Page:The Climber (Benson).djvu/178

168 looking nice. In fact, it would be a sort of retreat, with a little music in the evening. No doubt lots of people would come down for the day (underlined) on most of the days, and stop to dinner and go up late, but she particularly wanted the recipient of this note to spend the whole week there. It would be so cool and pleasant to sit in the garden and read books, and not talk unless you felt inclined, and you must come. The notes were all delivered by hand.

Edgar had been simply craven over this experiment.

"They will all refuse," he said, "and where will you be then? You will have to begin all over again, from the very beginning, and, besides, London never forgets a failure!"

Lucia stared at him in blank incomprehension.

"Begin what all over again?" she said. "What do yoi mean? London never forgets a failure? You speak as if I fighting for a place."

"Dear, it is rather strong to expect people to leave town the middle of July," he said.

"Then they won't come," said Lucia, "if they don't want to. I only want, and so do you, to have a quiet week. Personally I believe that plenty of our friends want it too. I may be wrong. If I am, what happens? You and I will have our quiet we alone. I shall—I shall just love it!"

"But the band and the French company?" he asked.

Lucia dimpled at him.

"I'll pay for it all," she said, "if it turns out we are to be alone, out of the ridiculously enormous allowance you give me. It is your birthday that week. But now explain: begin what all over again?"

Edgar felt a thrill of wonder at her, as no doubt she had meant he should do. She seemed genuinely unconscious, so he thought of the wonderful power she was becoming in the microcosm, and the words had slipped from him, betraying his knowledge of that of which she seemed so unaware. It was better to explain.

"I spoke as a spectator," he said, "when I should have spoken as your husband. You are doing such wonderful things, Lucia; you are realizing all your dream for me so completely, that I cannot help sometimes looking on, so to speak, observing how you succeed. But I am wrong; it is only you fulfilling yourself."

"Certainly that is all," she said; "but you still distrust me, not my plan, any more, but my instinct. Wait till we get the answers to my notes."