Sometimes Amory wondered whether these daring and illuminating talks with Cosimo were altogether a good thing for her art. They sometimes seemed to enlarge her ideas too much. It was difficult, with a common brush and an ordinary canvas and a paint-box like anybody else’s, to express the true philosophical meaning of the heart of things as Cosimo sometimes set that meaning forth; or rather, she could explain what she meant, but could not always make it explain itself. She expressed this doubt to Cosimo now, and found him quite extraordinarily full of help.
“I know,” he said thoughtfully. “It’s hard, but it’s what you’ve got to do, Amory. It’s your job. Fundamental brainwork, as Rossetti said. The old traditions are epuisées—worn out; in making the new one you must say to yourself, ‘Is this that I am doing merely a repetition, or does it belong to the age that has—well, say, wireless telegraphy?’ I don’t mean that you’ve got to muddle yourself, of course; that’s the other danger: like Scylla and Charybdis; there are always two dangers, underdoing and overdoing; it’s a Law. What I mean is that your art must be the thing. See what I mean? Break fresh ground. Do something new. Say to yourself ‘I’m going to do something new.’ That’s what the Pre-Raphaelites did, and look at Ford Madox Brown! As I say, it’s the swing of the pendulum; action and re——(Hallo, here’s Mrs. ’Ill—listen to her cough).... What a dreadful cold you have, Mrs. ’Ill!”
And they chuckled for a quarter of an hour over Mrs. ’Ill’s comical confusion.
That afternoon they had one of their jolliest chats about Heredity. Amory wished she had Galton by her so that she could show Cosimo what she really meant, but Galton, in that topsy-turvy, was not to be laid hands on. Cosimo rested on his broom from time to time to listen, fastened his coffee-brown eyes earnestly on her face, and said that she ought to paint a picture, not necessarily to be called “Heredity,” but to have something of Galton’s meaning and spirit about it. “Express him in a different medium, if you understand me,” he said.... Then he finished his walls, and they washed their begrimed hands and faces together over a bucket and went out to tea. Mrs. ’Ill and Jellies were left to sweep up and to make all ready for Cosimo to distemper the walls and stain the floor to-morrow. They dined, talking ever the more rapidly and brightly as the hours wore on; and Amory went as reluctantly back to Glenerne that night as if she had been going from a glorious liberty to a prison.
Here, however, a piece of bad news awaited her. After dinner Uncle George drew her aside and handed her a paragraph he had cut from a newspaper. Amory read it, and then looked inquiringly up at Mr. Massey. Except that it contained a name with which she was somehow remotely familiar, it conveyed nothing to her. Not many things in newspapers did convey much to Amory. She thought them dull, and wished they had a Cosimo at the head of them to fill them with the really interesting things about the New Movement and criticism and art.
Nor did the scholastic bookseller himself appear to know the full purport of the paragraph. It announced baldly and briefly that a trustee had absconded with certain funds, and Mr. Massey feared that those funds might include the capital sum that hitherto had yielded the thirteen pounds a quarter Amory had had from her godmother. The man might, of course (Mr. Massey said), be—something or other—“extradited” she thought the word was; but, on the other hand, he might not. Even if he were to be extradited, Mr. Massey feared that such delinquents commonly bolted, not with the money, but after the money was spent. So he would not advise Amory to build too much on the recovery of the money.... And Amory discovered something new and rather unexpected in her prospective uncle, namely, that while it was “a pleasure to assist” (as he had softly hissed) a young woman who had shown herself as capable as Amory had of assisting herself, he did not think it necessary to keep hold of her hand once she was set on her feet. She had a hundred pounds in actual cash, on account of a sum that might be very large indeed; and he himself would have thought himself lucky had he been possessed of half that capital at her age.... This mid-Victorian, heavy-father view of Mr. Massey’s, that young people should be kept a little short in the very years of their capacity for enjoyment, could, of course, have been demolished in a minute by any modern and rational and hard-up young man: it was manifestly absurd that people should have money only when they were past their pleasures: but it would have taken more than Cosimo to knock it out of Mr. Massey’s head for all that.
Amory went to bed moodily that night, first trying to tell herself, and then trying not to tell herself, that her income was in all probability now reduced by a half.
She had begun, too, to be a little alarmed at the rate at which her hundred pounds of actual capital was diminishing. Excellently and cheaply as Cosimo had bought, she simply could not tell herself where nearly thirty pounds had gone. There had been her bed, her bath, her chest of drawers, her washstand, her this, that, and the other; and there had been “sundries.” She had had the conception of sundries that they were quite small things, in paper packets and tins, that cost a few pence; it came rather as a shock to her that kettles and frying-pans and cups and saucers and scrubbing-brushes were sundries too. And tablecloths and blankets and sheets and pillow-cases seemed to be very considerable sundries indeed. Still—thirty pounds! She would have thought that thirty pounds would have furnished the Glenerne kitchens twice over. And at tea that afternoon, Cosimo had spoken of a carved wood frame he had seen in Marylebone High Street that it would be positively criminal not to buy for another three!...
Well, living would be cheaper at Cheyne Walk; that would be one thing. Tea and bread-and-butter and a chop or steak once a day would be quite enough for her; and when all these things were bought they were bought, and would not be to buy again. She had another shrinking as she remembered that, now that all her work had gone to Croziers’, she had hardly a canvas or stretcher in the place, and that half her paint-tubes were mere flat metal ribbons with a screw-cap on the end, and that she badly wanted a complete set of new brushes. She tried to tell herself that five pounds would refit her, but she knew in her heart that ten or twelve would hardly be too much; artists’ colourmen have their sundries too....
And now she must reckon a whole pound a week as good as gone....