Amory went into Cosimo's studio one night, after a long walk through Wandsworth, past Clapham Common, and back through the Old Town to the bus at Victoria, in order to see whether there were any letters for him. There were none, and she sat down on the edge of his bed, where she had sat that morning when she had come to tell Cosimo that she was moving into Cheyne Walk at once. Cosimo's studio was on the ground floor, at the back of a block. Amory had not lighted the gas. Somewhere away across a yard somebody was going to bed with a blind up, and the distant incandescent shed a raw ugly light. It shone through a narrow side-window of Cosimo's studio, making quite a bright patch on the floor at the foot of his bed. Amory watched it dully, trying to summon up force to get up and go home.
Aching as she was for Cosimo's return, she was still a little displeased with him. To be sure, he told her, in those rather perfunctory letters, how horribly he missed her, but somehow she did not feel that his sense of loss was quite as great as her own. She resented his staying so long away. It hardly rose to her conception of their past beautiful friendship. Of course his uncle was dead, but his uncle would still be dead if Cosimo stayed away another couple of months, making four in all, and Amory still waiting and waiting.... Well, he mustn't think that she was going to ask him to come back, though he never returned at all. She would continue to forward his letters, adding a patient little note of her own once in a while. Indeed, had it not been that Cosimo understood her art, she would hardly have done as much as that for him....
Then, still sitting on the edge of Cosimo's deserted bed, she remembered the richly comical interpretation that Dorothy and the plumber, the chimney-sweep and Glenerne, had put upon Cosimo's wellnigh perfect understanding of her art. And that recollection led to another--that of the "stage-kiss" Cosimo had given her when Mr. Wellcome had thrust them into one another's arms. She remembered that she had been--she hardly knew how to put it--say a little disappointed in Cosimo about that. Hitherto she had not asked herself the reason of this, but she thought she saw it now. Cosimo, for once, had not done the proper thing at all. The proper way to fool those inquisitive, stupid people to the top of their bent would have been to give her a _real_ kiss, not a mock one. As likely as not that clumsy caress had seemed the shyness of a real lover. No; the proper way to throw dust in their eyes would have been to take her face deliberately between his hands, turn it up, and plant the ridiculous emblem fairly and squarely on her mouth. _Then_, when they had found themselves alone again, they could have laughed together at Glenerne and its folly. Cosimo had not played the game.