Page:The Climber (Benson).djvu/188

178 "Do you see what I mean?" she said. "It is that I should consider it a dreadfully stupid thing to do, if I only went on giving Brayton weeks, so to speak. I gave that one because I thought it would amuse people, and because—to be perfectly frank—I wanted to get a foot down firmly. But after that, what next? That was just a bead. What is to be the string? Of course, oneself, one's character, is the string; but what is oneself? I know the shell of it, the case of it, and that is love of art, love of beautiful things, love of worldly success, if you like. Oh, 1 do like that enormously; it is the greatest fun. But in a manner of speaking, that is mine. Now, I want to stand firmly upon all that, and jump somewhere else. Where? Where do you jump to?"

This, again, came from below. Madge Heron had sufficiently considered her answer.

"It depends on your power of wanting," she said, "and what your power of wanting is you must find out for yourself; nobody, except a woman's husband, perhaps, can teach her."

Lucia looked up in a sort of comic dismay.

"Oh, but Edgar can't teach me anything," she said. "I had a rhapsody of wanting once, and rhapsodied to him, and he didn't understand the feeling even. It's I who make him want."

"But you propose to jump hand in hand?" asked Madge.

To herself she added: "She has never loved him."

Lucia puckered up her eyebrows for a moment, but at once grasped this.

"Why, of course," she said. "I never contemplated any other plan."

"She has never loved anybody else," thought Madge.

Lucia leaned forward again.

"He jumps beautifully," she said; "the—the only thing is that he looks back to see what a beautiful jump it has been. But I want to hear more about the string of the necklace. He can't teach me, and I know so little about it myself. Do suggest things."

Madge Heron laughed quietly; she saw now why she knew so little about Lucia, for at present there was so little to know. Lucia had never really dived into herself; she had never really brought up the things that lay in the deep water. Her scoopings, her self-revelation, had all been made in the shallows, just as her tastes, her achievements, had all been affairs of surface currents. But she was conscious anyhow of the possibility of depths, and