And, on the whole, Cosimo was rather glad that Amory didn’t suspect there was such a girl as Pattie in existence.
Cosimo half expected to find Amory still in bed when he went round to Cheyne Walk at ten o’clock on the following morning; but she was dressed and ready for going out. He was lucky, she said, to have caught her; she would have been off in another five minutes.—“Off where?” Cosimo asked. Oh, Amory didn’t know.—“All right, come along,” he said.
But when she turned her eyes slowly round to his he saw that the night had only set higher their clear courage. Again he could not have told why he felt guilty.
“Do you think it would be wise?” she asked gravely.
“Why not?” he asked, taken aback anew.
“Oh, very well,” she answered indifferently. “I’m ready.”
Many times they had walked together in the direction of Earl’s Court and Brook Green, but never in such a silence as this. Yet on Amory’s part it was a calm and cheery silence. It was so calm and cheery that uneasily Cosimo fell to wondering whether Amory had not been right and he had not, after all, changed without knowing it. These geniuses were terrible people: there was never any telling what they did not see. As they passed through Hammersmith, Cosimo longed to break out, “I haven’t changed, Amory—you’d know I thought more of you than ever if you’d seen the pretty but awfully stupid sort of girl I’ve been seeing while I’ve been away—everything we’ve agreed a self-respecting woman can’t be any longer: a mere man’s toy, a chattel, property, on sale just as much as if she was in an Oriental slave-market, economically dependent, hopelessly apathetic to everything that’s fine and feminist and new——” He knew that Amory would have called that “facing the facts.” But something, he knew not what, held him back. Oh, it was none of the things you might have thought—that Amory might make more of it than there had been (indeed, there had been nothing), nor that he realized that the whole truth can never be told, and that the more you explain the more there remains still to be explained, nor that hypocrisy and lack of candour are not without their poor uses when all is said and done. Cosimo would have denied these obsolescent propositions one by one.... So he concluded that he could not be very well either. That must be the reason for his reticence. Pattie’s company must have put him a little out of accord with the finer things. Pattie in Shropshire, too, seemed a thought less pretty than did Amory by his side that Sunday morning. If Amory were only a little differently dressed she might be incomparably pretty, as she was already incomparably clever....
But suddenly Amory broke the silence. It was as they approached Ravenscourt Park.
“Cosimo,” she said slowly—“I’ve been wondering again——”
He waited for her to continue. As she delayed to do so, he said, “What, Amory?”