“Wouldn’t ... why, anybody who’d say that must be mad!”
Amory straightened her back and nodded. “Thank you. That’s all I wanted to know,” she said. “I was a little afraid to trust my own judgment, that’s all. Thank you.”
But apparently it was not all that Cosimo wanted to know. Of course such a subject was always interesting quite apart from its personal application; many times he and Amory had discussed that kind of thing in the abstract by the half-day together; but now that was not all. His face was quite grimly set. Slowly he drew up a chair to where Amory sat, bolt upright and robed in her consciousness of rectitude, on the sofa.
“This,” he said slowly, “is interesting. May I hear a little more about it, please?”
Amory had more than half expected him to take that attitude. Since Cosimo had had his hair cut he was still to be counted as “one of them,” one of the enlightened ones; but, like Samson, he had lost perhaps a little of his strength in the process of shearing. He still saw the light, but sometimes it dazzled him a little—that was another reason why he needed an unflinching pair of eyes always by his side. Now his grimness was almost the ordinary conventional thing. The male behaved like that in most novels and in all theatres. Taken properly in hand, Cosimo would not be very difficult to manage.
“Need we go into it?” said Amory quietly. There was withering disdain of her traducers in the single glance she shot at him.
“I think we’ve got to,” Cosimo replied, with the same slightly histrionic quietness. “I really think we’d better, don’t you know.”
“As regards myself, I don’t consider it worth it,” Amory replied proudly.
“I know you don’t,” the still strong man pursued doggedly. “That’s because you’re so high-minded and scornful and wonderful. You’re so high above it all that really it’s difficult for you to understand. But I think I’ll make this my business, if you don’t mind. Please tell me.”
“Don’t you think that by touching pitch you’d only be defiling yourself?”