Page:The Climber (Benson).djvu/157

Rh "I think that is why I like him," he said. "He spends the whole day in his office, and personally reads every paragraph that is to come out in the Daily Review."

"I should expect that," said Lucia incisively. "I know now why it is so unreadable. It reeks of responsibility."

"You are rather down on a sense of responsibility to-day," he remarked.

"Yes; I think it is the fault of Chaucer. I like the 'smalë fowlës maken melodie' better. They are so improvident and irresponsible. Sometimes, do you know, sometimes I wish you had been a labourer, with eighteen shillings a week. Then on Friday evening we would have gone to the Queen's Hall with the last two shillings, and have had nothing to eat till you got your wages on Saturday. Oh, Edgar, it is delightful to be rich, but I wonder sometimes whether it would not be more exquisite to be poor. To do things we can't really afford! I think one would value them more. If you just manage to get something, you like it better than if you get it quite easily."

Lucia had gone too far; she had roused what she did not intend to rouse.

"How often have I wished that!" he said. "I wish I had been a breaker of stones on the road opposite Fair View. You and I would have been together now, just the same. And we could have denied ourselves for the sake of what we loved. You would have whistled the 'Unfinished' to me again. You whistled it from an upper window when I called on the day of our cricket-match. So it has become not Schubert only, but you and Schubert."

Lucia laughed.

"After all, Schubert began," she said. "You might call it Schubert and me, not me and Schubert."

"But he left it unfinished until you came," said Edgar.

He felt what he said; it was a lover's speech, but he could not help being neat over it.

Lover and killer of romance! Lucia hardly knew in which character she found him most difficult to respond to. Sometimes he killed external romance, when she believed it was just on the point of becoming luminous to her; sometimes, as now, he suddenly hoisted the flag of internal romance, and she had to be the wind to make it wave. And there was not a breath of air in all her welkin. She had, so she pictured it to herself, to go swarming up the flagstaff, and with her hand pull out the flag, and hold it extended, so that he might think it was waving.