"I don't think you quite understand, Dorothy. You see, it isn't like those other things Croziers' got. Those were just knocked off. I don't want to be conceited about 'Barrage,' but it has rather taken it out of me, in thought and emotion and those things. I've been feeling a perfect rag after a day at it. Of course, there were heaps of things I should like to do to it, but 'No,' I said that morning, 'you've expressed yourself, and if you began tickling it up here and there you'd only take away from the fierce meaning of it.' So I threw my brushes down, and then collapsed--perfectly limp." "Oh!" said Dorothy deferentially. She herself had once collapsed during a spring rush, but that had been a quite inferior collapsing, from too long hours simply, not from any emotional strain. But Amory misinterpreted her mild and respectful "Oh!" She spoke rather sweetly. "Of course I must live, and nobody can say I don't live frugally. But that apart, I don't do this for money at all. I do it because of my beliefs." "Oh!" said Dorothy again, this time very much as some gallant monarch might have protested that he never meddled with the beliefs of ladies. "I know," Amory continued firmly, "that there are some things we don't agree on, and of course I think I'm right and you're wrong, or I shouldn't believe what I do. But I do think that that picture in there," she made a little vague pointing movement, "preaches--well, a perfectly damnable lesson--from the feminist point of view perfectly damnable." "I--I don't think it's meant to," Dorothy ventured to say. "I don't so much mind it really--not that it pretends to be very much--but parts of it are quite like something, and I think painting has to be like things when all's said and done--I mean--certain sorts of painting----" It was rather a tickling experience for Amory to be schooled by a fashion-artist on "sorts of painting," and she wished Cosimo had been there to hear. And on these lines she knew that she could play with Dorothy as a cat plays with a mouse. So she was beginning, "Oh, why must painting necessarily be 'like' things, as you say? Is it a Law? Do tell me!" when suddenly Dorothy took her back altogether. For all the world as if both of them had been talking about one thing and thinking of another all the time, Dorothy boiled up. "Oh, Amory, you do make me so cross!" she cried. "Really, to hear you sometimes, nobody would think an awfully pretty girl was talking! Who cares a button about your opinions, with looks like yours? I could understand it if you were plain! I do wish you could manage to be a bit more like a human being; why don't you put on some clothes like other people's, instead of always dressing as if you were going to have a baby? Can't you take an interest in things, instead of always moping the way you do? Why, you might be a superfluous woman yourself!"