On a Wednesday afternoon about a fortnight after Lady Tasker's visit to The Witan, Amory walked the garden thoughtfully. The weather was growing chilly, the hammock had been taken in, and her feet in the fallen leaves made a melancholy sound. Cosimo had left her half an hour before; certain points had struck him in the course of conversation which he thought ought to be incorporated in the "_Life and Work_"; and it was a rule at The Witan that nothing must ever be allowed to interfere with the impulse of artistic creation. For the matter of that, Amory herself was creating now, or at any rate was at the last preparatory stage that immediately precedes creation. Presently she would have taken the plunge and would be deep in the new number of the "Novum." For the moment she was thinking of Mr. Strong. As she tried to clear up exactly what place Mr. Strong had in her thoughts she was struck by the dreadful tendency words and names and definitions have to attach themselves to vulgar and ready-made meanings--a tendency so strong that she had even caught herself more than once jumping to a common conclusion. To take an example, though a rather preposterous one. Had Dorothy, with one of her ridiculous advertisements waiting to be done, confessed to her that instead of setting about it she was thinking of a male person with a pair of alert blue eyes and a curiously mobile and clean-cut mouth (not that it was likely that Dorothy would have had the candour to make such a confession)--well, Amory might have smiled just like anybody else. She was not trying to make herself out any better than others. She was candid about it, however, which they were often not. Still, the trouble about her feeling for Mr. Strong was to find a word for it that had not been vulgarized. She was, of course, exceedingly interested in him, but that was not saying very much. She "liked" him, too, but that again might mean anything. Her difficulty was that she herself was so special; and so on second thoughts she might have been right in giving an interpretation to Dorothy's actions, and Dorothy quite wrong in giving the same interpretation to hers merely because the data were the same. Nor had Mr. Strong himself been able to help her very much when, a couple of days before, she had put the question to him, earnestly and without hateful false shame. "What _is_ this relation of ours?" she had asked him, point-blank and fearlessly. "Eh?" Mr. Strong had replied, a little startled. "There _must_ be a relation of some sort between every two people who come into contact. I'm just wondering exactly what ours _is_." Then Mr. Strong had knitted his brows and had said, presently, "I see.... Have you read '_The Tragic Comedians_?'"--Amory had not, and the copy of the book which she had immediately ordered had not come yet. And then she too had knitted her brows. She had caught the trick from him.