For a whole week Cosimo had been past telling helpful and enthusiastic. He had not gone out when Amory had called on him that morning; he had been still in bed; but, hearing her knock and knowing her step, he had called, “That you, Amory? Oh, do come in!” So Amory had sat on the edge of Cosimo’s bed, and Cosimo had bounded upward into a sitting posture as Amory had told him her great news. “No, by Jove, really, though!” he had shouted joyously. “You’ve got the money? I say, Amory, that’s perfectly glorious! Tell me quickly what you’re going to do!”
And they had taken a header into plans, both talking at once.
Cosimo had done the whole of the shopping; Amory had merely stood by and nodded and admired. “Leave it all to me,” he had said repeatedly; “you have your own special work that nobody but you can do: I can just about manage this.... Now, have you a bed? And a bath? And what about somewhere for your clothes? Tell me everything you’ve got, and then we shall know where we are.”
So Cosimo had chosen Amory’s narrow bed for her, going down into the basement for a slightly out-of-date pattern, much cheaper and probably better made; and since Amory must have a bath, Cosimo had advised her to get one of those oval ones with a lid that served as a travelling trunk as well; they were a little dearer, but much cheaper than buying the bath and the trunk separately. Then he had known where a second-hand chest of drawers was going for next to nothing, also a bowl and basin. And, cleverest of all, he had given orders that these things were to be sent, not at once, but on dates when, he calculated, the place would be just ready for their reception. Amory had ticked off these purchases on a slip of paper, as also she had those of turpentine and paraffin, boiled oil and soap and firewood and tins of distemper. She had read aloud from the list: “Soap, scrubbing-brushes, blacklead, condensed milk——” and Cosimo, laying his hand on each article as she named it, had replied with “Right—right——” It had been great fun.
It was lucky, too, that Jellies was out of work; that gave them somebody to help when Mrs. ’Ill was at the Creek (“or buying winkles for the hens,” Amory laughed). And the pair of them were almost as funny as a pantomime about Amory and Cosimo. They waited quite half a minute between knocking at the door and entering the room where the friends were, and if one of them went out again both of them did. It caused Amory the greatest amusement; they were as funny as Dorothy, when she had run in that afternoon thinking Amory wanted to tell her, not about Croziers’ and the pictures, but about—Cosimo! Really, these one-ideaed people were killing! It never occurred to them that it was just possible that their narrow, illiberal views were not shared by everybody! There was her aunt, for example: Aunt Jerry was the most comical, mid-Victorian survival imaginable. She had stated flatly, not two nights ago, that if she wasn’t married in a church, by two clergymen, with a bouquet and bells and “The Voice that Breathed o’er Eden,” she should not consider herself married at all! Bouquets and bells, at this time of day!... Amory (she thanked goodness) intended never to marry. Hers and Cosimo’s was a much more rational relation. They had argued it out anthropologically from Primitive Culture and The Golden Bough.
The plumber under the sink had a gas-jet and a soldering-iron, and he was raising a smell of warm lead and flux. He, too, seemed to have jumped to the same ludicrous conclusion as Mrs. ’Ill and Jellies. There was an intelligence about his back view, as if that aspect of him said, “I see—I’m minding my business—nearly finished—three’s none—’nuff said.” And when, as Cosimo swept, Amory approached the plumber and asked him whether the smell of cabbage-water would now cease, he turned round almost with a start.
“Beg pardon, Miss?... Oh, that! Don’t you worry your ’ead about that. A S-pipe’ll do it if anything will, and I’ll explain it to the master afore I go.”
The master!... Amory and Cosimo had to go out on to the landing in order to laugh. Otherwise they would have stifled.