And Cosimo sometimes, but of course only as a joke, spoke of her art with a sort of humorous resentment, as a man who is allowed much but is still excluded from one favour might speak of the rival in whose preference he after all concurs. Amory thought that a perfecting touch. Seriousness must be unassailable before such gracious, humorous little liberties can be taken with it.
As they drank their milk and ate their sandwiches that day they laughed together over Aunt Jerry's old-fashioned courtship. Cosimo asked to be told again what Aunt Jerry proposed to wear at her wedding. He had already been told several times, but he had the power, so rare among men, of visualizing a dress from a verbal description, and could carry the precise shade of a ribbon "in his eye" for matching purposes better than Amory herself....
"_Doesn't_ it sound like the year of the Great Exhibition!" he chuckled when Amory had told him.
"The dress?" Amory laughed. "The dress is nothing; it's the whole thing that's like the year of the Great Exhibition! Why, when I asked auntie an ordinary, simple question--whether she thought there would be any babies--she blushed as if she really believed the storks brought them, and implored me not to _dream_ of saying anything of the sort to George! Who to, I should like to know, if not to George? Such absurd false shame!... And this to-day, my dear, if you please, with Forel's book to be had at any French bookseller's, and Altruism and Camaraderie taught at even ordinary schools, and everything thrown open to sensible discussion just as you and I discuss these things! It's too funny!"
"There's only one word for it really--'prurient,'" Cosimo opined.
"Oh, but that's taking it too seriously; I prefer the funny side of it. Babies! Is she expecting butterflies, I wonder?... I did my best for her; I tried to explain what a chromosome was; but it was no good. You've never seen Aunt Jerry; I must have you meet her; she's _so_ like the lady who went to see Anthony and Cleopatra and said it was very unlike the homelife of the dear late Queen!"
Cosimo was silent for a moment; then his voice came authoritatively out of the darkness. Cosimo was not much of a painter, but he really had views that were often quite well worth hearing.