As she put her hand on his arm Cosimo had a little brotherly warming.
He was not aware—or if he had been aware, he had forgotten—that Amory’s Aunt Jerry and Mr. Massey lived on Chiswick Mall, hardly a stone’s-throw from where they were. They were passing the “Doves” when suddenly Amory exclaimed, “Why, we’re quite near to Aunt Jerry’s. Shall we go in to lunch?”
Her quick tone seemed a change from the past tense and broodings about his marriage, and he welcomed it eagerly. Moreover, to call on the Masseys would recall enlivening thoughts of that merry wedding day when Mr. Wellcome had got slightly drunk and had passed round the toothpicks. It would be the very thing to take Amory out of herself.
“Ripping idea!” said Cosimo enthusiastically. “Which is the house?”
“The one you’re walking past now,” said Amory, putting her hand on the knob of a tall wrought-iron gate. “I don’t suppose Aunt Jerry’s been to church.”
They walked up a narrow flagged path and Amory rang an old bell by the side of a torch-extinguisher. Already Aunt Jerry had waved her hand from the drawing-room window of the first floor. The door was opened, and they were admitted.
“We’ve asked ourselves to lunch, Cosimo and I,” said Amory, kissing her aunt where she sat by the window. “May we stay?”
Aunt Jerry affected a severity.
“I’m not so sure, after the disgraceful time you’ve thought fit to stop away,” she replied. “I’m very cross with both of you. If you’d left it one week longer, Cosimo—you see I haven’t forgotten I was to call you Cosimo—I really don’t think George would have had you in the house. But I forgive you now you are here. George will be back from church presently. Go and take your things off, child, and Cosimo will talk to me. You know the little room—or is it so long since you were here that you’ve forgotten?”
There were hyacinth bulbs in the glasses of Aunt Jerry’s rounded bow-window, and a canary in a white and gilt cage; and to Amory the house seemed furnished consonantly with the age of its owners, that is to say, its chairs and tables were not old enough in style to be antique and not new enough to be anything but what doubtless some of them were—second-hand. But the panelling was pleasant, and the airy view up the river delightful. Aunt Jerry pointed out the view to Cosimo at once; she sat there all day, she said, but it was almost as good as being out of doors. There was no need to ask why she sat there, watching her swelling hyacinths and listening to the trilling of her bird. Amory expected to be made a cousin early in April.