like this, she would see that those who did them were no worse off with her than with anybody else, and perhaps a bit better.... And now she must get off to Cheyne Walk. She rose, and went for her hat and raincoat. "You're not off, are you, Lennie?" said Miss Umpleby. She had finished talking into the telephone. Her last words had been, "Mean old thing!... Well, will you treat me to eighteen-pennorth at the Finbec, then?... Fried plaice and chips?... All right...." "Yes. Another stroke in my unfortunate family, tell Porchester. They came in a cab to fetch me. Good-bye...." She sought the lift, descended, passed along the narrow alley to the side street, and caught an Oxford Street bus. Her reason for leaving early was to warn Amory that guests might be expected at Cheyne Walk that evening. Going out to lunch that day she had met, coming away from the Wallace, a party of her old fellow-students of the McGrath. She had recognized them fifty yards away up Duke Street--tall Cosimo Pratt, without hat and with a grey flannel turned-down collar about his shapely throat, Walter Wyron in his snuff-coloured corduroys, Laura Beamish, Katie Deedes, and two or three other girls in clothes that (it seemed to Dorothy) looked as if a touch of opaque Chinese-white had somehow found its way into clear greens and russets and browns.--"Why, there's Dorothy!" Walter Wyron had exclaimed, turning from the Peasant Industries Shop on the west side of the street. "Hi, Dorothy!..." (Half the street had turned to see who shouted so.) "_Dorothy!_..." (The other half of the street had turned.) "Come here and tell us how's Fashions!..." They had borne Dorothy off to a teashop to lunch. Dorothy sometimes wished that they would find a newer joke than that about her occupation. It seemed to come virgin to them every time they met. It was not as if she had had any illusions about it. Moreover, when you came to think of it, Walter Wyron (much as Dorothy admired his decorative drawings in black and white), only published one of them every three or four months, and lived on his hundred and fifty a year the rest of the time. And handsome Cosimo Pratt had never published a drawing nor exhibited a painting in his life. Of course, even their failures were as much higher than Dorothy's successes as the heavens are higher than the earth: but Miss Porchester would not have trusted one of them with a Summer or Winter Catalogue cover. In her secret heart Dorothy was rather glad that Amory had not accepted her own offer of a day or two before. Mercier was going to do it. And Mercier didn't suppose it would be bought for the nation when it was done.