“The matter? How the matter?” she said. “I’m dying for some tea. Have you got some? I’ve been to see Dorothy, but I suppose it was a bit early for tea when I left.”
Cosimo had tea; he made it for himself in his room. As he lighted his spirit-lamp and filled the little kettle from the jug in the next room Amory listlessly tossed over the magazines on his little round table; but there was nothing new in them. She had grown suddenly dejected. There seemed to be nothing new in the world. She was as tired of Cosimo’s little furnished sitting-room as she was of his studio in the King’s Road or of her own studio in Cheyne Walk. She was tired of her work; she was tired of her friends—especially when they spread gross reports about her; for the moment she was even tired of “Barrage” and the League. And she was not sure that she was not tired of herself. Although Cosimo was back in town, she was plunged again into the mood in which she had wandered the streets during his absence, looking into eyes strange and various as the pebbles on a shore and thinking that the solitude would have been less frightening had she known as much as the names of their enigmatical possessors. She wanted a change; “Barrage” had taken more out of her even than she had supposed; she was petulant with herself. She was also exceedingly sorry for anybody of brilliant gifts on whom the world presses so harshly as to make that person petulant with herself. Self-contempt is ever the artist’s blackest despair.
“Well,” said Cosimo cheerfully, taking cakes from a square biscuit-tin which he had produced from a cupboard, “and what had Dorothy to say for herself?”
Amory did not hesitate. Though Dorothy could not keep her tongue from repeating a slander and then running away from it by refusing the slanderer’s name, Amory respected herself a little too much to give Dorothy or anybody whomsoever away. So she lay back on one of Cosimo’s sofa-cushions and put her cheek on the sofa-end.
“Oh, quite a lot,” she answered dully. “She seemed to be enjoying herself. She asked after you.”
“Really, awfully kind of her. She’s still at the Juperies, of course?”
“Oh yes, still there.”
“I say, you look fagged out. But tea won’t be a minute. No, don’t get up to help; all’s ready when the water boils.... Nothing wrong, is there?” he asked, as Amory sank wearily back on the cushion again.
“Oh, give me some tea first.”
“Then there is?” said Cosimo quickly, catching at the last word. “Not about ‘Barrage,’ I hope? They haven’t cried off, have they?”