Gray youth

the floor when you're going to fetch all sorts of cobwebs down from the walls and ceiling, and haven't as much as got the chimney swept? It's simply doing work twice ov

clean. Jellies, did you get lots of old newspapers? All right, I don't want 'em yet, they're to cover the

Ill and began at the corner of t

ney-sweep who had promised to come that morning at eight had not yet put in an appearance. The floor was an inch deep in dust and cobwebs and débris, and Cosimo's broom fetched down fresh showers moment by moment. He wore an old deer-stalker cap, to keep them out of his

and knowing her step, he had called, "That you, Amory? Oh, do come in!" So Amory had sat on the edge of Cosimo's bed, and Cosimo had bounded upward into a sitting posture as Amory had

header into plans,

d repeatedly; "you have your own special work that nobody but you can do: I can just about manage this.... Now, have you a be

ing the bath and the trunk separately. Then he had known where a second-hand chest of drawers was going for next to nothing, also a bowl and basin. And, cleverest of all, he had given orders that these things were to be sent, not at once, but on dates when, he calculated, the place would be just ready for their reception. Amory had ticked off t

ment; they were as funny as Dorothy, when she had run in that afternoon thinking Amory wanted to tell her, not about Croziers' and the pictures, but about-Cosimo! Really, these one-ideaed people were killing! It never occurred to them that it was just possible that their narrow, illiberal views were not shared by everybody! There was her aunt, for example: Aunt Jerry was the most comical, mid-Victorian survival imaginable. She had sta

lusion as Mrs. 'Ill and Jellies. There was an intelligence about his back view, as if that aspect of him said, "I see-I'm minding my business-nearly finished-three's none

ur 'ead about that. A S-pipe'll do it if anything

go out on to the landing in order to la

rustled down the chimney. Amory and Cosimo, unable to eat in the room itself and too begrimed to lunch at the litt

e girl of whom Amory could really approve. Girl after girl-Katie Deedes, Dickie Lemesurier, and others-Amory had suggested them all at one time and another as more or less eligible partners for her "pal"; but Cosimo had only laughed. He supposed he would marry some time or other, he had said, though why he must (now he came to think of it) he didn't quite know. Indeed, he thought he probably wouldn't, after all. "You see," he explained frankly, "it would have to be somebody so awfully like you, and there isn't anybody else so wonderful."-

ed much but is still excluded from one favour might speak of the rival in whose preference he after all concurs. Amory thought

again what Aunt Jerry proposed to wear at her wedding. He had already been told several times, but he had the power, so rare among men, of visualizi

of the Great Exhibition!" he c

s if she really believed the storks brought them, and implored me not to dream of saying anything of the sort to George! Who to, I should like to know, if not to George? Such absurd false shame!... And this to-day, my dear, if you

d for it really-'prur

y best for her; I tried to explain what a chromosome was; but it was no good. You've never seen Aunt Jerry; I must have you meet h

ively out of the darkness. Cosimo was not much of a painter, b

ese ribbon corsets. And it's just the same with their views on marriage. They make such mysteries about it, and what's the result? Why, in trying to make it impossibly beautiful they miss the real beauty that's there all the time, the beauty of the physical p

icult, with a common brush and an ordinary canvas and a paint-box like anybody else's, to express the true philosophical meaning of the heart of things as Cosimo sometimes set that meanin

e age that has-well, say, wireless telegraphy?' I don't mean that you've got to muddle yourself, of course; that's the other danger: like Scylla and Charybdis; there are always two dangers, underdoing and overdoing; it's a Law. What I mean is that your art must be the thing. See what I mean? Break

arter of an hour over Mrs.

said that she ought to paint a picture, not necessarily to be called "Heredity," but to have something of Galton's meaning and spirit about it. "Express him in a different medium, if you understand me," he said.... Then he finished his walls, and they washed their begrimed hands and faces together over a bucket and went out to t

nquiringly up at Mr. Massey. Except that it contained a name with which she was somehow remotely familiar, it conveyed nothing to her. Not many things in newspapers did convey m

ly bolted, not with the money, but after the money was spent. So he would not advise Amory to build too much on the recovery of the money.... And Amory discovered something new and rather unexpected in her prospective uncle, namely, that while it was "a pleasure to assist" (as he had softly hissed) a young woman who had shown herself as capable as Amory had of assisting herself, he did not think it necessary to keep hold of her hand once she was set on her feet. She had a hundred pounds in actual cash, on account of a sum that might be very large in

ell herself, and then trying not to tell herself, that

nd there had been "sundries." She had had the conception of sundries that they were quite small things, in paper packets and tins, that cost a few pence; it came rather as a shock to her that kettles and frying-pans and cups and saucers and scrubbing-brushes were sundries too. And tablecloths and blankets and sheets and pillow-cases see

again. She had another shrinking as she remembered that, now that all her work had gone to Croziers', she had hardly a canvas or stretcher in the place, and that half her paint-tubes were mere flat metal ribbons with a screw-cap on the

on a whole pound a we

Dix's newest article on her and her work. He was coming to interview her. The market for her twenty-eight canvases was alread

y, she should come into her kingdom, no poor artist, prov

Dorothy had offered to get her a number of these, and had said that it was a chance to be jumped at!... Why, even Cosimo, a man, had laughed and said, "Dear old Dot-she means awfully well, doesn't she?"... And Cosimo had chosen the two frocks Amory actually had bought. One of them was terra-cotta, the other green; both were exquisitely smocked at yoke and hips, and any of the Pre-Raphaelites (Cosimo said) would have gone half wild with delight over the drawing of the myriad intricate folds. He had made a suggestion or two in the shop itself, and when the things had been, delivered at the studio, Cosimo had not rested until he had seen Amory put them on. Amory had looked round the room; the curtain that was t

osimo had very cleverly built up a sort of gang-plank across it to the door. To see Jellies, herself of a yielding figure, crossing this yielding plank, was very funny indeed. The framing in passe-partout of the photographs of old masters went down as sundries; Amory, with Myers on Human Personality tucked under her arm, had spent half the day in setting the photographs each in the one and only pla

.. Look out, you're giving me a finished pair to cut ... and I say, Amory, you want a fresh binding on that skirt-you'll be catching you

y seemed almost to come within the prohibited degrees.... Still, if Amory couldn't marry Cosimo, she could keep, as it were, an eye on him. It would be dreadful if he fell into the hands of some jealous creature or other, worthy neither of him nor of Amory herself. Amory had long thought that it would be rather nice to be "Aunt Amory" to a number of eugenically-selected and rationally-clothed boys and girls, who were not told lies about where they came from, and had moral cour

osimo, why-why you

t-cloth and reached for a needle with

.... What's that? Marry Dorothy?... Why, you don't su

(he seemed to say) was a perfect dear, but not in that way. Nevertheless, Amory, who sat in the light and could see hers

suppose she'd look at me if there wasn't another man in London. Beside

he pretty bluebell-stalk of her n

to last me for some time to come.... Cosimo," she

pull the edge round

imes,' and ever since they've had nothing but advertisements-advertisements for wedding-cakes, dresses, veils, flowers, furniture, houses, and I don't know what not. The most private things-you wouldn't believe! It's as if every tradesman in London was looking

"If we're doing nothing else, we're driving the reactionarie

ink it'

the chromosome. If woman's got one and man hasn't, then she has something he hasn't, and is actually his superior. You've a chromosome and I haven't, and look at us.... Yes, that's why the stick-in-the-muds nowadays all want boys. The female disability's going

d rather have boys

making allowances for accidentals, Dot and J

oo.) But oh, Cosimo, isn't that going

s. We know what Dorothy is, but we don't know what Jellies might not have be

ers cut short (three-quarters of an hour later) the most illumi

inner Cosimo had cooked filled the room with a delightfully homelike smell. Potatoes roasted in their jackets in the ashes, liver-and-bacon keeping warm on the two hot plates inside the fender, a pancake ready for pouring into the pan, cheese, fruit, coffee in a li

potatoes anyway, which is just downstairs, also apples and oranges. And eggs I can always supply, though my experience is as artists puts too much trust in eggs, which hasn't the nourishment of meat when all's said, and not cheaper when you take your 'ealth into consideration, as all of us must, young or old and married or

llies curtsied elabo

great success of yours, to put the slippers I'd been whitewashing inside the fender. Jellies's eyes nearly f

o the coffee-jug and reach

t?... They would get Walter to bring him. And Katie and Dickie, of course, and Phyllis Hardy, and Amory supposed they'd have to ask Dorothy. They could pull the bed from behind its curtain to sit on; and now, thank goodness, there were plates and glasses enough to go round! Amory's eyes rested on them where they stood in overlapping rows on the rack that Cosimo had put up where the little bookshelf had been. They shone brightly, and the cups twinkled on the new brass hooks below them; and there were tea and coffee in the tins, and milk in a jug, and butter in a little dish, and everything looked so spick-and-span that Amory had half a mind to pa

Dix's articles, and Amory's own work; and it was long before Amory yawned sleepily. Then she rose. Return to Glenerne she must. She begged Cosimo, who had had a hard day, to let her go alone; but Cosimo would not hear of it. Then, as Cosimo