The plumber under the sink had a gas-jet and a soldering-iron, and he was raising a smell of warm lead and flux. He, too, seemed to have jumped to the same ludicrous conclusion as Mrs. 'Ill and Jellies. There was an intelligence about his back view, as if that aspect of him said, "I see--I'm minding my business--nearly finished--three's none--'nuff said." And when, as Cosimo swept, Amory approached the plumber and asked him whether the smell of cabbage-water would now cease, he turned round almost with a start.
"Beg pardon, Miss?... Oh, that! Don't you worry your 'ead about that. A S-pipe'll do it if anything will, and I'll explain it to the master afore I go."
The master!... Amory and Cosimo had to go out on to the landing in order to laugh. Otherwise they would have stifled.
Then, at nearly midday, the sweep arrived, and to the smells of dust and hot lead was added that of the soot that rustled down the chimney. Amory and Cosimo, unable to eat in the room itself and too begrimed to lunch at the little restaurant along the Embankment, sat with their glasses of milk and paper bag of sandwiches on the dark stairs.
Amory always devoutly hoped that when Cosimo married he would marry some nice girl whose friend she could be. At present he was as poor as a church mouse, but would not be so when his uncle died; and Cosimo was not the kind of man money would spoil. If he had not known the value of money he would not have been able to do Amory's shopping for her so admirably; and if anything at all could still further have uplifted their beautiful friendship, it would have been that Cosimo should by and by be buying chests of drawers and washbowls for some girl of whom Amory could really approve. Girl after girl--Katie Deedes, Dickie Lemesurier, and others--Amory had suggested them all at one time and another as more or less eligible partners for her "pal"; but Cosimo had only laughed. He supposed he would marry some time or other, he had said, though why he must (now he came to think of it) he didn't quite know. Indeed, he thought he probably wouldn't, after all. "You see," he explained frankly, "it would have to be somebody so awfully like you, and there _isn't_ anybody else so wonderful."--"What rubbish, Cosimo!" Amory usually replied, "there are lots of girls; why, you couldn't find a worse wife than me! What good should _I_ be about a house or nursing a baby?"--"True," Cosimo would then reply,--thoughtfully yet equably: "but you're unique, you see. You have your art."--And that, it always seemed to Amory, was the whole point. An ordinary young man would not have had the perception to recognize her art as the crux of the whole matter. He would have wanted to hold her hand or to put his arm about her, and so would have ruined all.