She was even nobler in her confession of weakness than she had been in the strength and rush of her outburst. Again, for no reason that he could have explained, Cosimo felt a brute.... He paw this bright little creature, as the odious Dix had done? He sully a thing so radiant as their relation with--pawing? Suddenly Cosimo found himself disliking Mr. Hamilton Dix more intensely than he had ever done before. Amory, for her part--though she did not know whose--rather fancied that she had put a spoke into somebody's wheel. V BOND AND FREE The truth was, Amory presently began to tell herself, that Cosimo's life was in danger of becoming rather an aimless sort of thing. Few people knew the perils of aimlessness so well as did Amory Towers. She knew them because for a time she had suffered them in her own thought and work. But that was all past now. She had begun to work again. The foundations of a real picture were being laid at last. This was the famous canvas, "Barrage," that afterwards made her name. None knew better than Amory herself its shortcomings as mere painting, but she had learned in bitterness that issues greater than those of painting were at stake to-day. To-day or never was the time to do all the things that had never been done. Accordingly, her picture was partly a painting and partly a sociological symbol. It was, as far as it was at present designed, a medley in which, before a series of guarded cave-mouths and dropped portcullises and defended doors, women of the various stages of civilization were grouped with men. Now they were in the attitude of menials at their feet, or hewing their wood, or drawing their water; anon, set on high pedestals, before which men made mock reverences, they stood wreathed with roses from beneath which iron fetters peeped grimly forth; and later, in apotheosis, Womanhood herself walked by man's side, equal, sworded, flashing and free. If something of a likeness to Amory herself was to be traced in all these figures, every artist who works in a single room knows how frequently, for lack of pence, he must use himself as a model. It was this picture, of which more later, that enabled Amory to see so clearly the peril that beset Cosimo.