"Oh?"
"May I sit down?"
She did so, with her doubled fists thrust between her knees and her head a little bowed. Then her eyes wandered sideways slowly round the room. Dorothy's blouse was thrown on the wide bed; from under the bed the baby Bit's bath peeped; and on the blouse lay Dorothy's hairbrushes.
Amory was thinking of another bed, a bed she had never seen, with portmanteaus on it, and a patched old waistcoat cast underneath it, and a girl busily packing at it, a girl whose voice she had heard pouting "You might buy me a trousseau—"
Dorothy also had sat down, but only on the edge of her chair. And she thought it would be best to speak a little more plainly.
"If you'll come to-morrow I shall know better what to say to you," she said. "You see, you've taken me by surprise. I didn't think you'd come, and I don't know now what you've come for. It isn't a thing to talk about, certainly not to-day. I should have liked to-day to myself. But if you feel that you must—will you come in again to-morrow?"
But Amory hardly seemed to hear. Her eyes were noting the appointments of the bedroom again. The time had been when she would at once have denounced the room as overcrowded and unhygienic. A cot, and a bed with two pillows ... in some respects her own plan was to be preferred. But this again was the kind of thing she had come to see, and she admitted that these things were more or less governed by what people could afford. From the kicked and scratched condition of the front of the chest of drawers she imagined that Dorothy's children must romp all over the flat. A parti-coloured ball lay under the cot where the baby slept. There was a rubber bath-doll near it. The two older boys would be sleeping in the next room.
She spoke again.—"I was going away," she said, dully, "with somebody."
Once more Dorothy merely said "Oh?"
Then it occurred to Amory that perhaps Dorothy did not quite understand.