“It’s awfully good of you—but you know I simply shouldn’t know how to begin,” she said. “I think perhaps I’d better stick to my own job.”
“Not if I gave you tips?” said Dorothy, almost wistfully.
“I’m afraid not.”
Dorothy openly admired her. The two girls had been at the McGrath together, and Dorothy’s admiration was the homage that artistic vice (fashion-drawing) paid to artistic virtue (street-markets and an impending one-man-show).
“I say, Amory, you are plucky!” she exclaimed.
Amory knew that she was not plucky in the least, but it did not displease her to let it go at that. She murmured something about “Absurd!” and Dorothy, with a wave, was off. Amory heard her step in the entry below; then the sound died away on Cheyne Walk.
Left alone, Amory set on the kettle again for washing-up; then, until it should boil, she looked anew round the room in which, for all she could see to the contrary, she would soon be living. And tea had now put her into a rather better humour. After all, it might not be so bad. Not that it was not all very fine for Dorothy to talk; anybody could talk lightly about living over greengrocers’ shops who had people who rode in cars with tea-baskets and bridge-tables inside them and lived in houses with eight-foot baths and electric lights in the wardrobes so that they could see which frocks they were taking down; nevertheless, it might not be so bad. Cosimo Pratt would help her. Cosimo was so good at arranging things. If anybody could make this single dingy room with the lovely view comfortable, Cosimo could. And Cosimo, unlike Dorothy, really did understand her painting....
She did not pick up The Golden Bough again; instead, she stood in front of a photograph of the Gioconda that was pinned to the plaster wall. It was one of a row—a Rembrandt, a Corot, the Infante, and others—which she had bought in Paris four years before. She had Pater’s description of the Gioconda by heart, as also she had that of Richard Jeffries of the Accroupie underneath it; and she was murmuring the passage, when, with a great burst of steam, the kettle boiled over. She set about her washing-up.
It was a task she loathed. All domestic work she loathed. In pouring the boiling water on to the cups and saucers, with the kettle held out at arm’s length so that she should not splash herself, she got hold of the hot part of the handle; and when she had run cold water on to the utensils she dipped her fingers into a scalding cup in a corner of the tin that had not been cooled. The butter on the plates was horrid, and instead of the proper drying-cloth she got hold of a painting-rag, with turps on it. A knife-handle came off in the boiling water, and, incautiously drawing too near the sink, she splashed the brown velvet skirt after all.
It was as she was washing her greasy hands afterwards that she became conscious of a vague and familiar odour. From what part of the house it came she did not know—perhaps from the greengrocer’s downstairs, perhaps from the rooms overhead. It came up the pipe, and it was the smell of water in which cabbage had been boiled.