But Cosimo must be saved for the Cause quickly, for he was giving up his studio in March, and once he got away again he might fall into the hands of the designing woman whose existence Amory had suspected. She knew those designing women. She knew them by the simple process of inversion of everything that was noble within herself. Amory had only seen Dorothy Lennard once since the afternoon when Dorothy had promised to see what she could do about Croziers' contract. That had been when Dorothy had come to tell her of the mitigation of its rigour she had secured from Hamilton Dix. But, finding herself in Oxford Street one afternoon, she sought Hallowells', and tried to find her way upstairs to the fashion-studio. "Tried," one says, for nearly twenty minutes Amory was hopelessly lost in the wilderness that seemed to grow ever more and more complicated as the time fixed for the opening drew nearer. It was during her wandering through this labyrinth that Amory received a shock. Passing along a corridor of such vast length that she seemed to be looking at it through the wrong end of a pair of opera-glasses, she entered a large apartment where three women on their knees polished the floor. There she saw a large historical painting. It was the picture of Queen Bess, Sir Walter, and the Cloak. Her first impulse was to fall back; her second one, which she obeyed, was to stand her ground, to put her head back and a little on one side, and to smile defiantly, indulgently, truculently, all three. It was as if she said to the picture, "We meet unexpectedly, but since we are here we may as well have a few words together, you and I!" A certain amount of skill, manual and ocular, had gone to the making of the picture--enough, as we have seen, to "hit" Mr. Miller "right there." Perhaps that was the reason why it hit Amory right there too, though in the contrary sense. She stepped forward and examined it near; then she stepped back and examined it at a distance. As she did so, a man in an astrachan-collared overcoat and an indented grey hat hurried past, dropping his cigar and uncovering his head as he found himself in the presence of a lady, even one he did not know; and then Amory continued her gazing.