her father had pronounced her, the worst educated
young woman in Europe, there was a sense (not intended by Sir
Frederick) in which her education might be called incomplete. She had
learnt the things that she liked, and she had left unlearnt the things
that she did not like. It was the method of discreet skipping; and it
answered so well in the world of books that she had applied it to the
world of men and women. She knew the people she liked, and she left
unknown those whom she did not like. Here in Harmouth her peculiar art
or instinct of selection earned for her, as Kitty Palliser had lately
told her, the character of exclusiveness. This, by the way was family
tradition again. From time immemorial there had been a certain
well-recognized distance between Court House and the little Georgian
town. And when Harmouth was discovered by a stock-broker and became a
watering-place, and people began to talk about Harmouth society, Court
House remained innocently unaware that anything of the sort existed.
Lucia selected her friends elsewhere with such supreme fastidiousness
that she could count them on the fingers of one hand, her instinct,
like all great natural gifts, being entirely spontaneous and
unconscious.

And now it seemed she had added Mr. Savage Keith Rickman to the list.
She owned quite frankly that in spite of everything she liked him.

But Rickman was right. Lucia with all her insight had not the remotest
conception of his state of mind. The acquaintance had arisen quite
naturally out of her desire to please Horace, and if on this there
supervened a desire to please Mr. Rickman, there was not a particle
of vanity in it. She had no thought of being Mr. Rickman's
inspiration; her attitude to his genius was humbly reverent, her
attitude to his manhood profoundly unconscious. She had preserved a
most formidable innocence. There had been nothing in Horace Jewdwine's
slow and well-regulated courtship to stir her senses, or give her the
smallest inkling of her own power that way. Kitty's suggestion seemed
to her preposterous; it was only the Kittishness of Kitty, and could
have no possible application to herself.

All this was not humility on her part--nothing of the sort. So far
from being humble, Miss Lucia Harden held the superb conviction that
any course she adopted was consecrated by her adoption. It was as if
she had been aware that her nature was rich, and that she could afford
to do what other women couldn't