So they dined that night at the Lettuce Grill, in St. Martins Lane, and Amory had never been more trenchant and brilliant, more bright and tender and free and brave. And after dinner they joined a larger party at one of the long tables, and Walter Wyron and Laura Beamish dropped in, and everybody was absolutely at his and her best, and it was almost like a larger and more responsible McGrath over again, and the Dawn, if emotion and enthusiasm and resolve counted for anything at all, was hastened that night by several years. And before the party broke up Amory definitely clinched the sale of "Barrage".... And Cosimo was pensive and abstracted now. He saw, not only how right Amory was in everything she said and did, but how temerarious he himself had been when, that afternoon, he had said, almost as if he had been making a sacrifice, that a being so daring and dashing and gloriously winged must of course marry him. There was no of course about it. It would be she, not he, who would be making the sacrifice. He would be lucky to get her. Laura Beamish, whispering to him that Amory, drinking to the Dawn in the Lettuce Grill's Unfermented Grape-fruit Moselle, was stunningly pretty, told Cosimo nothing that he could not now see for himself.
Yes, Cosimo Pratt saw at last that he had come near making a precious ass of himself when he had taken her acceptance of him so entirely for granted. He did not suppose for a moment that a girl so frank and free and brave could (to put it grossly) be holding out for her price; nevertheless her price could be no light one. And because it was not a light one, Cosimo was now full of eagerness to pay it.
The sale of "Barrage" to the Manumission League was definitely concluded within the week. Amory thought it a distinct smack in the eye for Mr. Hamilton Dix. Mr. Dix, in hoodwinking her, and all but fraudulently getting her to accept Croziers' miserable hundred pounds, had no doubt thought he was doing a smart stroke of business; but he was likely to squirm now, and to wish he had not given her permission to sell privately what work she could. True, Amory admitted that in a sense she had been indebted to Dorothy Lennard for this release--but only in a sense. It was a thing anybody would have thought of, and things anybody might think of were very lightly and happily hit off in that perfect phrase of Nietzsche's, "the vulgarity of the lucky find." In any case, Amory and nobody else had actually painted "Barrage." So if Dorothy liked to go about boasting that she herself had procured the sale to the League--not that Amory knew for a fact that she had done or was doing this--well, it would be a little beneath Amory's dignity to contradict her. Some people cannot bear to hear of the success of others. Amory thanked goodness that she was not like that.