Amory herself would have been the first to confess the weakness that set her wondering how many bedrooms the Shropshire house had, and whether there were rose gardens and fruit trees on the southern walls. Even from thoughts of duty weak mortals must sometimes stoop. Besides, if there was not a village green with a maypole on it, some arrangement would probably have to be made. Amory didn't think she would want morrice-dancing on the lawn in front of the drawing-room windows, except, of course, on birthdays and festival days and the days when the tenants paid their rent. The people themselves would probably prefer to have their merrymaking to themselves. Very likely they would only be shy before their betters. She would show the tenantry (she did not insist on the name) every consideration, as she should expect them to consider her.... And if there was a lily garden as well as a rose garden, she would send lilies as well as roses to the cottages quite frequently.
But Cosimo must be saved for the Cause quickly, for he was giving up his studio in March, and once he got away again he might fall into the hands of the designing woman whose existence Amory had suspected. She knew those designing women. She knew them by the simple process of inversion of everything that was noble within herself.
Amory had only seen Dorothy Lennard once since the afternoon when Dorothy had promised to see what she could do about Croziers' contract. That had been when Dorothy had come to tell her of the mitigation of its rigour she had secured from Hamilton Dix. But, finding herself in Oxford Street one afternoon, she sought Hallowells', and tried to find her way upstairs to the fashion-studio. "Tried," one says, for nearly twenty minutes Amory was hopelessly lost in the wilderness that seemed to grow ever more and more complicated as the time fixed for the opening drew nearer. It was during her wandering through this labyrinth that Amory received a shock. Passing along a corridor of such vast length that she seemed to be looking at it through the wrong end of a pair of opera-glasses, she entered a large apartment where three women on their knees polished the floor. There she saw a large historical painting. It was the picture of Queen Bess, Sir Walter, and the Cloak.