"He's out," said Amory, passing to the bell.
She sat down on the corner of the sofa, and watched the maid bring in tea. Mr. Strong, who had placed himself on the footstool and was making soughing noises by expelling the air from his locked hands, appeared to be brooding over his forthcoming number. But that quick little tingle of half an hour before had had a curious after-affect on Amory. How it had come about she did not know, but the fact remained that she was not, now, so very sure that even the "Novum" was quite as great a thing as she had supposed it to be. Or rather, if the "Novum" itself was no less great, she had, quite newly, if dimly, foreseen herself in a more majestic rôle than that of a mere technical directrice.
Politics? Yes, it undoubtedly was the Great Game. Strong men fancied themselves somewhat at it, and conceited themselves, after the fashion of men, that it was they who wrought this marvel or that. But was it? Had there not been women so much stronger than they that, doing apparently nothing, their nothings had been more potent than all the rest? She began to give her fancy play. For example, there was that about a face launching a thousand ships. That was an old story, of course; if a face could launch a thousand ships so many centuries ago, there was practically no limit to its powers with the British Navy at its present magnificent pitch of numerical efficiency. But that by the way. It was the idea that had seized Amory. Say a face—Helen's, she thought it was—had launched a thousand, or even five hundred ships; where was the point? Why, surely that that old Greek Lord High Admiral, whoever he was—(Amory must look him up; chapter and verse would be so very silencing if she ever had occasion to put all this into words)—surely he had thought, as all men thought, that he was obeying no behest but his own. The chances were that he had hardly wasted a thought on Helen's face as a factor in the launching....
Yet Helen's face had been the real launching force, or rather the brain behind Helen's face ... but Amory admitted that she was not quite sure of her ground there. Perhaps she was mixing Helen up with somebody else. At any rate, if she was wrong about Helen she was not wrong about Catherine of Russia. Nor about Cleopatra. Nor about the Pompadour. These had all had brains, far superior to the brains of their men, which they had used through the medium of their beauty. She knew this because she had been reading about them quite recently, and could put her finger on the very page; she had a wonderful memory for the places in books in which passages occurred.... So there were Catherine the Second, and Cleopatra, and the Pompadour, even if she had been wrong about Helen. That was a curious omission of Homer's, by the way—or was it Virgil?—the omission of all reference to the brain behind. Perhaps it had seemed so obvious that he took it for granted. But barring that, the notion of a face launching the ships was very fine. It was the Romantic Point of View. Hitherto Amory had passed over the Romantic Point of View rather lightly, but now she rather thought there was a good deal in it. At any rate that about the face of a woman being the real launching-force of a whole lot of ships—well, it was an exaggeration, of course, and in a sense only a poetic way of putting it—but it was quite a ripping idea.
So if a ship could be launched, apparently, not by a mere material knocking away of the thingummy, but by the timeless beauty of a face, an Indian policy ought not to present more difficulties. At all events it was worth trying. Perhaps "trying" was not exactly the word. These things happened or they didn't happen. But anybody not entirely stupid would know what Amory meant.
The maid lighted the little lamp under the water-vessel that kept the muffins hot and then withdrew. Amory turned languidly to Mr. Strong.
"Would you mind pouring out the tea? I'm so lazy," she said.
She had put her feet up on the sofa, and her hands were clasped behind her head. The attitude allowed the wide-sleeved tea-gown into which she had changed to fall away from her upper arm, showing her satiny triceps. The studio was warm; it might be well to open the window a little; and Amory, from her sofa, gave the order. It seemed to her that she had not given orders enough from sofas. She had been doing too much of the work herself instead of lying at her ease and stilly willing it to be done. She knew better now. It was much better to take a leaf out of the book of les grandes maitresses. She recognized that she ought to have done that long ago.
So Mr. Strong brought her tea, and then returned to his footstool again, where he ate enormous mouthfuls of muffin, spreading anchovy-paste over them, and drank great gulps of tea. He fairly made a meal of it. But Amory ate little, and allowed her tea to get cold. The cast which Stan had coarsely called "the fore-quarter" had been hung up on the wall at the sofa's end, and her eyes were musingly upon it. The trotter lay out of sight behind her.
"Well, about that thing of Prang's," said Mr. Strong when he could eat no more. "Hadn't we better be settling about it?"