Page:The Climber (Benson).djvu/14

4 cocoa and sandwiches on these occasions; she would have thought it strange to be asked for anything else. These arrangements were of the Mede and Persian order—the human mind (as exhibited in the case of Mrs. Eddis) was incapable of conceiving a different order of things.

But Lucia had a genius for appearing rapturously contented with the ways and manners of other people; at any rate, while she was with them. She had already been complimentary on the subject of the sandwiches, and now she lit her bedroom candle at once.

"Yes, let's go upstairs," she said, "but I warn you that the first step toward going to bed is probably widely removed from the last. I've got heaps to say, simply heaps, and I shan't have another opportunity of saying it for ages. That is one of the penalties of the cold-water cure: nobody, not a soul, down at Brixham understands one single thing!"

Maud laughed.

"How do you manage to communicate, then?" she asked.

"Oh, I have learned their language, you see, though they haven't learned mine. It's quite different. So I talk about their things, which I understand perfectly. There is no misunderstanding possible. What it amounts to is: 'Be good, sweet maid, and in course of time you will become stupid and ugly.' They have, most of them, become it."

Maud took up her candle and followed her friend upstairs. Devoted as she was to Lucia, she often wished that Lucia would not talk like this. She did not believe that the real Lucia was reflected in remarks of this nature, and she concluded therefore that they were insincere, a pose, an affectation, an outcome of surface irritability. She herself was as little a prey to irritability as she was given to poses or affectations, and for a moment it rather hurt her that Lucia should say that the juster name for serious people was stupid people. And it hurt her because, though she did not believe that such a speech, as has been said, represented the real Lucia, she was aware that the real Lucia was slightly intolerant of the qualities which may be called serious. And at this point in her reflections, as she followed her up the rather narrow staircase of this house in Warwick Square, she, as usual, cut them short with a swift application of the loyal knife, and thrilled again with the thought that this wonderful Lucia was her friend.

The two had started an acquaintance that very soon ripened into intimacy at Girton College. Maud, at first sight almost,