All that day Amory did nothing but build palaces of fairy gold, laying them low again only to re-erect them more shining than before. Say her pictures sold at the very lowest figure, ten pounds apiece (but twenty or thirty or more would be nearer the mark—Croziers’ didn’t dabble in mere ten-pound prices). Some of them she had painted in a day, but call it two days, or even two pictures a week. Why, there, at the most ridiculously low estimate, was a thousand pounds a year! Fifteen hundred would really be nearer the mark, and that without counting the moral encouragement that would come by mere force of success. Two thousand would hardly be too much; but call it a thousand in order to be perfectly safe. Her two pounds a week would be mere glove-money. She could spend that on handkerchiefs. Not real lace ones, of course; she would have to do better even than a thousand before she could afford real lace ones, with everything else to match; but this, after all, was only a beginning. Ten pounds a canvas? Why, Morton, who did not paint half as well as she did, had got three hundred for that rubbishy “Fête Galante” only the other day—a thing shockingly out of drawing, and the colour—oh dear! “Aha!” (Amory smiled). Let them wait just a bit! She would show them at the McGrath! She would make the saturnine Mr. Jowett sit up presently! And she would help the less fortunate, too, provided they were deserving. She would publish a book of Walter’s drawings for him; they were really quite good—better, at any rate, than a good deal of the stuff that was published. That was what the country had wanted for a long time; not so much patrons who bought pictures, but patrons who knew what they had got when they had bought them. And even if she only painted a few pictures a year, that, when she had made her name....

Of course she laughed at herself from time to time; she knew she was piling it on, but it was delicious for all that. Like a queen she received their full chorus of congratulations at Glenerne that night—a stately little queen, crowned with the barbaric red gold of her hair. She forbore to ask them whether they had thought that artists painted pictures for the mere sake of killing time; she did not want to rub in their booking-clerkships and estate-agencies too much. It was enough that they saw things now as they really were. Young Mr. Edmondson would no more have dared to speak to her of squeezing at the Crystal Palace now than he would have dared to discuss with her the subjects that made her friendship with Cosimo so wonderful; it was, rather, a quite aged and very much subdued Mr. Edmondson who for a full hour talked of Closing Prices to Mr. Rainbow.... And even when, the felicitations over, Mr. Sandys slapped his hands together in a business-like way and said to Mrs. Deschamps, “Well, what about a tune, Mrs. D.?” that too in its way was a tribute. It meant that even of exalted things poor weak human nature can have more than its fill. Amory knew that she had given Glenerne something to talk about for many, many months to come.

Then, on the morrow, setting her cloud-castle building sternly on one side, she riveted her attention to immediate things. She was going to remove to Cheyne Walk immediately; she had announced the fact to Miss Addams. Not only had no opposition been offered; it had been tacitly accepted that Glenerne was no place for one to whom these stupendous things could happen. Amory would seek Cosimo that morning; without Cosimo nothing could be done. Dorothy, she was afraid, would have to make other arrangements at once; she must telephone to Dorothy that day.

Blithely she tripped down the Glenerne steps and sought the Goldhawk Road tram. It was early; it was not likely that Cosimo would have gone out. She might even have time to call at Katie Deedes’s and get The Golden Ass on the way.

When, two days later, there arrived at Glenerne a blue press-cutting envelope containing an article nearly a column long on “The Art of Miss Amory Towers,” by Hamilton Dix—and when, a day or two later still, there followed half a dozen quotations from that same article from the provincial papers—Glenerne was almost glad of Amory’s translation. The honour was too heavy. It was felt on all hands that the crags of Sinai, and not the boarding-houses of Shepherd’s Bush, were the proper habitation for Miss Towers and her renown.

VI
WOMAN’S WHOLE EXISTENCE

There was nobody like Cosimo for beginning at the beginning. “What,” he asked, extending a magnificent arm, bare (and black) to the very shoulder, “is the use of doing the floor when you’re going to fetch all sorts of cobwebs down from the walls and ceiling, and haven’t as much as got the chimney swept? It’s simply doing work twice over. No; let that plumber chap finish the sink-pipe first, then, when the things we’ve bought come, I’ll have the men give them a thorough sweeping in the cart and Mrs. ’Ill or Jellies can wash them with ammonia and water downstairs, so that everything’ll come in perfectly clean. Jellies, did you get lots of old newspapers? All right, I don’t want ’em yet, they’re to cover the floor when I distemper the walls. Put ’em out on the landing there.—Now give me that brush, Mrs. ’Ill——”

He took a long brush from Mrs. ’Ill and began at the corner of the ceiling beyond the fireplace.

Dorothy had taken away her black-and-white desk and her other belongings some days before; now the table, the chairs, Amory’s easel and a whole clutter of other things filled the landing and staircase outside. The plumber worked crouched half under the sink; but the chimney-sweep who had promised to come that morning at eight had not yet put in an appearance. The floor was an inch deep in dust and cobwebs and débris, and Cosimo’s broom fetched down fresh showers moment by moment. He wore an old deer-stalker cap, to keep them out of his tendrilled hair. Amory, too, wore an old dust-bonnet of Mrs. ’Ill’s and her oldest painting pinafore. Cosimo gave her loud warnings to stand out of the way as each fall came down. Mrs. ’Ill and Jellies grimaced and spat the dust out of their mouths as they swept the walls.