Even at that Cosimo caught eagerly. “When? To-morrow?”
“No, not to-morrow; I shall be packing. Nor the day after; I shall be busy with the ‘Barrage’ Committee. I’ll write to you, Cosimo.”
“Write!”
“Do you get many letters such as I should write to you?” she asked gently. “I’ll write, Cosimo; perhaps you may see me once or twice more.”
“Oh,” Cosimo groaned, “however shall I get through the time!”
The years they had spent together now seemed as nothing compared with these last eternal days before the new order, whatever it was to be, should begin.
III
EPITHALAMIUM
It is not impossible, though it is in the last degree unlikely, that you may have lived in England in those days of Amory Towers’ rise to fame without having heard of the furore created by “Barrage,” and of its triumphant tour through the country, drawing shillings wherever it went; but you certainly did not live in London that spring without having another and not dissimilar event hammered home on you morning, noon, and night—the astounding series of social functions with which Hallowells’ immortalized its Inauguration. “Not dissimilar,” one says, and that is the truth, if not the very obvious truth. For both successes were due to the same cause—high, victorious advertisement. It made no difference that the two glories were different glories—that Mr. Miller knew the dignity due to millinery, and the “Barrage” Committee, ably assisted by Mr. Hamilton Dix, had the secret of making art boom. And perhaps the hidden causes that slowly make history decreed that both successes should come to pass at pretty much the same time. You put pressure upon an object, but that object also puts pressure upon you. Mr. Miller recognized the need of commerce for ideals, and the leaders of the Manumission League recognized the need ideals had of business organization. The one would elevate business into a Faith, the others make their Faith into an effective and shilling-producing business. It is a Law. It was also one of the Laws that Amory did not see.
For Amory forgot the slight and constant bitterness of having sold “Barrage” outright in the renown that was now hers. Virtually, by an omission so ludicrously accidental that even Dorothy Lennard had noticed it (so, in these miserable mercenary matters, has the small mind the advantage over the great one), she was pouring streams of gold into the League’s war-chest. She solaced herself with that thought—but she intended to see that matters were placed on a very different footing next time. She did not know that there could be no next time. She did not know that though her signature might now be clamoured for by the advertisers of Brain Foods and Hair Washes, Dentifrices and the makers of Portia Caps, the public does not rise to the same fly twice. There was to be no successor to “Barrage.” She might paint—she did paint—all those other fiery-cross canvases, the White Slave canvas, the Tuberculosis canvas, the State Motherhood canvas, and the rest, but she remained Miss Amory Towers, the painter of the famous feminist picture, “Barrage.” And presently there grew up a cult of her finer but unrecognized masterpieces. Cosimo began it later, when he set about the writing of the Life and Work of Amory Towers. It became a test of your knowledge and discrimination. Your lip, if you were really one of the elect, curled a little at the mention of “Barrage”; not (you were expected, if you were a superior person, to say) that “Barrage” was not all very well in its way; popular and so forth; but—did your hearer know the “Tuberculosis” canvas? That was the true Towers. So it was in this pluperfect esteem that Amory by and by came to bask, with Cosimo as her showman.