Amory was sitting on a painted three-legged stool under a standard lamp, listlessly turning over the pages of a magazine. She hated this place and these people, and only ironically had she asked Dorothy that afternoon whether she would not like to come to this party. And she almost hated her aunt, who was probably still sitting in the little bead-curtained recess on the landing where the cloudy aquarium stood. It seemed to her that if Aunt Jerry must get engaged at thirty-eight, she might at least have done so without giving occasion for this kind of vulgar and familiar comment. But she supposed that that was what the “Young Musical Society” of Miss Addams’s advertisement really meant: gouty flirtations, ping-pong in middle age, having your toes trodden on during scratch dances by stout and breathless partners, and Progressive Whist with twenty-five-years-old stories told between the deals. Amory’s pretty mouth curled: she saw it all with merciless clearness. Glenerne seemed to her to be half ancients trying to be young, and half young people quickly getting old before their time. Oh, that terrible and affable Mr. Edmondson—that awful Mr. Geake—that impossible bank clerk, whatever his name was! And the place itself! These Nottingham lace curtains, with the dreary joke of the artificial spiders crawling upon them, and the macramé-hung mantelpieces, and the Japanese joy-bells tinkling on the chandelier, when, with plain brown or green paper, and a stencilled frieze in two colours, and a Japanese print or two put just in the right places, and a few chosen books here and there, even Glenerne might have been made quite passable!... She was glad she was going to Cheyne Walk. She would at least be among her own people and her own surroundings there!
She wished herself in Cheyne Walk at that moment when Mr. Edmondson walked up to her where she sat. It never seemed to occur to Mr. Edmondson that his company might not be at all times desirable, and she almost shrank from him as she found her great fir-cone of red-gold hair only an inch or two from his green knitted waistcoat. At a greater distance, she sometimes glanced at this waistcoat with interest, as if, in this place where the old became young again at the expense of their juniors, she expected Mr. Edmondson to become visibly stouter from day to day. Mr. Edmondson spoke now with idiotic cheerfulness.
“Looking at pictures, eh?” he said parentally. “Don’t you get a bit fed-up with ’em after a whole day of it?”
“No,” said Amory.
“Don’t you, really! Well, I must say illusterated papers have made great strides this last few years. Who’d ha’ thought of a Daily Spec a few years ago? And we think nothing about it now. I see ’em out o’ my little window once the morning rush slacks off a bit—the bookstall’s just opposight—they chuck their ha’pennies down one after another—‘Spec!’ they say—never think twice about it.”
“Oh?” said Amory. Mr. Edmondson might have been the historian of modern journalism, looking back. He continued.
“’Uge circulation it must have; why, I’ve known ’em get through as many as thirty-eight quires in a single morning at our place alone; somebody must make some money out of it! I forget what their divvy is.—But I wonder you don’t get fed-up with pictures for all that. It’ll be like me dealing out tickets instead of cards for whist.”
“Almost the same,” said Amory.
Mr. Edmondson looked at her for a moment suspiciously, as if he thought she was getting at him. Not very long before, Mr. Edmondson would have resented being got at by girls, especially in his green waistcoat; but he had grown soberer and more tolerant since then. He went avuncularly on.