Then, at nearly midday, the sweep arrived, and to the smells of dust and hot lead was added that of the soot that rustled down the chimney. Amory and Cosimo, unable to eat in the room itself and too begrimed to lunch at the little restaurant along the Embankment, sat with their glasses of milk and paper bag of sandwiches on the dark stairs.
Amory always devoutly hoped that when Cosimo married he would marry some nice girl whose friend she could be. At present he was as poor as a church mouse, but would not be so when his uncle died; and Cosimo was not the kind of man money would spoil. If he had not known the value of money he would not have been able to do Amory’s shopping for her so admirably; and if anything at all could still further have uplifted their beautiful friendship, it would have been that Cosimo should by and by be buying chests of drawers and washbowls for some girl of whom Amory could really approve. Girl after girl—Katie Deedes, Dickie Lemesurier, and others—Amory had suggested them all at one time and another as more or less eligible partners for her “pal”; but Cosimo had only laughed. He supposed he would marry some time or other, he had said, though why he must (now he came to think of it) he didn’t quite know. Indeed, he thought he probably wouldn’t, after all. “You see,” he explained frankly, “it would have to be somebody so awfully like you, and there isn’t anybody else so wonderful.”—“What rubbish, Cosimo!” Amory usually replied, “there are lots of girls; why, you couldn’t find a worse wife than me! What good should I be about a house or nursing a baby?”—“True,” Cosimo would then reply,—thoughtfully yet equably: “but you’re unique, you see. You have your art.”—And that, it always seemed to Amory, was the whole point. An ordinary young man would not have had the perception to recognize her art as the crux of the whole matter. He would have wanted to hold her hand or to put his arm about her, and so would have ruined all.
And Cosimo sometimes, but of course only as a joke, spoke of her art with a sort of humorous resentment, as a man who is allowed much but is still excluded from one favour might speak of the rival in whose preference he after all concurs. Amory thought that a perfecting touch. Seriousness must be unassailable before such gracious, humorous little liberties can be taken with it.
As they drank their milk and ate their sandwiches that day they laughed together over Aunt Jerry’s old-fashioned courtship. Cosimo asked to be told again what Aunt Jerry proposed to wear at her wedding. He had already been told several times, but he had the power, so rare among men, of visualizing a dress from a verbal description, and could carry the precise shade of a ribbon “in his eye” for matching purposes better than Amory herself....
“Doesn’t it sound like the year of the Great Exhibition!” he chuckled when Amory had told him.
“The dress?” Amory laughed. “The dress is nothing; it’s the whole thing that’s like the year of the Great Exhibition! Why, when I asked auntie an ordinary, simple question—whether she thought there would be any babies—she blushed as if she really believed the storks brought them, and implored me not to dream of saying anything of the sort to George! Who to, I should like to know, if not to George? Such absurd false shame!... And this to-day, my dear, if you please, with Forel’s book to be had at any French bookseller’s, and Altruism and Camaraderie taught at even ordinary schools, and everything thrown open to sensible discussion just as you and I discuss these things! It’s too funny!”
“There’s only one word for it really—‘prurient,’” Cosimo opined.
“Oh, but that’s taking it too seriously; I prefer the funny side of it. Babies! Is she expecting butterflies, I wonder?... I did my best for her; I tried to explain what a chromosome was; but it was no good. You’ve never seen Aunt Jerry; I must have you meet her; she’s so like the lady who went to see Anthony and Cleopatra and said it was very unlike the homelife of the dear late Queen!”
Cosimo was silent for a moment; then his voice came authoritatively out of the darkness. Cosimo was not much of a painter, but he really had views that were often quite well worth hearing.
“You see, Amory, it’s the swing of the pendulum. Action and re-action. Perfectly simple. Take wearing stays, for example. What woman to-day would think of wearing the stays they used to wear? Half the women we know wear none at all, and the other half only these ribbon corsets. And it’s just the same with their views on marriage. They make such mysteries about it, and what’s the result? Why, in trying to make it impossibly beautiful they miss the real beauty that’s there all the time, the beauty of the physical process. We have to rediscover that to-day. And we’ve got a whole lot of abolishing to do before we can begin. Sorry to have to abolish your aunt, but really, as you say, Amory, we haven’t time to-day to waste on people who marry and expect to have butterflies.”