“Then I think I know what you mean.... I don’t think we’ll talk about it. There’s really nothing to be said.—So——”
Amory was vaguely puzzled. Of Dorothy’s relation to Sir Benjamin she knew nothing. Dorothy appeared to be waiting for her to go. That would mean back to The Witan. But she had come here expressly to avoid going back to The Witan. Again she spoke foolishly.
“Cosimo’s coming back,” she said.
“My aunt thought he might be,” said Dorothy in an even voice.
“And I was going away—but I’m not now——”
“Oh?”
“May I sit down?”
She did so, with her doubled fists thrust between her knees and her head a little bowed. Then her eyes wandered sideways slowly round the room. Dorothy’s blouse was thrown on the wide bed; from under the bed the baby Bit’s bath peeped; and on the blouse lay Dorothy’s hairbrushes.
Amory was thinking of another bed, a bed she had never seen, with portmanteaus on it, and a patched old waistcoat cast underneath it, and a girl busily packing at it, a girl whose voice she had heard pouting “You might buy me a trousseau—”
Dorothy also had sat down, but only on the edge of her chair. And she thought it would be best to speak a little more plainly.