“I’m afraid not,” Amory replied, drawing on her new gloves. “Cosimo and I have to go and see Europa at the New Greek Society; it’s the first performance in England.”
“The theatre—on Sunday!” Aunt Jerry exclaimed softly.
And Amory and Cosimo left. If they had stayed there would have been nothing to beat Aunt Jerry’s consternation at the idea of going to a theatre on Sunday.
Hitherto it had not struck Amory that the Manumission League, in paying her two hundred pounds for “Barrage,” had paid a very good price indeed for a canvas by an artist who, save for a few columns about her by Mr. Hamilton Dix (who was not to a column or so about anybody on whom Croziers’ wandering eyes might rest), was unknown. Nor had it occurred to her that the League might want to see its money back again. Dorothy Lennard might entertain such suspicions, but then Dorothy was of a suspicious nature, always thinking somebody might be getting the better of her, and naturally crediting other people with intentions no better than her own. “I don’t like sales outright,” Dorothy had said.... And Amory, too, began to wonder whether righteousness also may not have its mammon when she first heard, at the Lettuce Grill, of the purpose to which it was intended to put her picture. It was only a rumour; indeed, Amory had it from a source no more official than Walter Wyron and Laura Beamish; but Walter’s father was the mainstay of the New Greek Society, and things that he said had a way of being authentic, and Amory began to wonder whether she ought not to have had a royalty, or a percentage, or whatever Dorothy had called it after all. The rumour was to the effect that, merely as a means of sowing the good seed, “Barrage” was to be exhibited, not in an ordinary gallery with a hundred other pictures, but by itself, with drapery round it, set back in a sort of proscenium, with lights at the top and bottom, and a muffled harmonium playing sacred music in the next room, and a faint odour of Ruban de Bruges burning, and other appurtenances of reverence and solemnity. That converts might be made, the whole of the League’s resources were to be concentrated on the enterprise, and the admission was to be a shilling. If the picture drew neophytes and shillings enough in London it was to be taken to the Provinces.
There are twenty shillings in a pound, and in two hundred pounds four thousand shillings. When four thousand shillings had been taken, “Barrage,” omitting other expenses, would have paid for itself.
Now the League had many times four thousand members in London alone....
A royalty of, say, a penny in the shilling would have worked out at more than four pounds per thousand....
The League was going to do the thing very thoroughly, and a special “Barrage” Committee was to be formed....
Two hundred pounds was well enough as far as it went, but there was going to be increment beyond that, earned really by Amory....
She felt a sharp stab of regret that she had let “Barrage” go for so little.