Page:The Climber (Benson).djvu/47

Rh her mind had dozed, partly from laziness, partly from the conviction that everything here was grey and unprofitable, partly, perhaps, her spirit had been like one enjoying the last minutes of sleep and knowing, though instinctively and unconsciously, that the hour of awakening is close at hand. Alert and alive now she certainly was, and she judged and condemned herself for this somnolent year. To make herself complete, to be ready for the fulfilment of her desires, she saw now that this torpor would never do. She had dropped all her Cambridge studies, she had let herself grow rusty in languages, she had scarcely touched the piano in all these months. And worse than all, she had largely lost interest in people; she had labelled Brixham as a town full of "Empties" without really ever troubling to look inside it and see. Very likely she was right, very likely they had all turned into cabbages in this sleepy hollow, but what she had not reckoned with was the risk of turning into a cabbage too.

Lucia had, in addition to the wonderful charm and beauty of bodily presence, a mental gift which is second to none in the securing of a person's aims; she knew her own mind with precision, and had a quiet obstinacy that wore down opposition and obstacles by its unwearying pertinacity. It was not a quality that she wore on her sleeve for all the world to see; on the contrary, she concealed it, showing on the surface only her vivid vitality, her exuberance of spirit which had so charmed Maud, and indeed charmed any to whom she chose to exhibit it. But the unwearying obstinacy was there below it, never asserting itself, never being violent, but being always quite hard and firm like the stone of some soft plum with smooth bloom on its skin, and golden ripeness within. It was only when you bit to the centre, so to speak, that you found it at all. And this morning, standing hatless on the dewy down, in the dawn of the day and the dawn of her womanhood, she bit deep into herself, and found it there, hard and cool.

She brought back with her long sprays of the flowering hawthorn, and before the aunts came down, had put them in water in the two large cut-glass vases that stood in the hall, and would certainly have been described by an auctioneer as "very handsome." This, however, was not a very happy inspiration, for Aunt Elizabeth was instantly seized with such a violent access of hay- fever that the banisters of the stairs, as she came down, shook under the tempest of her sneezing, and Lucia, guessing the cause, took the handsome vases out into the garden, and came