Gray youth: The story of a very modern courtship and a very modern marriageOnions, Oliver
General
Gray youth: The story of a very modern courtship and a very modern marriage
Onions, Oliver
Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction; Women -- Social and moral questions -- Fiction
"The theatre--on Sunday!" Aunt Jerry exclaimed softly.
And Amory and Cosimo left. If they had stayed there would have been
nothing to beat Aunt Jerry's consternation at the idea of going to a
theatre on Sunday.
Hitherto it had not struck Amory that the Manumission League, in paying
her two hundred pounds for "Barrage," had paid a very good price indeed
for a canvas by an artist who, save for a few columns about her by
Mr. Hamilton Dix (who was not to a column or so about anybody on whom
Croziers' wandering eyes might rest), was unknown. Nor had it occurred
to her that the League might want to see its money back again. Dorothy
Lennard might entertain such suspicions, but then Dorothy was of a
suspicious nature, always thinking somebody might be getting the better
of her, and naturally crediting other people with intentions no better
than her own. "I don't like sales outright," Dorothy had said.... And
Amory, too, began to wonder whether righteousness also may not have its
mammon when she first heard, at the Lettuce Grill, of the purpose to
which it was intended to put her picture. It was only a rumour; indeed,
Amory had it from a source no more official than Walter Wyron and Laura
Beamish; but Walter's father was the mainstay of the New Greek Society,
and things that he said had a way of being authentic, and Amory began
to wonder whether she ought not to have had a royalty, or a percentage,
or whatever Dorothy had called it after all. The rumour was to the
effect that, merely as a means of sowing the good seed, "Barrage"
was to be exhibited, not in an ordinary gallery with a hundred other
pictures, but by itself, with drapery round it, set back in a sort of
proscenium, with lights at the top and bottom, and a muffled harmonium
playing sacred music in the next room, and a faint odour of Ruban de
Bruges burning, and other appurtenances of reverence and solemnity.
That converts might be made, the whole of the League's resources were
to be concentrated on the enterprise, and the admission was to be a
shilling. If the picture drew neophytes and shillings enough in London
it was to be taken to the Provinces.
There are twenty shillings in a pound, and in two hundred pounds four
thousand shillings. When four thousand shillings had been taken,
"Barrage," omitting other expenses, would have paid for itself.
Now the League had many times four thousand members in London alone....
A royalty of, say, a penny in the shilling would have worked out at
more than four pounds per thousand....
The League was going to do the thing _very_ thoroughly, and a special
"Barrage" Committee was to be formed....
Two hundred pounds was well enough as far as it went, but there was
going to be increment beyond that, earned really by Amory....
She felt a sharp stab of regret that she had let "Barrage" go for so
little.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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