Dorothy turned quickly. "Oh, Amory, don't be so silly!" she broke out. "Of course it doesn't matter a button to us whether you sign it or not, but I thought you might as well. Nobody need sign it for that matter, but we have our space, and it's a pity to waste this rain. And I really could get you the complete outfit, boots and all. As well as getting your name before the public. But don't if you don't want." Amory lifted her shallow (but penetrating) eyes. "Well, dear--if it were _really_ necessary--especially after all your kindness--but as you say it isn't--if you wouldn't very much mind--I think my signature looks better on my pictures----" "All right. It doesn't matter," said Dorothy. "I'll let you know how I go on with Mr. Dix----" And she was gone, once more to put the Ararat and the Japhet Boots to the test of the heaviest rainfall for eighteen years. No sooner was her back turned than Amory, flinging aside the curtain on its little rail, lay down on her unmade bed. She had the promise of her ten pounds, but it had cost its price. It had cost it in forbearance. Still, that was no more than all the poets and seers and souls dedicated to art had had to suffer before her, and she, like them, had kept her ideal unsullied. But she was disappointed in Dorothy. II A DAMSEL ERRANT More and more as she thought it over, Amory was glad that she was not going to see Mr. Hamilton Dix again. Excepting always Cosimo, who was different, she had begun to have a poor opinion of men. And as this opinion was based, not on her reading of Association books, nor on anything Laura Beamish or Katie Deedes had told her, but on her own unshakable and inalienable experience, it is perhaps worth a moment's examination. By no means, then, did she now think men the efficient, capable creatures they appeared to consider themselves to be. Amory knew men; she knew two of them, no fewer. One of these two men had inveigled her into an all-but-fraudulent contract; the other, definitely fraudulently, had absconded with the funds that had provided Amory Towers with an income of a pound a week, and was not very likely ever to be heard of again. We all speak of the world as we find it. This was the world as Amory had found it; and, since the total sum of the world's wrong and cruelty was admittedly enormous, what more natural than to try to gauge its enormousness by a process of multiplication? Amory, sternly and deliberately setting her painting aside until she should have come to some really basic conclusion on these points, began to multiply.