Page:The Climber (Benson).djvu/197

Rh "So, if it please my lord," she said, "I will send a telegram, shall I, to Aunt Cathie, with the warmest welcome for next week? Will that please you?"

Suddenly she paused

"Oh, Edgar," she said, "but we both forgot. We are giving 'Salome' on the Thursday. Tell me, can you imagine Aunt Cathie looking at 'Salome'? If you can, I make my compliments to your imagination. It is brilliant."

Edgar had not thought of that.

"But it's in German," he said rather feebly. "She probably won't understand it."

"John the Baptist's head isn't in German," remarked Lucia.

"It can't be helped," he said, after a pause. "Most likely she will not care to come, when you tell her."

"Ah, when I tell her!" said Lucia softly to herself.

Edgar did not hear this: Lucia had not meant him to. She was not the sort of woman who speaks asides in order to have them heard. When she wanted to be heard, she spoke out loud.

"Indeed, I am not altogether pleased myself that we are going to give it," he said, getting up. "There was that French play, too, which we gave at the end of the week in July, that I think we had better have done without. We don't want it characteristic of the house that you see here plays which the censor would not sanction for the London stage."

"We couldn't help ourselves about 'La Rouille, said Lucia. "The Princess asked us to have it."

Lucia had sat down at a writing-table, and taken from the stationery desk a case of telegraph forms, to send one to Aunt Cathie. Edgar, however, as his habit was when a little agitated, was pacing up and down between two columns of the terrace, four quick steps one way, a quick turn, and four quick steps in the opposite direction. The action in itself always slightly annoyed Lucia; she disliked it also for a further reason—namely, that it implied that Edgar was preparing to discuss something that troubled him. She had begun to hate the word "discussion." She immediately heard it.

"I should like to have a little discussion with you, Lucia," he said, "about several questions which arise from and are connected with what we have just been saying. To begin with, you say we could not help ourselves about 'La Rouille' because the Princess Olga asked us to have it. There I part company with you. I disagree altogether. In the ordering of our house, in