Amory had smiled. Oh, advertisement! She had thought that Dorothy could hardly mean that she was going to make all this money out of fashion-drawing! Advertisements—those funny things that Aunt Jerry was getting! Amory smiled again.
For Aunt Jerry had lately been showing her more of them—advertisements now, not of caterers and wedding-cake makers, job-masters, and house-agents and furnishers, such as she had had at the time of her wedding, but of quite other things. Amory had thought she had never seen anything so funny—and nauseating—funny and nauseating both at once. Really, the things were an outrage! She supposed that somebody—Mr. Miller perhaps—read the top left-hand corner of the front page of the Times and Morning Post day by day, carefully counted the weeks, felt (as it were) Aunt Jerry’s pulse, asked her how she was feeling each morning, penetrated into her hidden thoughts, anticipated her desires, and then sent the things along—descriptions of layettes and perambulators, of cribs and pens and patent bottles, of foods and clothes and schemes for insurance. “Baby will Soon be Cutting his Teeth,” Mr. Miller, or whoever it was, began, whispering (so to speak) confidentially behind his hand; or “Of course if you WANT your Wee One to have Wind!”... That, Amory thought, was the funny aspect; the nauseating one came when you remembered that, properly diffused by this same means, really valuable information about Eugenics and the Chromosome might have been given to the world. That, if Aunt Jerry and Mr. Massey must have children, would have been, not immediately perhaps, but ultimately far more to the purpose. But Amory supposed it would be a waste of time to look for ultimate purposes to Dorothy. Possibly she not only devised the advertisements, but drew the layette too.
But Amory had not forgotten that she wanted Dorothy to lend her ten pounds. The minutes were passing, and no doubt Dorothy would soon be putting on the Ararat again, and going back to Oxford Street and Mr. Miller. Amory turned over this and that “opening”; none of them seemed very promising. Dorothy was already lacing up the Japhet Boots; she was going to make her advertisement a “cinch” by walking back also in the downpour. But suddenly Amory remembered her pride. There was no need for abjectness. Therefore it was with a certain offhandedness that, as Dorothy rose and stamped one Japhet boot after the other, she suddenly said, “Oh, I say, Dorothy, will you lend me ten pounds?”
It is astonishing how rich everybody else appears when we ourselves are poor. For a moment Dorothy’s eyes opened widely, then she broke into a humorous grimace.
“My dear!... Where from, I wonder?” Then she added, “Really? I mean, you really want it?”
“Yes,” said Amory shortly. She wondered whether Dorothy thought she would ask for it if she didn’t want it.
“I haven’t ten pounds in the world,” said Dorothy. Then she considered for a moment. “If it’s really urgent—I mean if you really must have it—I might—I never have yet, but I might be able to get it——” She paused.
There seemed to Amory a certain lack of delicacy in the pause. It was as if she gave Amory an opportunity of saying what she wanted the money for. Amory was sure that some day, when those poor and deserving artists should come to her, she would neither ask questions nor break off into pauses that came to the same thing. She did not deny Dorothy’s right to refuse; she did deny her any other right. If Dorothy’s fashion-drawing or advertisements or whatever it was could not provide ten pounds, then absolutely the only thing that could be said for these absurdities disappeared.
“You see, I should have to borrow it myself——” Dorothy said hesitatingly, and Amory merely hoisted her shapely shoulders.