Cosimo may not have seen, but he was at any rate silenced. A new fear had seized on him now. Hitherto he had taken this question of "compromising" very much at Amory's valuation, without overmuch thought about it on his own account; but now--now that he had had his hair cut--that irrational conventional point of view refused to be altogether banished. Though it came late and should have come earlier, perhaps he ought to consider her a little more; indeed, things being so hatefully as they seemed to be, it might be better if, for some time to come at any rate, they were less together than they had been in the past. The thought afflicted him with a melancholy sense of loneliness and hopelessness; he felt a little as a man feels after a weakening attack of influenza. Something he had grown to need he must now be more or less deprived of.... But again, as he mumbled something of this kind, Amory came out shining and magnificent. Not go on precisely as before? Why (she exclaimed) that would be the next worst thing to marrying! If any difference was to be made at all, they must be seen even _more_ constantly together than before! Just as the League sometimes overstated things in order that those things should "carry," so even by a slight parade of intimacy they must enter their protest. To weaken now would never, never do! Surely Cosimo saw _that_? So they dined that night at the Lettuce Grill, in St. Martins Lane, and Amory had never been more trenchant and brilliant, more bright and tender and free and brave. And after dinner they joined a larger party at one of the long tables, and Walter Wyron and Laura Beamish dropped in, and everybody was absolutely at his and her best, and it was almost like a larger and more responsible McGrath over again, and the Dawn, if emotion and enthusiasm and resolve counted for anything at all, was hastened that night by several years. And before the party broke up Amory definitely clinched the sale of "Barrage".... And Cosimo was pensive and abstracted now. He saw, not only how right Amory was in everything she said and did, but how temerarious he himself had been when, that afternoon, he had said, almost as if he had been making a sacrifice, that a being so daring and dashing and gloriously winged must of course marry him. There was no of course about it. It would be she, not he, who would be making the sacrifice. He would be lucky to get her. Laura Beamish, whispering to him that Amory, drinking to the Dawn in the Lettuce Grill's Unfermented Grape-fruit Moselle, was stunningly pretty, told Cosimo nothing that he could not now see for himself.