Many times they had walked together in the direction of Earl's Court and Brook Green, but never in such a silence as this. Yet on Amory's part it was a calm and cheery silence. It was so calm and cheery that uneasily Cosimo fell to wondering whether Amory had not been right and he had not, after all, changed without knowing it. These geniuses were terrible people: there was never any telling what they did not see. As they passed through Hammersmith, Cosimo longed to break out, "I _haven't_ changed, Amory--you'd _know_ I thought more of you than ever if you'd seen the pretty but awfully stupid sort of girl I've been seeing while I've been away--everything we've agreed a self-respecting woman can't be any longer: a mere man's toy, a chattel, property, on sale just as much as if she was in an Oriental slave-market, economically dependent, hopelessly apathetic to everything that's fine and feminist and new----" He knew that Amory would have called that "facing the facts." But something, he knew not what, held him back. Oh, it was none of the things you might have thought--that Amory might make more of it than there had been (indeed, there had been nothing), nor that he realized that the whole truth can never be told, and that the more you explain the more there remains still to be explained, nor that hypocrisy and lack of candour are not without their poor uses when all is said and done. Cosimo would have denied these obsolescent propositions one by one.... So he concluded that he could not be very well either. That must be the reason for his reticence. Pattie's company must have put him a little out of accord with the finer things. Pattie in Shropshire, too, seemed a thought less pretty than did Amory by his side that Sunday morning. If Amory were only a little differently dressed she might be incomparably pretty, as she was already incomparably clever.... But suddenly Amory broke the silence. It was as they approached Ravenscourt Park. "Cosimo," she said slowly--"I've been wondering again----" He waited for her to continue. As she delayed to do so, he said, "What, Amory?" "I've been wondering again--why you don't marry Dorothy." When Amory had said this same thing before, Cosimo had laughed, and with beautiful tact had replied that Dorothy would never have married him: but there was something of the still, of the rapt, about Amory that morning that would have made a laugh an offence. Instead, he said, almost reproachfully, "Oh,--Amory!" "Why don't you?" she continued dreamily. "I hope it's not that mere settling down of opinion that is fatal to real vitality of thought. An _idée fixe_ isn't an _idée_ at all; it's a Law that in course of time thoughts become petrified. Then they've got to be got fluid again. Are you sure that you haven't got Dorothy wrongly classified?" She looked earnestly at him. "But----" he began, but Amory interrupted him gently.