Part 32 (1/2)

He looked again at the portrait, but the likeness had vanished. In the frank sensuality of Sir Frederick's crimson smirk he could find no affinity to Lucia's grave and tender smile.

”There are some things,” he said to himself, ”that she could never see.”

CHAPTER XXV

If Lucia was not, as her father had p.r.o.nounced 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 att.i.tude to his genius was humbly reverent, her att.i.tude to his manhood profoundly unconscious. She had preserved a most formidable innocence. There had been nothing in Horace Jewdwine's slow and well-regulated courts.h.i.+p 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; ”there were ways,” she would say, ”of doing them.”

And in Mr. Savage Keith Rickman she had divined a nature no less generously gifted. He could afford to take what she could afford to offer; better still, he would take just so much and no more. With some people certain possibilities were moral miracles; and her instinct told her that this man's mind was incapable of vulgar misconception.

She was safe with him. These things she pondered during that brief time when Rickman lingered in the portrait gallery.

He saw her again that night for yet another moment. Lucia was called back into the picture gallery by the voice of Kitty Palliser, whose return coincided with his departure. Kitty, from the safe threshold of the drawing-room, looked back after his retreating figure.

”Poor darling, he has dressed himself with care.”

”He always does. He has broken every literary convention.”

Lucia drew Kitty into the room and shut the door.

”Has he been trying any more experiments in diminished friction on polished surfaces?”

”No; there was a good deal more repose about him after you left. The friction was decidedly diminished. What do you think of him?”

”Oh, I rather like the way he drops his aitches. It gives a pathetic piquancy to his conversation.”

”Don't Kitty.”

”I won't. But, after all, how do we know that this young man is not a fraud?”

”How do we know anything?”

”Oh, if you're going to be metaphysical, _I_'m off to my little bed.”

”Not yet, Kitty. Sit down and toast your toes. I want to talk to you.”

”All right, fire away.”

But Lucia hesitated; Kitty was in an unpropitious mood.

”What do you think I've done?” she said.