“Quite so: why?” Amory replied. “What a strange idea! Really, I never knew you confuse Accidentals and Essentials so before! Why, if a person’s made up his mind to do a thing, how will a door stop it? And if it won’t, why a door? You know as well as I do that these things happen within ourselves. Besides, I thought we’d arrived at our conclusions.”
“Of course, so we have,” said Cosimo apologetically. “I know we’ve got quite down to fundamentals. Still, there’s no actual harm in having a hinge.”
Amory shook her head slowly. The lamp on the floor shone tiny in either brook-brown eye. Somehow Cosimo felt as uncomfortable as a guilty dog under those eyes.
“You’ve changed, Cosimo,” she said. “Something’s changed you.... Why,” she suddenly made a soft little appeal and held out both hands—“why don’t you tell me what it is?”
Cosimo appeared not to notice her hands. His own fumbled with a screw.
“I haven’t changed, Amory, really—really I haven’t,” he protested.
“You have, Cosimo,” Amory replied, her head critically a little on one side. “You mayn’t know it, but you’re becoming—ordinary.”
“Oh!” Cosimo broke out, revolted. “Ordinary—Cosimo!——”
“I’m not reproaching you,” Amory continued. “I suppose that if you examine it, it’s nothing to be ashamed of—I mean that ’ashamed’ isn’t quite the word. But words are only symbols after all; it’s the thing that matters.”
“Of course,” Cosimo agreed quickly. “You don’t think I’ve changed my mind about that, I hope, Amory? We came to the conclusion that words were only symbols years ago.”
But again Amory made her tender little appeal. Her fingers touched Cosimo’s hand lightly for a moment.
“Won’t you tell me, Cosimo? You see, it’s purely a matter of our intellectual identity. That’s been such a beautiful thing. Hasn’t it been a beautiful thing?” The fingers rested on his hand.
“Don’t say ‘been,’ Amory—it is,” Cosimo interrupted.
“Such a precious thing. Isn’t it Emerson who says that at bottom all friendship is based on equality of intellectual understanding? It’s a mingling of minds, Cosimo. When we use the same words we mean the same things by them, and—oh, how rare that is! Of course, I know your uncle’s dead, and that may have upset you, and you’ve all sorts of business about property and so on on your mind, but I can’t believe that accounts for all of it. I know you too well, you see! Or is it”—she gave a little start, as at a quite new surmise—“I don’t believe it can be, but is it—that you find me changed?”
Cosimo protested that Amory had not changed in the least. Neither of them had changed. A person might change from prejudice and intolerance to the larger view, but nobody in their senses thought of changing back again.
“Because if we have, either of us,” Amory continued, looking fearlessly before her, “I think we ought to face the fact. There can’t be two opinions about that. Whatever else we do, Cosimo, don’t let’s muddle. I simply couldn’t bear to sloven along, keeping up a pretence of friendship that was simply an intellectual hypocrisy. Either we still think the same about the great basic facts of Life, or we don’t; but don’t in either case let’s be cowards about it. If I’m to go forward alone, I’d much, much rather know it. No doubt it’ll be strange at first, but I shall get used to it, I suppose.”
She might have found it a little difficult to tell Cosimo exactly what it was she was so brave about, but unflinchingly brave about something she certainly seemed to be. With both hands she cast back her hair, showing her dauntless brow; her chin was held high above the bluebell-stalk of a throat, the lids were dropped over the shallow, gold-flecked eyes. As if she saw before her the bleak prospect of years to come without the intellectual companionship of Cosimo, the corners of her mouth gave a momentary twitch, but were instantly courageous again; and she reopened the eyes. They were full of sorrow and resolve. Cosimo had changed....
“Amory,” he pleaded, “don’t look like that.” This time he touched her hand.
“Like what?” she asked, without emotion.
“As if—it’s so ridiculous—as if it wasn’t all your fancy. You’re a bit run down, that’s all that’s the matter with you.”
“I have felt better,” she admitted, closing the eyes again and passing her finger-tips over the lids.
“Look here—can I get you something—knock a chemist up or anything?”
“No, thank you, Cosimo.”
“But—but—I’m really worried about you, dear——”
“You mustn’t worry, Cosimo. These things have to be faced.”
“But, my dear girl!... What things? I assure you it’s pure fancy! Look here,” he said resolutely, “tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself this past week, and I’ll bet I can tell you what’s the matter with you! In the first place, have you had proper meals?”
“All I wanted, thank you.”
“That means eggs, I expect. You haven’t a headache, have you?”
“Only quite a slight one. No, please don’t brush my hair; if you wouldn’t mind getting me a drink of water instead——”
“But,” said Cosimo presently, bending solicitously over her with the water he had fetched, “I used to be able to stroke your headaches away. Do let me try——”
“No, thank you so awfully much, Cosimo—I don’t think it would do this one any good—and I really think you ought to be going now. I shall go to bed.”
“Is it made?”
“I don’t know. Would you mind giving me a hand up? I expect I shall be all right again in the morning——”
He helped her weary but enduring form to the curtained corner where the bed lay. Then he looked anxiously at her. He stood irresolute.
“I’ll put you a jug of water by your side, shall I?”
“Yes, please, and Tchekoff—the little book there——”
“Oh, come, reading in bed’s the very worst thing you can do!”
“Perhaps Tchekoff’ll buck me up. He is stimulating. You haven’t read him? You should. I feel I need him to-night. Thank Heaven, one can always have the companionship of these men through their works.... When are you going away again? I suppose you’ll be giving up the studio in March? I shall go out for a long walk to-morrow by myself. I’ll prop the door up after you, but it really didn’t matter; there’s nothing anybody would come for. Thank you so much for mending it, though, and for the glass of water. I’m quite all right now. Good night, Cosimo——”
She had crossed the floor again. They held the tottering door up between them. “Stupid not to have waited till Monday,” Cosimo was muttering; “look here, shall I try to fix it up again as it was? Afraid the screwholes wouldn’t hold, though; they’ll have to be plugged.... Then put something heavy against it inside—your chest of drawers or something—won’t you?”
“Oh, very well, if you wish.”
“I was a fool not to wait till Monday.... You’re all right?”
“Perfectly.”
“I shall come round in the morning to see how you are.... Good night.” He was peering round the edge of the door.
“Good night.”
Cosimo left slowly. He felt a brute. He couldn’t have told why, but it seemed to him that, by comparison with this brave girl, who preferred the sharpest pains of knowledge to the lethargy of ignorance, and would have the truth though it were a blade in her lonely breast, he was inferior and a coward. But for all that, Amory had been quite wrong in thinking he had changed. He had not. He still thought Amory splendid. And not only that: he hadn’t quite realized before how very pretty she was. He had known she was pretty, but not how pretty; perhaps she hadn’t been quite so pretty before?... And now Cosimo came to think of it, he had been noticing lately whether girls were pretty or not. Somehow Pattie Wynn-Jenkins had got him into the way of it. Pattie, whose father’s plantation adjoined the western boundary of the grazing that was now Cosimo’s own, was pretty herself, and seemed to raise the question.... Still, Cosimo had not changed. He could admire Pattie without in the least taking away from the devotion he owed to Amory. And as for anything else than mere prettiness, Pattie wasn’t in it. Pattie would never have dreamed of reading Weiniger and Tchekoff. Just at present she cared for nothing in the world so much as how she should reduce her golf handicap. It was hard to call a girl so pretty as Pattie a fool, but, not to mince matters, that was about the long and the short of it....
And, on the whole, Cosimo was rather glad that Amory didn’t suspect there was such a girl as Pattie in existence.
Cosimo half expected to find Amory still in bed when he went round to Cheyne Walk at ten o’clock on the following morning; but she was dressed and ready for going out. He was lucky, she said, to have caught her; she would have been off in another five minutes.—“Off where?” Cosimo asked. Oh, Amory didn’t know.—“All right, come along,” he said.
But when she turned her eyes slowly round to his he saw that the night had only set higher their clear courage. Again he could not have told why he felt guilty.
“Do you think it would be wise?” she asked gravely.
“Why not?” he asked, taken aback anew.
“Oh, very well,” she answered indifferently. “I’m ready.”
Many times they had walked together in the direction of Earl’s Court and Brook Green, but never in such a silence as this. Yet on Amory’s part it was a calm and cheery silence. It was so calm and cheery that uneasily Cosimo fell to wondering whether Amory had not been right and he had not, after all, changed without knowing it. These geniuses were terrible people: there was never any telling what they did not see. As they passed through Hammersmith, Cosimo longed to break out, “I haven’t changed, Amory—you’d know I thought more of you than ever if you’d seen the pretty but awfully stupid sort of girl I’ve been seeing while I’ve been away—everything we’ve agreed a self-respecting woman can’t be any longer: a mere man’s toy, a chattel, property, on sale just as much as if she was in an Oriental slave-market, economically dependent, hopelessly apathetic to everything that’s fine and feminist and new——” He knew that Amory would have called that “facing the facts.” But something, he knew not what, held him back. Oh, it was none of the things you might have thought—that Amory might make more of it than there had been (indeed, there had been nothing), nor that he realized that the whole truth can never be told, and that the more you explain the more there remains still to be explained, nor that hypocrisy and lack of candour are not without their poor uses when all is said and done. Cosimo would have denied these obsolescent propositions one by one.... So he concluded that he could not be very well either. That must be the reason for his reticence. Pattie’s company must have put him a little out of accord with the finer things. Pattie in Shropshire, too, seemed a thought less pretty than did Amory by his side that Sunday morning. If Amory were only a little differently dressed she might be incomparably pretty, as she was already incomparably clever....
But suddenly Amory broke the silence. It was as they approached Ravenscourt Park.
“Cosimo,” she said slowly—“I’ve been wondering again——”
He waited for her to continue. As she delayed to do so, he said, “What, Amory?”
“I’ve been wondering again—why you don’t marry Dorothy.”
When Amory had said this same thing before, Cosimo had laughed, and with beautiful tact had replied that Dorothy would never have married him: but there was something of the still, of the rapt, about Amory that morning that would have made a laugh an offence. Instead, he said, almost reproachfully, “Oh,—Amory!”
“Why don’t you?” she continued dreamily. “I hope it’s not that mere settling down of opinion that is fatal to real vitality of thought. An idée fixe isn’t an idée at all; it’s a Law that in course of time thoughts become petrified. Then they’ve got to be got fluid again. Are you sure that you haven’t got Dorothy wrongly classified?”
She looked earnestly at him.
“But——” he began, but Amory interrupted him gently.
“Let’s face the facts about Dorothy without prejudice,” she said. “First, I know she’s mixed up with perfectly impossible people, but you mustn’t forget that she was with us at the McGrath. Her work’s impossible too, poor dear Dot, but search where you will, Cosimo, you won’t find a better appreciator than she is. It would only need a little encouragement of that side of her nature and a little suppression of the other and Dorothy would be an almost ideal wife for an advanced and fine-thinking man. It’s merely her Environment that doesn’t give her a chance. Of course, from the point of view of Eugenics, those people of hers may be a little epuisées; intermarried too much: but she doesn’t show it—she may be a throw-back. And it isn’t a drawback any longer that Dorothy’s rather fond of her own way. Equality of Opportunity is admitted nowadays, and in another ten years the conception of woman as property will be quite dead. And think how much worse you might do, Cosimo! Suppose you got hold of a mere doll!... Cosimo,” she added earnestly, “it would be—hell!”
Cosimo quailed inwardly, nor could he, in the face of Amory’s earnestness, dissemble his quailing with a laugh. “But,” he protested by and by, “I—I don’t want Dorothy, Amory!”
“I only ask you to ask yourself whether that isn’t an idée fixe.”
“I really don’t think it’s an idée fixe,” Cosimo returned, after further examination of it. “And besides, you’ve rather spoiled me for the companionship of—of anybody who comes along——”
“It has been beautiful,” said Amory, with a detached air, “and it will be more beautiful still to look back on. I don’t conceal from you, Cosimo, that quite the most precious and significant part of my life has been shared with you.”
He broke out almost angrily—“The past tense again, Amory! Really, I—I don’t know what’s come over you!”
“You mean that you’d miss me a little too?”
“Miss you!——” This time he did give a little mirthless laugh.
“Then,” Amory went on presently, “there’s something else to remember. Dorothy’s used to me. We are friends. Another girl might not be. You see how much I care who you marry, Cosimo, and why.”
“But—but—whatever’s put it into your head that I want to marry at all?” Cosimo cried, stopping and looking blankly at her.
She, too, looked at him; then she moved slowly forward again.
“Ah, you’re at the very heart of the feminist Movement there, if you only knew it, Cosimo,” she replied. “A man has only his intelligence; a woman has intelligence and her intuitions as well.”
“You mean you’ve an intuition I want to get married?” Cosimo broke out. “I swear——”
“Oh, Cosimo, what’s the good of swearing? That’s merely like that antiquated old Service again, when you promise to love and honour and all the time you’re absolutely in the dark. You may not want to at this moment. But you don’t know that to-morrow somebody may not want to marry you. I only want it to be the right person—chum of mine,” she added softly.
As she put her hand on his arm Cosimo had a little brotherly warming.
He was not aware—or if he had been aware, he had forgotten—that Amory’s Aunt Jerry and Mr. Massey lived on Chiswick Mall, hardly a stone’s-throw from where they were. They were passing the “Doves” when suddenly Amory exclaimed, “Why, we’re quite near to Aunt Jerry’s. Shall we go in to lunch?”
Her quick tone seemed a change from the past tense and broodings about his marriage, and he welcomed it eagerly. Moreover, to call on the Masseys would recall enlivening thoughts of that merry wedding day when Mr. Wellcome had got slightly drunk and had passed round the toothpicks. It would be the very thing to take Amory out of herself.
“Ripping idea!” said Cosimo enthusiastically. “Which is the house?”
“The one you’re walking past now,” said Amory, putting her hand on the knob of a tall wrought-iron gate. “I don’t suppose Aunt Jerry’s been to church.”
They walked up a narrow flagged path and Amory rang an old bell by the side of a torch-extinguisher. Already Aunt Jerry had waved her hand from the drawing-room window of the first floor. The door was opened, and they were admitted.
“We’ve asked ourselves to lunch, Cosimo and I,” said Amory, kissing her aunt where she sat by the window. “May we stay?”
Aunt Jerry affected a severity.
“I’m not so sure, after the disgraceful time you’ve thought fit to stop away,” she replied. “I’m very cross with both of you. If you’d left it one week longer, Cosimo—you see I haven’t forgotten I was to call you Cosimo—I really don’t think George would have had you in the house. But I forgive you now you are here. George will be back from church presently. Go and take your things off, child, and Cosimo will talk to me. You know the little room—or is it so long since you were here that you’ve forgotten?”
There were hyacinth bulbs in the glasses of Aunt Jerry’s rounded bow-window, and a canary in a white and gilt cage; and to Amory the house seemed furnished consonantly with the age of its owners, that is to say, its chairs and tables were not old enough in style to be antique and not new enough to be anything but what doubtless some of them were—second-hand. But the panelling was pleasant, and the airy view up the river delightful. Aunt Jerry pointed out the view to Cosimo at once; she sat there all day, she said, but it was almost as good as being out of doors. There was no need to ask why she sat there, watching her swelling hyacinths and listening to the trilling of her bird. Amory expected to be made a cousin early in April.
“I’m so glad you’ve come,” said Aunt Jerry to Cosimo. “Mrs. Deschamps is coming; George will meet her after church; and Miss Crebbin (do you remember Miss Crebbin?)—she’s bringing her young man. But I ought to say that our lunch is really our dinner on Sundays because of the girls’ afternoon off. Well, and now tell me how you are.”
She was fresh as a rose, and talked as if she and Cosimo had been old friends. Cosimo remembered the joke of Mrs. ’Ill, the plumber, Mr. Wellcome, and the chimney-sweep. Only for a moment had Aunt Jerry glanced at Cosimo’s suit of tweeds. She had heard of Cosimo’s bereavement, but, after all, a loss can be felt as deeply in tweeds as in anything else, and the glance had seemed to admit that perhaps it wasn’t altogether a bad thing that the old custom of extravagant funerals, often at the expense of the needs of the living, was dying out. “We must all go sometime,” her short silence seemed to say, “and those who follow us must take up the burdens we leave.” Perhaps it was not all burden either. Aunt Jerry had forgotten the precise number of acres, but she remembered that Cosimo was now “eligible.”
Aunt Jerry was telling Cosimo how all at sea Amory had seemed during the past weeks, when Mr. Massey arrived with Mrs. Deschamps. They were followed a few minutes later by Miss Crebbin and her young man, a Mr. Allport. And Mrs. Deschamps, too, greeted Cosimo as quite an old friend.
“I shall never, never forget that wedding day, Mr. Pratt!” she exclaimed vivaciously. “That cake—the wretches! But they’re always up to something, scaring you out of your wits with a jam-splash on the tablecloth or a spill of ink on your book—you’ve seen them, Mr. Pratt; they’re a penny, and I’ve had dreadful turns with them! But I simply cannot call you ‘Mr. Pratt.’ It isn’t like Glenerne here. I admit it’s best to be on the safe side there, but at Oasthouse View we’re a family party—aren’t we, George? And don’t I come on Sundays till you’re sick of the sight of me and say, ‘Here’s that nuisance of a Nellie again?’ He needn’t shake his head,” the bright little widow continued to Cosimo; “Geraldine thinks we go to church together, but really I’m making love to him—aren’t I, George?”
“Yes—yes, yes, yes,” Mr. Massey hissed softly over his teeth, entering into the joke and smiling amiably about him.
And Mrs. Deschamps confided to Cosimo in a stage whisper that it was already arranged that she was to be “Number Two.”
They lunched in the panelled room beneath Aunt Jerry’s drawing-room, Amory and Cosimo on one side of the table facing Miss Crebbin and her young man on the other. Cosimo presently became aware that this was a quite amusing variation of the joke of Jellies, Dorothy, the plumber, etc. It lacked the boisterousness of that day when Mr. Wellcome had thrust him into Amory’s arms, but it had a subtle flavour of its own. Cosimo had only one uneasiness, which was that Amory was perhaps not well enough in health to extract the last particle of savour from all this taking-for-granted. She sat next to Mr. Allport, but said little. She ate hungrily of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and quite agreed when Mr. Allport said what “an A1 little pitch Oasthouse View was.” Then Mr. Allport talked water-rates and gas-fittings to Mr. Massey. He could be seen making mental notes of fixtures and furniture against the day when he and his young woman should set up together for themselves. He seemed, too, to be advising Cosimo also to be picking up wrinkles in good time. Cosimo was secretly glad that Mr. Wellcome was not there. His robustiousness would have spoiled the quiet and artistic character of the comedy.
And again he hoped that Amory was not missing anything.
Then the ladies ascended to the drawing-room again, and Mr. Massey, who knew perfectly well everything that the sideboard did and did not contain, pretended to be in doubt, and “thought there ought to be a little port somewhere.” He found it, and the three men sat, Mr. Allport again talking of cupboards and drains, but obviously thinking that... but let Cosimo and Amory tell the rest.
“My—dear!” Amory broke out when, at half-past three, they passed the “Doves” again. “Did you ever!”
Cosimo’s light fears that Amory might have missed the delicate comedy had been wasted; Amory was quite her old self again. That, Cosimo thought, was the good meal of roast beef. She bubbled freely, and caught at Cosimo’s arm.
“My—dear! If only you could have heard the priceless things that were said upstairs!”
Cosimo was wondrously bucked by the change in her.
“Oh, this is torture—do tell me!” he implored.
“Oh, it’s beyond words—I don’t know where to begin! Aunt Jerry—and that incredible Deschamps woman—and that doll of a girl who’s going to love, honour, obey, and all the rest of it!... Have the poor dears an inkling of what it all really means?”
“You mean——?” said Cosimo tentatively.
“Of course I do—the stupid institution of the Family again! Did George say anything to you? No, I suppose he wouldn’t; high-and-mighty man again; quite too superior; hopes that as long as he says nothing he’ll be taken for wise, as somebody says. But Aunt Jerry’s got it all—oh, perfection hardly describes it!” Lightly she threw up her hands and allowed them to drop again.
“Not the old conceptions, of the father as the head of the Family and so on?” Cosimo said incredulously.
“Yes!”
“No!—Parental Despotism?”
“Despotism!”
“Not corporal punishment!”
“Cor-por-al punishment!”
“No Justice for children?”
“Love and Authority instead!”
“And woman as the mere plaything of man?”
“The mere plaything of man!”
“Property?”
“A chattel!”
“Woman’s place at home with her children?”
“C’est ça!”
“By—Jove!”
Cosimo whistled.
“Yes, I thought I should surprise you,” said Amory, with quiet satisfaction.
“Surprise!—I’m thunderstruck!”
“You didn’t know you’d been lunching in a regular museum of it all, did you?”
“A museum? A catacomb!”
“You wouldn’t suppose that we lived in this Year of Grace, would you?”
“About 1100, I should have said.”
“Oh no,” Amory interrupted, “under Feudalism it would have been all right. It would have been proper to their stage of development. But—to-day! Or rather next April, I should say——!”
“The hands of the clock are to be set back in April?”
“So the doctor says. I dare say his rule-of-thumb carries him as far as that.”
“Awful impostors, doctors.”
Then Amory spoke slowly and impressively.—“What I want to know is, how much longer can Individualism last? We heard that American lady last year; would you have thought it possible that the system could have survived such a slashing attack? When will people begin to have even a rudimentary conception of the function of the State in these matters? When will they see, for instance, that when a dispute arises between a parent and a child the case is exactly like any other dispute, with the plaintiff on one side and the defendant on the other? If the parent’s the plaintiff, how can he speak for the defendant as well? Why, it’s making him judge and executioner and all the lot!... And those, Cosimo,” she went on, with still deeper gravity, into which contempt crept, “are my aunt’s and uncle’s ideas! Violence, harshness, and repression. Russianizing the Home, instead of abolishing it altogether, or only allowing it under the very strictest inspection, in such cases as when a parent has really proved his fitness for Child-culture! The Home!... Oh, when will the dawn come?” She turned up the pretty eyes to the sky; she spoke passionately. “Aunt Jerry fit to be a Mother of the Race! Why,” she broke out witheringly—“has she (to begin with the very elements) a notion of what to feed a child on? Does she know what a proteid is? Does she know what albumen is? Has she as much as seen a bit of yeast under the microscope? (I have; a girl once showed me.) Doesn’t she choose her very feeding-bottles out of these awful circulars of Dorothy’s or whose ever they are? And the clothes she showed us!... Ribbons, pink if it’s a girl and blue if it’s a boy! This hateful insistence on sex from the very beginning! From before the beginning!... And the pride of these people in their ignorance and conceit! Bursting with it!”...
Cosimo was awed. But he was glad, too, that there was no more talk about the end of their friendship. Amory was incomparable. Never had he honoured her so. It was almost a pity she painted, so magnificent a lecturer was lost in her. Not that just at present she was painting very much. She was doing better than painting. With all the strength of which she was capable she was resolutely not painting. She was laying strong and enduring foundations. There would be time enough for pinnacles by and by.
“And then,” Amory continued, more quietly, but even more stingingly, “in what spirit do they undertake this enormous responsibility? From the highest motive known to Ethics you’d think, wouldn’t you—the sense of Duty to Mankind? Yes, you’d think so. You wouldn’t think they’d regard it as a mere personal gratification, would you? You wouldn’t think they thought they’d accounted for it all when they said they were ‘in love,’ would you? But it is so, Cosimo. That’s exactly their mental development. They are exactly as advanced as the animals. Neither more nor less.... Mind you, I don’t deny what’s called ‘love’ altogether. I suppose it does serve some such purpose as the perfume does to the flower. The perfume attracts insects, and insects do fertilize some flowers. So love has its place. But what I want to know is, is it going to be allowed to supplant plain reason and common sense? I say no. There ought to be a State Mating-season. They can do it about fishing and game; why not about love? Because everything’s in the hands of men, and men think more about fishing and game than they do about these things. Oh, if only a Woman would arise! We should soon see all this altered!”...
“Well, you know I’m heart and soul with you about that, Amory,” Cosimo said, a little uneasily, as if he personally might be included in her arraignment of his sex.
“You!” said Amory, with an intellectually affectionate look of her golden eyes.... “If it weren’t for you, Cosimo, I should despair altogether. Nobody else understands me—nobody. The others—well, take a man like Hamilton Dix, who might be supposed to have higher interests: really, it’s as much as I’ve been able to do sometimes to keep him from pawing me! And once he did kiss my hand.... Cosimo”—she lifted the golden eyes almost bashfully, and then dropped them again—“I said last night that there ought perhaps to be an end of our friendship. Not an end, I mean, because I should always respect you and honour your views. And I still think it might be best. But—I don’t know whether I should have the strength to do it, Cosimo. I ought to, but—I’m only a woman in some things. I know they aren’t the real things, and it’s only because my sex has been downtrodden and we’ve been denied our opportunities; but we do have transmitted fears from those barbarous times when you used to drag us about by the hair. So I don’t know whether I should really have the strength, Cosimo——”
She was even nobler in her confession of weakness than she had been in the strength and rush of her outburst. Again, for no reason that he could have explained, Cosimo felt a brute.... He paw this bright little creature, as the odious Dix had done? He sully a thing so radiant as their relation with—pawing?
Suddenly Cosimo found himself disliking Mr. Hamilton Dix more intensely than he had ever done before.
Amory, for her part—though she did not know whose—rather fancied that she had put a spoke into somebody’s wheel.