Page:The Climber (Benson).djvu/20

10 "I want, I want," she cried, "like those little people in the Blake drawing, putting the ladder up to the moon. But I don't want the moon at all, thank you. I want horses and carriages and motor-cars and dances and theatres and money. I used always to enjoy those things when they came in my way, but now I find they are what I want. It's a sad revelation, isn't it? It means I am worldly and material, and all the rest of the unedifying things on which our affections shouldn't be set, but there it is. I have been nobody before: now I am beginning to be myself. Not a nice self, oh, not nice at all, but it is so much better to be oneself than to be nobody."

Maud's natural reticence became intensely embarrassing to her, so embarrassing as to make her very self-conscious for the moment. She felt herself desiring to "take a line" with Lucia, instead of taking it. But it was Lucia's sudden and perplexing consciousness of herself that induced it, though that self-consciousness was so different in form from hers that it seemed to be but ironical to call it by the same name. Then Lucia's attack of this distressing symptom left her, and she became cruelly critical instead.

"I love you, Maud," she said. "You are all that I ought to want to be. But I don't. You are kind, and good, and sympathetic, and above all you are fond of me. That, after all, is the quality one likes best in others."

"But you said just now you didn't like men who liked you," remarked Maud.

Lucia waved her hands in a sort of impotent despair.

"Well, what if I did? It was inconsistent, I suppose. But what's the good of being consistent? It is the dullest possible state to be in. I wish you wouldn't interrupt when the spirit of—anything you like—is upon me."

Maud was obediently silent. It appeared that this attitude did not suit Lucia any better.

"Darling, you are dignifiedly mute," she said. "You adopt a disapproving silence, like Aunt Cathie when she hasn't anything to say. It does irritate me so."

"Well, then, you are talking nonsense," said Maud firmly.

"You said that before."

"Because you talked nonsense before."

Lucia took a turn or two up and down the room before she answered, setting square to each other the candles on her dressing-table, and pulling up the blind a little so that its wooden binder no longer tapped against the edge of the open window. She