Page:The Climber (Benson).djvu/284

274 shade on the near side of friendship, as it has been lately. It is that, I may tell you, that has been so universally remarked."

Lucia frowned.

"Ah, what a horrid world!" she said. "As if one mightn't be friendly with one's husband's cousin."

That, again, considering the actual state of affairs, was colossal. Lucia was shocked at the horrid world for putting the right construction on what she was doing. But Madge only wore the faintest smile.

"Horrid or not," she said, "it is the only world with which we have to deal, and if you want it not to be horrid to you, you must make the concessions it insists on. Maud, you see, has been horrid, so you think, too. Perhaps Edgar also."

Lucia considered this. It was wise, but not being so comforting, she did not applaud it.

"Yes, dear Madge," she said.

"As I say, I should continue my very friendly public manner, and have—no private manner at all. Don't see him privately at all—for a time. Give suspicion no scent to follow. For a time, until they whip it off and take it home to its kennel. They are only—only cub-hunting at present. They go home early."

Then an impulse of tremendous inconsistency visited Madge, an inconsistency which every now and then, like some bolt from the blue or sudden earthquake-shock, comes to tempt or, on the other hand, to trouble those who deal most singly with life. She had lived herself with astonishing singleness of purpose, and had consistently taken all that life could be made to give her that was to herself desirable, without considering too closely the cost to others or even distantly what her own soul paid for it. These spiritual cheques were easily signed, and they went to a bank that seemed never to worry her with letters that warned of an overdraft. But now it seemed a pity that Lucia should take the same path as she had taken. The world offered her everything. How good it would be to see the rejection of the forbidden fruit. Yes, it was forbidden; and whether she herself had fed or not on forbidden things even to the extent of making a diet of them, seemed for the moment not to matter. Dimly, and almost dumbly, till the words broke through the barrier of the sense of her own utter inconsistency, she longed to urge Lucia to do as she herself had not done. It might have been but a whet to a jaded appetite to see herself in the rôle of preacher, but she cared not whence the impulse came. She wanted to see