For Amory forgot the slight and constant bitterness of having sold "Barrage" outright in the renown that was now hers. Virtually, by an omission so ludicrously accidental that even Dorothy Lennard had noticed it (so, in these miserable mercenary matters, has the small mind the advantage over the great one), she was pouring streams of gold into the League's war-chest. She solaced herself with that thought--but she intended to see that matters were placed on a very different footing next time. She did not know that there could be no next time. She did not know that though her signature might now be clamoured for by the advertisers of Brain Foods and Hair Washes, Dentifrices and the makers of Portia Caps, the public does not rise to the same fly twice. There was to be no successor to "Barrage." She might paint--she did paint--all those other fiery-cross canvases, the White Slave canvas, the Tuberculosis canvas, the State Motherhood canvas, and the rest, but she remained Miss Amory Towers, the painter of the famous feminist picture, "Barrage." And presently there grew up a cult of her finer but unrecognized masterpieces. Cosimo began it later, when he set about the writing of the _Life and Work of Amory Towers_. It became a test of your knowledge and discrimination. Your lip, if you were really one of the elect, curled a little at the mention of "Barrage"; not (you were expected, if you were a superior person, to say) that "Barrage" was not all very well in its way; popular and so forth; but--did your hearer know the "Tuberculosis" canvas? _That_ was the true Towers. So it was in this pluperfect esteem that Amory by and by came to bask, with Cosimo as her showman.
Benighted Dorothy Lennard, on the other hand, fluked into _her_ wretched success by sheer luck. She had never an ideal to her name, never realized that the best possession to which she could lay claim was a certain knack, a certain low business cunning. And it was only to be expected that this should pay her, in mere despicable cash, twenty times as well as Amory's purer _awen_ had paid. Amory was not in the least envious. Poor Dorothy would need it all, and more. However rich she became, she could never become a prophet; she might become a millionaire, but she could never qualify for the martyr's crown. Amory hoped her money might make her happy. But she did not see how it could.