ucia) seemed anxious to precipitate
matters, and Jewdwine in his soul abhorred precipitancy. Edith, too,
was secretly alarmed, and Lucia could read secrets. But it was to
avoid both a grossly pathetic appeal to the emotions and an appearance
of collusion with the intrigues of Fate that Lucia had feigned
recovery and betaken herself to Sophie in Tavistock Place, before, and
(this was subtlety again), well before the return of Horace from his
holiday. And if the awful reflection visited her that this step might
prove to be a more importunate appeal than any, to be a positive
forcing of his hand, Edith had dissipated it by showing very plainly
that the appeal was to their pride and not their pity.

Lucia did not consider herself by any means an object of pity. She was
happy. The absence of intolerable tension was enough to make her so.
As for the society she was thrown with, after the wear of incessant
subtleties and uncertainties there was something positively soothing
in straightforward uninspired vulgarity. These people knew their own
minds, if their minds were not worth knowing; and that was something.
It seemed to her that her own mind was growing healthier every day;
till, by the time Edith visited her, there was no need to feign
recovery, for recovery had come. And with it had come many benign and
salutary things; the old delicious joy of giving pleasure; a new sense
of the redeeming and atoning pathos of the world; all manner of sweet
compunctions and tender tolerances; the divine chance, she told
herself, for all the charities in which she might have failed. There
had come Sophie. And there had come, at last, in spite of everything,
Keith Rickman.

As for Keith Rickman, her interest in him was not only a strong
personal matter, but it had been part of the cool intellectual game
she had played, for Horace's distraction and her own deception; a game
which Horace, with his subterfuges and suppressions, had not played
fair. But when, seeking to excuse him, she began to consider the
possible motives of her cousin's behaviour, Lucia was profoundly
disturbed.

It had come to this: if Horace had cared for her he might have had a
right to interfere. But he did not care. Therefore, no interference,
she vowed, should come between her and her friendship for the poet who
had honoured her by trusting her. She could not help feeling a little
bitter with Horace for the harm he had done her, or rather, might have
done her in K