And for once Dorothy dropped her excusatory attitude towards her friend. She dropped it so completely that by and by she found herself wondering whether Amory would have married Cosimo had he been a poor man. She was aware that, stated in that way, it sounded hideous; nor did she quite mean that perhaps Amory had married Cosimo simply and solely because he had _not_ been poor; no doubt Amory had assumed other things to be equal that as a matter of fact had unfortunately proved to be not equal at all; but she _did_ doubt now whether Amory had not missed that something, that something made of so many things, that caused her own heart suddenly to gush out to the absent Stan. The thought frightened her a little. Had Amory married and had babies--all, as it were, beside the mark?... Dorothy did not know. But an obscurer hint still had seemed to lie behind her aunt's persistent questions. "Was Amory ill?" she herself had asked in alarm when that unexpected word "doctor" had been quietly dropped; and "Ill? I didn't say she was ill; there's no illness about it," Lady Tasker had replied. No illness about what? Apparently about something Lady Tasker saw, or thought she saw, in Amory.... An old lady whose years had earned her the right to sit comfortably in her chair had gone so far as to descend the stairs and go out into the street to have a closer look at a young one: why? Why ask "Is she a Channel swimmer?" and "Is her painting a mere hitting of the air?" Why this insistence on some satisfaction for labour, as if without that satisfaction the labour wreaked on the labourer some sort of revenge? What sort of a revenge? And why on Amory? Yes, Dorothy would have liked to ask her aunt a good many questions.... She did not know that Lady Tasker could not have answered them. She did not know that the whole world is waiting for precisely those replies. She did not know that the data of a great experiment have not yet begun to be gathered together. She did not know that, while she and Stan would never see the results of that experiment, little Noel and the other Bits, and Corin and Bonniebell might. She only knew that her aunt was a wise and experienced woman, with an appetite for life and all belonging to it that only grew the stronger as her remaining years drew in, and that apparently Lady Tasker found something to question, if not to fear. "Is she a Channel swimmer? Does she get any emotional satisfaction out of what she does?" They were oddly precise questions.... Much less odd was that homely summing-up of Lady Tasker's: "Too much money, and not enough to do."... Dorothy had often thought that herself. V "HOUSE FULL"