Oliver Onions

“ Out of the silence of consternation that had fallen on the studio Walter Wyron was the first to come. He nudged Cosimo, as if to warn him not to spoil everything, and then, with his hands deep in the pockets of his knickers and an anticipatory relish on his face, said "I say, old chap—make us a speech, won't you?"
But if Walter thought to take a rise out of Mr. Crabtree he was quite, quite mistaken. With good-natured truculence the collier turned on him also. ”

“ It is all very well for people whose mental range is limited by matinées and Brooklands and the newest car to talk in pleasant and unimpassioned voices, but what was going to happen to Art unless Cosimo hurled himself and the 'Life and Work' against this heretic Van Gogh, and what was to become of England if Walter allowed a pig-headed man who could say nothing but "Blackpool Pier, Blackpool Pier," to shout him down, and what would happen to Civilization if Mr. Wilkinson did not, figuratively speaking, take hold of the dilettante Brimby and shake him as a terrier shakes a rat? ”

“ Surely it ought to be possible to say that the presence of a person affected you pleasantly, or unpleasantly, without sniggering inferences of a liaison in the one case or of a rupture in the other!
Therefore it was once more just a little irritating that Mr. Strong, instead of telling her what type he did admire, should merely laugh and say, "Well—not Mrs. Tasker." If Amory had a criticism at all to make of Mr. Strong it was this habit of his of negatives, that sometimes almost justified the nickname Mr. Brimby had given him, of "Stone Wall Strong." ”

“ Amory would have been far less observant than she was had it not occurred to her, as she left Dorothy's flat that day, that she had been hustled out almost unceremoniously. She hoped—she sincerely hoped—that she did not see the reason. To herself, as to any other person not absolutely case-hardened by prejudice, the thing that presented itself to her mind would not have been a reason at all; but these conventional people were so extraordinary, and in nothing more extraordinary than in their regulations for receiving callers of the opposite sex. ”

“ Strong had cared that that foot, that arm, had been exposed to the gaze of anybody who might have entered the house! He had not said so; he did not say so now; but that was it! More, he had cared so much that it had quite distorted his judgment of Mr. Prang. And all at once Amory remembered something else—a glance Edgar Strong had given her, neither more nor less eloquent than the look he was bending on the casts now, one afternoon when she had lain in the hammock in the garden and Mr. Prang, bending over her, had ventured to examine a locket about her throat.... ”

“ But again they had failed to find Amory, and Dorothy and Katie took a turn round the Heath before returning to the flat for tea. As they walked along the hawthorn hedge that runs towards Parliament Hill and South Hill Park they talked. Kites were flying on the Hill; the Highgate Woods and the white spire showed like a pale pastel in the Spring sunshine; and from the prows of a score of prams growing babies leaned out like the figureheads of ships. ”

“ True, poor Dorothy, without as much as a single spark of talent, had nevertheless buckled to, and, in various devious ways, had contrived to suck a parasitic living out of the wholesome body of real art; none the less, Amory had conceived her friend to be of the number of those who play at hardship and independence with a fully spread table at home for them to return to when they are tired of the game. ”

“ Still, it was wonderful how frequently the Wyrons' 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. ”

“ Such a man not manage Mr. Prang! Why, here he was, ready to bear her off that very night at a word!
Paris—Montmartre—the Quartier!
It was Romance with a vengeance!
Then at a thought she grew paler still. The children! What about Corin and Bonniebell? It didn't matter so much about Cosimo; it would serve him right; but what about the twins? Were they also to be included in the seven francs a day? And wouldn't it matter how they dressed either in the Quarter? Or did Edgar propose that they should be left behind in Cosimo's keeping, with Britomart Belchamber for a stepmother? ”

“ When asked by Dorothy whether she would prefer to be called Mrs. Mossop or Ruth, Mrs. Mossop had chosen the latter name, giving as her reason that it had been like Mr. Mossop's impudence to ask her to accept the other name at all; and very many other memories also, brooded on and gloomily loved, including the four children, had been bits of Mr. Mossop's impudence. Stan had adopted the phrase, finding in it chuckles of his own; and so His Impudence he had become, and Noel and Jackie the fruits thereof. ”

“ The least exercise of her imagination must have told her that to press Britomart Belchamber's hand, for example, was the most innocent of creature-comforts. Why, he had pressed it with Amory herself there; he had said, jokingly, and Amory had heard him, that it was a desirable hand to press, and he had pressed it. And so with Britomart's dancing of "Rufty Tufty." Amory, who, like Cosimo, had had an artist's training, ought to be the last person to deny that any eye so trained did not see a hundred beauties where eyes uneducated saw one only. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ Amory herself, up to then, had not had a larger conception. For while the Wyrons had secretly married simply and solely in order that their offspring should not lie under a stigma, their overt lives had been one impassioned and beautiful protest against any assumption whatever on the part of the world of a right to make rules for the generation that was to follow. No less a gospel than this formed the substance of those Lectures of Walter's; great as the number of the born was, his mission was the protection of a greater number still. ”

“ Pratt to conceive that any human soul could be so benighted as the soul of Lady Tasker was. "Those casts!" Mrs. Pratt might have cried in amazement—or rather Miss Amory Towers might have cried, for there is nothing in the Wedding Service about making over to your husband, along with your love and obedience, the valuable goodwill of a professional name. "Those poor casts!... Of course they may not be very beautiful—," here the original of the casts might have modestly dropped her eyes, "—but such as they are—goodness me! How can people be so prurient, Cosimo? ”

“ The main theme of this romance is the situation created by the marriage—a marriage of love—of a comparatively poor man, proud, chivalrous, and tender, to a wealthy heiress: a girl of refined and generous instincts, but something of a wayward 'spoilt child,' loving to use the power which her fortune gives her to play the Lady Mæcenas to a crowd of impecunious flatterers, fortune hunters, and unrecognized geniuses. ”

“ And so, in spite of that curious warm tingle, Amory was not one atom more free, nor one atom less free, to develop (did she wish it) a relationship with anybody else—Edgar Strong or anybody—than she had been before. She saw this perfectly clearly. She had talked it all over with Cosimo scores of times. ”

“ Until the law should allow a man to have more wives than one (if then) , of course only one woman in the world could be perfectly happy—the woman who had Stan. That conviction came first, and last, and ran throughout her meditation. And of what Dorothy might compassionately have called secondary happinesses she had hitherto not thought very much. She had merely thanked her stars that she had not married a man like Cosimo, had once or twice rather resented Amory's well-meant but left-handed kindnesses, and that had been the extent of her concern about the Pratt household. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Brimby will open the proceedings. He will say the things above-mentioned, and presently, with emotion and his sense of the world's sorrow gaining on him, will come to the case of their dear friend Amory Pratt. Here, he will say, is a young woman, one of themselves, who does not know what is the matter with her—who does not know what has become of her joy—who cannot understand (if Mr. Brimby may be allowed to express himself a little poetically) why the bloom of her life has turned to an early rime. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Instinctively Amory had covered her face with her hands. It was fearfully sweet and dangerous. Flattery could hardly have gone further than that tortured cry, "What do you think I'm made of?" Her heart was thumping—thump, thump, thump, thump. A lesser woman would have taken refuge in evasions, but not she—not she, with Cosimo carrying on with Britomart, and Dorothy Tasker no doubt whispering to her Otis or Wilbur or whatever [Pg 116] her American's name might be, and Stan perhaps deep in an intrigue with his Spanish female at that very moment. ”

“ Cosimo could only pipe—one little note, high and thin as that of a piccolo. Amory continued.
"I'm not asking a single question about it. I'm not even curious. I didn't become your property when we married, and you're not mine. Our souls are our own, both of us. I think we were very wise to foresee it quite at the beginning.—And don't think I'm jealous. Perfectly truly, I wish you every happiness. Britomart's a very pretty girl, and nobody can say she's always making a display of her cleverness, like some of them. I respect your privacy, and want you to do the best you can with your life." ”

“ 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. ”