"No. I'm sure of that. I knew her so well." Dorothy was quite confident on that point, and Katie agreed. Lady Tasker's questions continued.
And then, suddenly, into this apparently aimless catechism the word "doctor" came. Dorothy gave a start.
"Aunt Grace!... Do you mean Amory's ill?" she cried.
Lady Tasker did not look up from her crochet.—"Ill?" she said. "I've no reason to suppose so. I didn't say she was ill. There's no illness about it.... By the way, I don't think I've asked how Stan is."
But for the curiously persistent questions, Dorothy might have seized the opportunity to hint that Stan was made for something more nationally useful than getting himself black and blue by stopping runaway horses for the film or running the risk of double pneumonia by being fished out of the sea on a January day—which was the form his bread-winning was taking on that particular week-end. But the Ludlow design was for the moment forgotten. She would have liked to ask her aunt straight out what she really meant, but feared to be rude. So she turned to the album again, and again Katie, turning from turban to staff-cap and from staff-cap to pith helmet, urged that those were the people who really knew what they were talking about—surely Dorothy saw that!——
Then, in the middle of Dorothy's bewilderment, once more the questions.... About that painting of her friend's, Lady Tasker wanted to know: did Mrs. Pratt get any real satisfaction out of it?—Any emotional satisfaction?—Was she entirely wrapped up in it?—Or was it just a sort of hitting at the air?—Did it exhaust her to no purpose, or was it really worth something when it was done?——
"If Dorothy doesn't know, surely you do, Katie."
Katie coloured a little.—"I liked 'Barrage' awfully at the time," she confessed, "but—," and she cheered up again, "—I hate it now."
"But did her work—what's the expression?—fill her life?"
Here Dorothy answered for Katie.—"I think she rather liked the fame part of it," she said slowly.