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
To anticipate a little: those contingent results of the enormous
publicity that was presently given to "Barrage" came duly to pass.
Croziers' sold all but two of those old Saturday-night street-markets
of hers at prices that varied from ten to thirty pounds apiece. Their
numerous charges and commissions struck Amory as merely capacious;
for all that, she received a series of cheques that totted up in all
to more than four hundred pounds; and in several articles he wrote
on the astonishing combination of human sympathy and pure idealism
that distinguished the work of Miss Towers from the work of all other
living artists, Mr. Hamilton Dix fairly let himself go. This was when
"Barrage" left London for Manchester, Liverpool, and the North, to
draw its thousands of visitors per week and to be chosen as a popular
and attractive text, though with various applications, by half the
Nonconformist ministers in the land; and one of the curious little
after-effects of the enterprise was to show how entirely right Mr.
Miller was when he said that the mere advertising "stunt" was over,
and that advertising, to be effective to-day, must attach itself to
something higher than itself. He would have attached a drapery business
to the Royal Standard; but the feminist picture did even better. The
"Barrage" turnstiles took their toll of shillings that were really the
sinews of a Holy War.
Nothing, in Cosimo's opinion, could have been more simple and
unaffected and fine than the way in which Amory still stuck to the
shabby little studio in Cheyne Walk. More than once he protested, but
she lifted her eyes to him and asked him, Was it not enough? The roof
kept out the rain; the door kept out intruders; and she could open the
diamond-latticed window and look at the stars whenever she liked. She
liked the solitude, she said; out of just such a solitude the strength
must be gathered that is to be put to the service of the multitude.
She did sometimes sigh for the country; she was not sure that soon
she might not take a trip away somewhere, a longish one, quite alone;
she had always promised herself such a trip, to Italy, but the loved
servitude of her career had never permitted her to get farther than
Paris; but now there was nothing to keep her in England. She might even
go and live permanently abroad, working for the Cause from wherever it
might be. But wherever she went, Cosimo must not suppose she would ever
forget him. She would write to him quite frequently. And he must write
to her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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