“Oh!” said Dorothy deferentially. She herself had once collapsed during a spring rush, but that had been a quite inferior collapsing, from too long hours simply, not from any emotional strain. But Amory misinterpreted her mild and respectful “Oh!” She spoke rather sweetly.
“Of course I must live, and nobody can say I don’t live frugally. But that apart, I don’t do this for money at all. I do it because of my beliefs.”
“Oh!” said Dorothy again, this time very much as some gallant monarch might have protested that he never meddled with the beliefs of ladies.
“I know,” Amory continued firmly, “that there are some things we don’t agree on, and of course I think I’m right and you’re wrong, or I shouldn’t believe what I do. But I do think that that picture in there,” she made a little vague pointing movement, “preaches—well, a perfectly damnable lesson—from the feminist point of view perfectly damnable.”
“I—I don’t think it’s meant to,” Dorothy ventured to say. “I don’t so much mind it really—not that it pretends to be very much—but parts of it are quite like something, and I think painting has to be like things when all’s said and done—I mean—certain sorts of painting——”
It was rather a tickling experience for Amory to be schooled by a fashion-artist on “sorts of painting,” and she wished Cosimo had been there to hear. And on these lines she knew that she could play with Dorothy as a cat plays with a mouse. So she was beginning, “Oh, why must painting necessarily be ‘like’ things, as you say? Is it a Law? Do tell me!” when suddenly Dorothy took her back altogether. For all the world as if both of them had been talking about one thing and thinking of another all the time, Dorothy boiled up.
“Oh, Amory, you do make me so cross!” she cried. “Really, to hear you sometimes, nobody would think an awfully pretty girl was talking! Who cares a button about your opinions, with looks like yours? I could understand it if you were plain! I do wish you could manage to be a bit more like a human being; why don’t you put on some clothes like other people’s, instead of always dressing as if you were going to have a baby? Can’t you take an interest in things, instead of always moping the way you do? Why, you might be a superfluous woman yourself!”
For one moment Amory fairly lost her composure, but only for one moment. The next moment she had seen what was the matter. By “taking an interest in things” Dorothy meant forsaking her principles; by “putting on clothes like other people’s,” she meant abandoning her velvets and corduroys that took the light in such lovely broken bits of accidental colour, and dressing like one of her own impossible fashion-plates; and by being “a bit more like a human being,” she meant sitting with a young man on a box and kissing him with a mouth full of sandwich. It was almost too funny to laugh at. If Dorothy would only ask her outright what she evidently had in her mind to ask her—why she didn’t marry Cosimo—it would be perfect. Poor old Dot! She had been fairly caught only a few minutes before, and naturally would still feel rather sore. Amory waited for her to go on.
She did go on. “I’ve wanted to say this for a long time,” she said. “Look here, Amory, why don’t you marry Cosimo and have done with it? You’re lovely—he’s quite good-looking—you seem to understand one another all right—I’m sure you ought to by this time—and it would be ever so much more sensible! It seems to me you could drag on like this for ever!”