A Crooked Mile. Oliver Onions

Strong, but he had used none of them. Instead his eyes had given as it were a flick to Amory's face. The proprietor's proprietor had continued indignantly.

      "It ruins the whole effect! It's unspeakably vulgar! After that glowing, that impassioned Foreword—this! Hardly a month ago that lovely apostrophe to Truth Naked—that beautiful image of her stark and innocent on our banners but with a forest of bright bayonets bristling about her—and now this! It's revolting!"

      But Mr. Strong had himself written that impassioned Foreword, and knew all about it. Again he had given his proprietor's wife that quietly humouring look.

      "Do you mean that the 'Novum's' going to refuse advertisements?"

      "I mean that I blue-pencilled that one myself."

      "And what about the others—the 'Eden' and the Suffrage Shop and Wyron's Lectures?"

      "They're different. They are the Cause. You said yourself that the 'Novum' was going to be a sort of generalissimo, and these the brigades or whatever they're called. They are, at any rate, doing the Work. Is that doing any Work, I should like to know?"

      Mr. Strong had refrained from flippancy.—"I see what you mean," he had replied equably. "At the same time, if you're going to refuse advertisements the thing's going to cost a good deal more money."

      "Well?" Amory had replied, as who might say, "Has money been refused you yet?"

      Strong had given a compliant shrug—"All right. That means I censor the advertisements, I suppose. New industry. Very well. The 'Eden' and Wyron's Lectures and Week-end Cottages and the Plato Press only, then. I'll strike out that 'Platinum: False Teeth Bought.' But I warn you it will cost more."

      "Never mind that."

      And so the incident had ended.

      But perhaps Mrs. Pratt's sensitiveness of eye was not the only cause of the rejection of that offending advertisement. Another reason might have lain in her present relation with her sometime fellow-student of the McGrath School of Art, Dorothy Tasker. For that relation had suffered a change since the days when the two girls had shared a shabby day-studio in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. At that time, now five years ago, Amory Towers had been thrust by circumstances into a position of ignoble envy of her friend. She had been poor, and Dorothy's people (or so she had supposed) very, very wealthy. True, poor Dorothy, without as much as a single spark of talent, had nevertheless buckled to, and, in various devious ways, had contrived to suck a parasitic living out of the wholesome body of real art; none the less, Amory had conceived her friend to be of the number of those who play at hardship and independence with a fully spread table at home for them to return to when they are tired of the game. But the case was entirely changed now. Amory frankly admitted that she had been mistaken in one thing, namely, that if those people of Dorothy's had more money, they had also more claims upon it, and so were relatively poor. Amory herself was now very comfortably off indeed. By that virtue and good management which the envious call luck, she had now money, Cosimo's money, to devote to the regeneration of the world. Dorothy, married to the good-tempered and shiftless Stan, sometimes did not know which way to turn for the overdue quarter's rent.

      Now among her other ways of making ends meet Dorothy had for some years done rather well out of precisely that kind of work which Amory refused to allow the "Novum" to touch—advertisements. She had wormed herself into the services of this firm and that as an advertisement-adviser. But her contracts had begun in course of time to lapse, one or two fluky successes had not been followed up, and two children had further tightened things. Nor had Stan been of very much help. Amory despised Stan. She thought him, not a man, but a mere mouth to be fed. Real men, like Cosimo, always had money, and Amory was quite sure that, even if Cosimo had not inherited a fortune from his uncle, he would still have contrived to make himself the possessor of money in some other way.

      Therefore Amory was even kinder to Dorothy than she was to Dickie Lemesurier of the Suffrage Shop, to Katie Deedes of the "Eden," and to Laura Beamish and Walter Wyron, who ran the "Lectures on Love." But somehow—it was a little difficult to say exactly how, but there it undoubtedly was—Dorothy did not accept her kindnesses in quite the proper spirit. One or two she had even rejected—gently, Amory was bound to admit, but still a rejection. For example, there had been that little rebuff (to call it by its worst name for a moment) about the governess. Amory had, in Miss Britomart Belchamber, the most highly-qualified governess for Corin and Bonniebell that money and careful search had been able to obtain; Dorothy lived less than a quarter of an hour's walk away; it would have been just as easy for Britomart to teach four children as to teach two; but Dorothy had twisted and turned and had finally said that she had decided that she couldn't put Amory to the trouble. And again, when the twins had had their party, Amory would positively have liked Noel and Jackie to come and dance "Twickenham Ferry" in those spare costumes and to join in those songs from the Book of Caroline Ditties; but again an excuse had been made. And half a dozen similar things had driven Amory to the conclusion, sadly against her will, that the Taskers were taking up that ridiculous, if not actually hostile attitude, of the poor who hug their pride. It was not nice between old friends. Amory could say with a clear conscience that she had not refused Dorothy's help in the days when the boot had been on the other leg. She was not resentful, but really it did look very much like putting on airs.

      But of course that stupid Stanhope Tasker was at the bottom of it all. Amory did not so much mind his not having liked her from the first; she would have been sorry to let a trifle like that ruffle her equanimity; but it was evident that he did not in the least realize his position. She was quite sure, in the first place, that he couldn't afford (or rather Dorothy couldn't afford) to pay eighty pounds for that flat, plus another twenty for the little office they had annexed and used as a nursery. And in the next place he dressed absurdly above his position. Cosimo dressed for hygiene and comfort, in cellular things and things made of non-irritant vegetable fibre; but those absurdly modish jackets and morning-coats of Stan's had, unless Amory was very much mistaken, to be bought at the expense of real necessaries. And so with their hospitality. In that too, they tried to cut a dash and came very near to making themselves ridiculous. Amory didn't want to interfere; she couldn't plan and be wise for everybody; she had her own affairs to attend to; but she was quite sure that the Taskers would have done better to regulate their hospitality as hospitality was regulated at The Witan—that was, to make no special preparation, but to have the door always open to their friends. But no; the Taskers must make a splash. They must needs "invite" people and be a little stand-offish about people coming uninvited. They were "At home" and "Not at home" for all the world as if they had been important people. But Amory would have thought herself very stupid to be taken in by all this ceremony. For example, the last time she and Cosimo had been asked to the flat to dinner she knew that they had been "worked off" only because the Taskers had had the pheasants given by somebody, and very likely the fish too. And it would have been just like Stan Tasker's insolence had he asked them because he knew that the Pratts did not eat poor beasties that should have been allowed to live because of their lovely plumes, nor the pretty speckled creatures that had done no harm to the destroyer who had taken them with a hook out of their pretty stream.