“If you’ll come to-morrow I shall know better what to say to you,” she said. “You see, you’ve taken me by surprise. I didn’t think you’d come, and I don’t know now what you’ve come for. It isn’t a thing to talk about, certainly not to-day. I should have liked to-day to myself. But if you feel that you must—will you come in again to-morrow?”
But Amory hardly seemed to hear. Her eyes were noting the appointments of the bedroom again. The time had been when she would at once have denounced the room as overcrowded and unhygienic. A cot, and a bed with two pillows ... in some respects her own plan was to be preferred. But this again was the kind of thing she had come to see, and she admitted that these things were more or less governed by what people could afford. From the kicked and scratched condition of the front of the chest of drawers she imagined that Dorothy’s children must romp all over the flat. A parti-coloured ball lay under the cot where the baby slept. There was a rubber bath-doll near it. The two older boys would be sleeping in the next room.
She spoke again.—“I was going away,” she said, dully, “with somebody.”
Once more Dorothy merely said “Oh?”
Then it occurred to Amory that perhaps Dorothy did not quite understand.
“I mean with—with somebody not my husband.”
She had half expected that Dorothy would be shocked, or at least surprised; but she seemed to take it quite coolly. Dorothy, as a matter of fact, was not surprised in the very least. She too guessed at the futility of looking for a starting-point of things that grow by inevitable and infinitesimal degrees. It was rather sad, but not at all astonishing. On Amory’s own premises, there was simply no reason why she shouldn’t. So again she merely said “Oh?” and added after a moment, “But you’re not?”
“No.”
“How’s that? Has what we’ve heard to-day made you change your mind?”