Page:The Climber (Benson).djvu/19

Rh Fancy being reclaimed when you didn't want to! That is quite an unwarrantable thing to do."

Maud again stiffened.

"Oh, Lucia, you are talking nonsense," she said. "Do stop and let me brush your hair."

Lucia suddenly pulled her feet out of the rug and clasped her hands round her knees.

"But it isn't nonsense," she said. "It is interfering with a person's liberty to try to make him better, if he wants to be worse. He has got a right to be worse if he likes. Everybody is himself and especially herself, if you see what I mean."

"I don't quite," said Maud.

"Then it's very stupid of you. What I mean is that women know more about themselves, and assert their natures more than men do. Look at the undergraduates at Cambridge. They are all exactly alike. They all smoke pipes, and flirt if they have a chance, and wear the same clothes, and play games. I don't think I like men. But they like me."

That was so frightfully true that Maud could not deny it. But in the barest justice it is due to Lucia to say that she made this statement without complacency, but with complete unconcern. The immediate sequence of her discourse explained this.

"But among all the bad things which I assuredly am," she continued, "I am not a flirt. I suppose I should be if it amused me. It doesn't. I think—I think I might like a kind old man most awfully, and be willing to kiss him and—and do all that sort of thing. But I don't like young men. Oh, Maud, I am turning round like a person who is being tried on! But I want to go back a bit. It isn't the left side—that's where the heart is supposed to be, isn't it?—that I want you to look at. It's my hat you must look at—my head, my brain. Darling, it isn't a nice one. There's—what shall I say?—too much feather in it."

Maud felt a sudden impulse of loyalty to her friend, though it was Lucia who was depreciating herself.

"There isn't," she said. "Not a scrap. It's just right; it's perfect. It's you."

"That's true anyhow," said Lucia. "It is me. And that's what I have been finding out all this week. I always used to think I hadn't got anything of my own except one hundred pounds a year and a sense of the ridiculous. But I find I have: I've got myself. Not nice, but myself."

Lucia suddenly abandoned the cat-like attitude, and jumped up.