Amory went into Cosimo’s studio one night, after a long walk through Wandsworth, past Clapham Common, and back through the Old Town to the bus at Victoria, in order to see whether there were any letters for him. There were none, and she sat down on the edge of his bed, where she had sat that morning when she had come to tell Cosimo that she was moving into Cheyne Walk at once. Cosimo’s studio was on the ground floor, at the back of a block. Amory had not lighted the gas. Somewhere away across a yard somebody was going to bed with a blind up, and the distant incandescent shed a raw ugly light. It shone through a narrow side-window of Cosimo’s studio, making quite a bright patch on the floor at the foot of his bed. Amory watched it dully, trying to summon up force to get up and go home.
Aching as she was for Cosimo’s return, she was still a little displeased with him. To be sure, he told her, in those rather perfunctory letters, how horribly he missed her, but somehow she did not feel that his sense of loss was quite as great as her own. She resented his staying so long away. It hardly rose to her conception of their past beautiful friendship. Of course his uncle was dead, but his uncle would still be dead if Cosimo stayed away another couple of months, making four in all, and Amory still waiting and waiting.... Well, he mustn’t think that she was going to ask him to come back, though he never returned at all. She would continue to forward his letters, adding a patient little note of her own once in a while. Indeed, had it not been that Cosimo understood her art, she would hardly have done as much as that for him....
Then, still sitting on the edge of Cosimo’s deserted bed, she remembered the richly comical interpretation that Dorothy and the plumber, the chimney-sweep and Glenerne, had put upon Cosimo’s wellnigh perfect understanding of her art. And that recollection led to another—that of the “stage-kiss” Cosimo had given her when Mr. Wellcome had thrust them into one another’s arms. She remembered that she had been—she hardly knew how to put it—say a little disappointed in Cosimo about that. Hitherto she had not asked herself the reason of this, but she thought she saw it now. Cosimo, for once, had not done the proper thing at all. The proper way to fool those inquisitive, stupid people to the top of their bent would have been to give her a real kiss, not a mock one. As likely as not that clumsy caress had seemed the shyness of a real lover. No; the proper way to throw dust in their eyes would have been to take her face deliberately between his hands, turn it up, and plant the ridiculous emblem fairly and squarely on her mouth. Then, when they had found themselves alone again, they could have laughed together at Glenerne and its folly. Cosimo had not played the game.
And she felt the slight disappointment in him that night especially, for, reaching North Side an hour or two before, she had suddenly left the pavement and struck across the Common towards the “Plough.” It was a coldish night, and not, from the point of view of the phenomena she had passed on the Common, to be compared with any warm evening in the Spring; nevertheless she had seen enough to give an exquisitely ironical point to this obsession of bodily contacts that seemed to engage the world. Simply, they had been kissing everywhere, and Cosimo certainly ought to have been there to exchange with her humorous Olympian comments on the screaming absurdity of it all. Perhaps—Amory was not sure—but perhaps, merely as part of the general joke—as a sort of recognition of their surroundings—a sort of politeness (if you cared to put it in that way)—as a doing in Rome as Rome does, and on Clapham Common as Clapham Common does, Amory might have let him kiss her too.... And then they would have come back here or to Cheyne Walk, to laugh together as he cleared supper away and she braided her inordinate hair. To taste the full savour of folly you yourself must have been a fool too—just once. Perhaps—Amory was not quite certain—it was a Law....
But Cosimo had not been a fool even once....
But Amory was almost too fagged out even for resentment. She could only weakly wish, as she rested her aching back on Cosimo’s bed, that even with his few imperfections he was there. For one thing, twice that very night she had been frightened on the Common by the approach of men. Hating herself for doing anything so unmasculine, she had clutched her skirts and almost made a run for it. To the turning heads of women in the streets, who apparently found something amusing in her demonstratively serviceable Portia hat and her obviously sensible square-toed, flat-heeled shoes, she had long been accustomed; but such alarms as she had felt when Mr. Jowett had turned up his moustache to show the growth of it were only the beginning of her instinctive shrinkings from the rough physique of men. They were not Antinöuses on Clapham Common. She preferred masculinity sublimated, so to speak—purified by the processes of art. Anything else—a caress of Cosimo’s, for example—would have owed its bearableness largely to the philosophic or ironic meaning behind.
She continued to wish that Cosimo was there. Then they would have talked quite a lot about those things.
She had not noticed that the glaring incandescent across the yard had been extinguished and that the studio was now pitch-dark. She wished that before he had left Cosimo had not removed the linen cases from his pillows; the striped ticking tickled her cheek. But she was too tired to move. Some time ago a clock had struck a quarter-past something; a quarter-past eleven she supposed; she decided that when it struck half-past she would get up. That would not be for five minutes yet. She closed her eyes.