And then Laura Wyron will speak, saying tremulously that she can't understand why Amory isn't happy when she has those two lovely babies; but she is not happy, and never will be again, because she has turned her back on her art; and Britomart Belchamber (who will be hoisted to her feet because she has lived in the same house with Amory, and may have something interesting and intimate to say) will doubt whether Amory has always quite closed the sweat-ducts with a cold sponge; and then the crowd will rush in--the governess playwrights will say what they think, the clerk sculptors what they think, and everybody else what he or she thinks--and presently they will have strayed a little from the business in hand, and will be discussing Cubism, or Matriarchy, or Toe-posts, or the Revival of the Ballad, or Rufty Tufty, quite beyond Mr. Brimby's power to hale them back to the proper subject. And so the Meeting will have to be adjourned, and we shall all go again to-morrow night, when Mr. Wilkinson will be in the Chair, and there ought to be some fun----
But Edgar Strong will not be there, because he will be on the water, and Cosimo will not be there, because he will be anxiously counting what money remains to him, and Mr. Prang will not be there, because he will be under arrest in Bombay. But, except for these absences, it will be a perfectly ripping Meeting----
But none of these things were Dorothy's business. Instead, by the time she had finished her questioning of Amory, there was no thought at all in her breast, save only the pitiful desire to help. She saw before her an old young woman, more drained and disillusioned and with less to look forward to at thirty-odd than her aunt had at seventy. Her very presence in Dorothy's house that night was a confession of it. It was the last house she would willingly have gone to, and yet there she was, begging Dorothy to tell her what had happened to her. And there was nothing for Dorothy to say in reply....
She knew that Stan, in the dining-room, was waiting to come to bed, but he must wait; Dorothy had the fire to mend, and Amory's cold hands to chafe, and to get her something hot to drink, and a dozen other things to do that had never had a beginning either, yet there they were, mere helpful habit and nothing more. Presently she set a cup of hot soup to Amory's lips.