"And they'd be able to do whatever they liked with it--reproduce it or anything?"
"I suppose so. Do you mean it isn't enough?"
"I wasn't thinking of that so much. I was thinking--but of course I don't know all the circumstances."
"I'm not keeping anything back from you, Dorothy," said Amory. Indeed she wasn't. She knew that Dorothy's advice on such a point would be well worth having.
"Oh, I don't mean that at all," Dorothy hastened to say. "I only mean that it's hard to form a judgment without having seen for yourself. I don't like the idea of selling anything outright. If it was only a nominal royalty, in case they wanted to reproduce or anything of that sort----"
"Oh, that! As for that, I should be only too glad to let them reproduce if they wanted."
"Of course you would get the advertisement, but I don't see why you shouldn't have a small royalty too."
Amory smiled. The advertisement! Wasn't that just like dear old Dorothy! As if all the costly things that had gone to the making of "Barrage" could be valued and bartered like that! Amory explained gently.
"I don't think you quite understand, Dorothy. You see, it isn't like those other things Croziers' got. Those were just knocked off. I don't want to be conceited about 'Barrage,' but it has rather taken it out of me, in thought and emotion and those things. I've been feeling a perfect rag after a day at it. Of course, there were heaps of things I should like to do to it, but 'No,' I said that morning, 'you've expressed yourself, and if you began tickling it up here and there you'd only take away from the fierce meaning of it.' So I threw my brushes down, and then collapsed--perfectly limp."
"Oh!" said Dorothy deferentially. She herself had once collapsed during a spring rush, but that had been a quite inferior collapsing, from too long hours simply, not from any emotional strain. But Amory misinterpreted her mild and respectful "Oh!" She spoke rather sweetly.
"Of course I must live, and nobody can say I don't live frugally. But that apart, I don't do this for money at all. I do it because of my beliefs."
"Oh!" said Dorothy again, this time very much as some gallant monarch might have protested that he never meddled with the beliefs of ladies.