t was
intolerable to think of Lucia mixing with the sort of people whom
nobody but Goodness ever does know; but, after all, she wouldn't mix
with them; she hadn't had time to; and if instantly removed from the
place of contamination she might yet be presented to society again
without spot or taint. But it was not all. Out of the many hundred
base abodes of Bloomsbury Lucia had picked out the one house she ought
to have avoided, the one address which for five years her cousin
Horace had been endeavouring to conceal from her; it being the address
of the one disreputable, the one impossible person of his
acquaintance. Rickman had appeared, as strange people sometimes did,
at Edith's court; an appearance easily explained and justified by the
fact that he was a genius of whom Horace Jewdwine hoped great things.
But he had never been suffered in that salon when Lucia had been
there. Horace had taken untold pains, he had even lied frequently and
elaborately, to prevent Lucia's encountering, were it only by
accident, that one impossible person; and here she was living,
actually living in the same house with him. Even if Rickman could be
trusted to efface himself (which wasn't very likely; for if there is
anything more irrepressible than a cockney vulgarian it is a poet; and
Rickman was both!), could they, could anybody trust Lucia and her
idiotic impulse to be kind? To be kind at any cost. She never
calculated the cost of anything; which was another irritating
reflection for Miss Jewdwine. Poor as she was, she thought nothing of
paying twenty-five or thirty shillings for her board and a miserable
lodging, when she might--she ought--to have been living with her
relations free of all expense. But there was the sting, the
unspeakable sting; for it meant that Lucia would do anything, pay
anything, rather than stop another week in Hampstead. And Edith knew
that it was she who had made Lucia feel like that; she who had driven
her to this deplorable step. Not by anything done, or said, or even
implied; but by things not done, things not said, things darkly or
passionately thought. For Lucia, with her terrible gift of intuition,
must somehow have known all the time what Edith hardly knew, what at
least she would never have recognized if she had not observed the
effect on Lucia. Edith had no patience with people who were so
abominably sensitive. It was all nerves, nerves, nerves. Lucia was and
always had been hopelessly neurotic. And if