"You really underrate her, Cosimo. Of course there's that dreadful job of hers, but she does know better really. I do hope she wasn't bored."
"Well, you can't help Dorothy's shortcomings, Amory," Cosimo remarked, as if true artists had sorrows enough of their own without taking those of fashion-artists on their shoulders.
"Of course you are," Cosimo replied promptly. "That's what I always find so fine about you. The stronger _always_ worries about the weaker. It seems to be a Law----"
"Do you think it is a Law?" Amory asked thoughtfully.
"Well, _isn't_ it? Just look at it, now...."
Cosimo began to set it forth. Halfway up North End Road Amory had reluctantly to confess that it did seem to be a Law. She had suspected it before, but never, never had it been made quite so clear to her. She resolved that she must be very gentle with Dorothy. At that moment she was very fond of her indeed.
When Mr. Hamilton Dix, the renowned critic, had first mentioned Amory in print, he had made a perhaps pardonable error about her sex. But the error itself had been a compliment. In speaking of "Mr. Amory Towers" he had been misled by the rugged masculinity of "The Paviors," her second exhibited picture.
Amory was not sure that she liked Mr. Dix very much. He seemed to her to have a rather remarkable faculty for slightly impairing the value of everything of which he wrote or spoke. His conclusions were undeniable; when Mr. Hamilton Dix had pronounced on a thing Q.E.D. might be written after that thing; there was no more to be said about it. But somehow all the fun had gone out of it. You told yourself, grossly unfairly, that if it interested Mr. Hamilton Dix it had no further interest for you. That was your loss, since Mr. Dix usually fastened on the best things. In appearance he was a big man with an overpowering presence, a promising eye, and brown curls that frothed all over his head like the "top" of a mug of porter; and you wondered whether a person could ever be so glad to see anybody whomsoever as Mr. Hamilton Dix appeared to be to see everybody. He still occasionally called Amory "Mr. Towers" by way of a joke.
Mr. Dix had no official connection with the Crozier Gallery. He frequently wrote of "another admirable Exhibition at the Crozier which no serious student of art must miss," or "the gift of discovering the best among our younger artists which the proprietors of the Crozier seem to possess," but that was all. As a professional critic he was not eligible for membership of the artists' clubs, but he blew like a March gale through their studios, and the smaller and poorer the studio the more he irradiated it with the light of his optimistic eye.