Page:The Climber (Benson).djvu/187

Rh overtake her, and came into the room some eight yards in advance of him, while he gasped her name out from the neighbourhood of the door.

"Dearest Madge," she said, "and nobody else is here, is there? How heavenly of you! Oh, I wish I had large brown eyes like you, and grey hair! As it is, I lack impressiveness. I've ridden, I've been to see the Rodin Exhibition—I shan't go there again—I've been to my dressmaker, and I want lunch more than I can possibly tell you. How are you?"

"What's the matter with Rodin?" asked Lady Heron.

"I'm not sure that I can explain—yes, perhaps it is that his things are quite small, I mean in actual size, but on a scale as big as a nightmare. Things on a big scale must be of a certain size, just as things on a small scale must be of a certain smallness. You can't have Hercules, or Day or Night or Morning to stand on the top of a clock, any more than you could have a Dresden shepherdess nine feet high. Also, if a man never finished his work at all, you can't help wondering if it is because he can't. Gertie Miller was there, gasping. She has taken to gasping, because she doesn't really know what she feels about a thing, and if she gasps she can't talk. And Charlie and Maud turned up. I rode with Charlie this morning. Do you know, I have scarcely set eyes on you since the Brayton week? I want to ask you such a heap of questions."

"About it? There is no need for any question at all. It was quite beyond question. I don't know anybody else who could have done it like that. It seemed perfectly effortless, and so I suspect that it was most carefully planned."

Lucia nodded.

"I should just think it was," she said. "I tried to leave nothing to chance."

Lucia leaned back in her chair.

"I came here for tuition," she said. "I want you to tell me your plan. It seems to me that anybody who does anything must have a plan, like the string that keeps the beads of a necklace together. It is invisible, but it runs through them all, keeping them together, making a whole of them, instead of a series of detached beads that run into corners and get lost. Or am I wrong?"

Madge Heron considered her answer. She felt that Lucia was talking far below the surface, as it were; she was not talking, at any rate, from the Brayton-week standpoint. But before she answered Lucia went on: