Gray youth

there. Had Amory herself wanted a post as an apprentice to fashion-drawing, she would have had to fill her folio with "specimens," to sit with half a dozen other applicants in a waiting-room

ipled ways with men. Almost any one woman (Dorothy was in the habit of reasoning modestly) could turn any one man round her finger if she went the right way about it; and it seemed to her that the men knew that too. If they didn't, why were they always t

es growling overhead, but at supper at an hotel. These things make all the difference to the consideration in which you are held.... She had hardly had to ask for her job. Machinating men, with their stories and drinks and cigars, can do a good deal, but Dorothy knew how to make of her guileless blue eyes a spiritualizing of mere drinks and stories and cigars. She had, too, ideas the very na?veté of which was likely to strike a man immersed in mere dull business routine. Meeting the printers

atalogue-business had

d of Hallowell & Smith's it is not Hallowell & Smith's fault. A mutually profitable "dicker" that had something to do with Hallowell & Smith's minor printing made the place cheap; and, though the firm's Summer and Winter Catalogues were still drawn and printed elsewhere, nothing (it had seemed to Dorothy) would be lost by allowing Hallowell & Smith's to discover presently that they had facilities for this kind of work actually on the spot.... This was the kind of hint she had dropp

e and dust, and the running day and night of a crane the top of which lost itself in the blue air, was worse. These activities shook the whole fabric of the place, playing the very deuce with Torchon and Valenciennes. But in every other

with the seeds, for they were yet to grow and ripen marvellously. Fat Miss Benson took them in hand first. With a foot-rule by her side for checking, lest there should be too much even of a good thing, she roughed in those elongated and fish-like figures which, if you would see them in normal proportion, you must squint at aslant up the tilted page. Then Miss Hurst or blonde Miss Umpleby took over the drawing, further developing the Tea-gown or the Walking Costume, or the lady in her corsets riding in a motor car, or whatever it might

an inch lower over one eyebrow than during the season before. She received the travellers, and taught her girls, if they must talk to one another as they worked, to do so without removing their eyes from their sheets of Bristol-board. Quite animated conversation

y, for example, was as old as Dorothy, but Miss Smedley, for no reason that could be described, always seemed to move in an atmosphere of kindlily-bestowed pity; but nobody would have dreamed of pitying Dorothy. It was very much the other way. As if they

ckle of odd jobs would be coming in. Even the rule about not moving your head as you talked had been relaxed, and only one cloud marred the general sense of release-the certainty that some of the girls would be "given a holiday" until the next rush began in the Autumn. The girls were discussing this that afternoon. Miss Porchester had gone to

nd clasped hands rested against the coats and jackets on the wall. "They always want somebody to run a

bows on the table; she

e Specialist! Why, if I was to be set to do Damask, or Mourning, or Boots, like Benny, I should no more know where to b

ached air of one who reminds her hearers of a well-known fact in mortality stati

e," another girl commented. (To be on the staff of a newspaper,

r the Daily Spec, like the one you beg

the time, and another doing nothing but heads, and another the curly-cues! There i

uicker!" somebody else joined in. "'Holid

te Carlo for me, I think," she said. "Then I shall be able to put in those

of her apple. "You needn't growl

source of trouble up now." She brought the chair down on to its fore-legs again. "Tell m

on in which the words "Carlton ... or the Savoy if you like ... Menton

ometimes wondered whether she herself ought not to have sponged on her relations rather than keep one of these needy girls out of a place.... But she was a practical young woman, with more plans than theories, and eyes that did not carry over many of the dreams of the night into the working days; and beyond a certain point she refused to shoulder the responsibilities of a world she had had no hand in making. Up to that point-well, if (say, by and by) she were ever to "run" a studio of this kind, she would see that the work was not so sub-divided that her girls had no chance in the open market. And she would offer now an

the telephone. Her last words had been, "Mean old thing!... Well, will you treat me

te family, tell Porchester. They cam

along the narrow alley to the side st

hat and with a grey flannel turned-down collar about his shapely throat, Walter Wyron in his snuff-coloured corduroys, Laura Beamish, Katie Deedes, and two or three other girls in clothes that (it seemed to Dorothy) looked as if a touch of opaque Chinese-white had somehow found its way into clear greens and ru

orothy off to a

only published one of them every three or four months, and lived on his hundred and fifty a year the rest of the time. And handsome Cosimo Pratt had never published a drawing nor exhibited a painting in his life. Of course, even their failures were as much higher than Dorothy's successes as the heavens are higher than t

ly by asking, in altered tones, questions about Amory and what she was doing. When (they wanted to know) was that show of hers going to be? Why didn't she

ed. "Why not all come round to-night? Cosimo, you'

ken out in his glad, rich vo

ter Wyron had

your guitar, coul

t heard Walter's

We'll

the

rying to Cheyne Walk to

d found Amory in a long pinafore, painting. "You needn't knock off," s

k, or whether her pulse had suddenly bounded at the thought of

with you. Just half a minute; I'll wash m

uite forgot their own dinner; it was Dorothy who stopped at the butcher's for three-quarters of a pound of steak, and, at the confectioner's remembered the Chelsea buns. At a wine-shop they bought a flask of Chianti, and at a grocer's nuts, biscuits, and a box of dates. Walter and Cosimo could be relied on to provide cigarettes, and oranges and bananas were to b

ut my canvas out of the way-and it won't take me thr

as out on to the landing

she wanted to have with Cosimo on the subject of Eugenics. Cosimo was the kind of man you could talk to sanely and sensibly about these things; he could discuss them with her in the proper inquiring spirit, and without either mock modesty or a thought behind. He despised mock modesty and the thought behind as much

f, she replied with an almost indulgent laugh. Dorothy wouldn't believe (she said) how

some diamonds everybody'd forgotten all about, but some stupid old busybody of a bank-manager must go and turn them up, and Aunt Emmie says grandfather gave them to her, and Aunt Eliza says he gave them to her, and ... well, there you are. The less said about those diamonds the better in a famil

tterfly," and began to cut it

s," she said, as Doroth

pered and salted and prepared to cook the three-quarters of a pound of steak. She turned the dish this way and that, seeking fresh lights to put it in. Amory's work was never done. Often she was busiest when she seemed most idle. She could not say to eye and brain, as Dorothy could say to m

e of all, with the flask of Chianti, another still-life group. Then she disposed the chairs as if by happy accident, and poked the fire. The casement looking over the river

beyond the Pier Hotel, the sound of a baritone voice. It was Wal

" she cried, cla

own the stair