Page:Henry B. Fuller - Bertram Cope's Year, 1919.djvu/197

 be written and a place, with a real salary, found in the academic world. How, even, buy an engagement ring--that costly superfluity? How even contrive to pay for all the small gifts and attentions which an engagement involved? Yet why ask himself such questions? For he was conscious of a fundamental repugnance to any such scheme of life and was acutely aware that—for awhile, at least, and perhaps for always—he wanted to live in quite a different mode.

Amy's confident assumptions began to fill the house, to alter its atmosphere. Medora Phillips, who had begun by raising her eyebrows in light criticism, now lowered them in frowning protest. She had found Cope "charming"; but this charm of his was to add to the attractiveness of her house and to give her a high degree of personal gratification. It was not to be frittered away; still less was it to be absorbed elsewhere. Hortense, who had been secretly at work on a portrait-sketch of Cope in oil, and rather despising herself for it, now began to make another bold picture in her own mind. She saw herself handing out the sketch to Cope in person, with an air of high bravado; she might say, if bad came to worse, that she had found some professional interest in his color or in his "planes." On one occasion Medora hardily requisitioned Cope for an evening at the theatre, in the city; miles in and miles back she had him in her car all to herself; and if Amy, next day, appeared to feel that wealth and organization had taken an unfair advantage of simple, honest love, Medora herself was troubled by no stirrings of conscience.