"You see, Amory, it's the swing of the pendulum. Action and re-action. Perfectly simple. Take wearing stays, for example. What woman to-day would think of wearing the stays they used to wear? Half the women we know wear none at all, and the other half only these ribbon corsets. And it's just the same with their views on marriage. They make such mysteries about it, and what's the result? Why, in trying to make it impossibly beautiful they miss the real beauty that's there all the time, the beauty of the physical process. We have to rediscover that to-day. And we've got a whole lot of abolishing to do before we can begin. Sorry to have to abolish your aunt, but really, as you say, Amory, we haven't time to-day to waste on people who marry and expect to have butterflies."
Sometimes Amory wondered whether these daring and illuminating talks with Cosimo were altogether a good thing for her art. They sometimes seemed to enlarge her ideas _too_ much. It was difficult, with a common brush and an ordinary canvas and a paint-box like anybody else's, to express the true philosophical meaning of the heart of things as Cosimo sometimes set that meaning forth; or rather, she could explain what she meant, but could not always make it explain itself. She expressed this doubt to Cosimo now, and found him quite extraordinarily full of help.
"I know," he said thoughtfully. "It's hard, but it's what you've got to do, Amory. It's your job. Fundamental brainwork, as Rossetti said. The old traditions are _epuisées_--worn out; in making the new one you must say to yourself, 'Is this that I am doing merely a repetition, or does it belong to the age that has--well, say, wireless telegraphy?' I don't mean that you've got to muddle yourself, of course; that's the other danger: like Scylla and Charybdis; there are always two dangers, underdoing and overdoing; it's a Law. What I mean is that your art must be _the_ thing. See what I mean? Break fresh ground. Do something new. Say to yourself 'I'm going to do something new.' That's what the Pre-Raphaelites did, and look at Ford Madox Brown! As I say, it's the swing of the pendulum; action and re----(Hallo, here's Mrs. 'Ill--listen to her cough).... What a dreadful cold you have, Mrs. 'Ill!"