Page:The Climber (Benson).djvu/90

80 Lucia leaned forward: she wanted a cigarette, rather badly, but she had heard him express his views about women smoking.

"How do you mean?" she said. "I don't think I quite understand."

"You do though," he said, "because you practise all that I am saying. Music, for instance. In town I can go and hear the Queen's Hall orchestra give a perfect performance of Schubert's "Unfinished," but the true musical, intellectual value of it is better known to you, though you only play it on a cottage piano. You make it your own like that; it becomes part of you. It is the same with painting: the man who knows that Velasquez is, into whom Velasquez has entered, needs no more than a mere photograph of Philip the Fourth, or that wonderful Admiral, to give him the full intellectual feast."

Lucia laughed.

"That is a comfortable doctrine for those of us who have to live in poky little houses beside railway embankments," she said. "Or rather I think it is an uncomfortable one, because whenever one feels that one is rusty and suburban and narrow, you tell me that it is one's own fault."

"But you do not feel rusty and suburban and narrow," he said.

"Ah, don't I! don't I!" said Lucia. "Of course you wouldn't see it—I don't mean to be paying you a compliment, and there is nothing for you to acknowledge—but of course when I am with you I don't feel rusty, because you bring even into this poky little house that atmosphere of the world, of culture, of perception, and naturally that makes one forget the rustiness and the narrowness for a time. I used to be worse than I am. I don't mind telling you that. I used to simply despair at ever getting anything out of life here. Then last May, as lately as that, I turned over a new leaf: I played duets with one girl, I gardened with another, I talked French with a third, and Aunt Cathie joined us. Wasn't it darling of her? and to hear her talk French is quite the funniest thing in the world, the old dear! But I don't want to talk about myself; I am sure the secret of life is to get away from oneself. Or rather"

Lucia paused for a moment, letting her eyes grow wide and unfocussed.

"Or rather the secret is to be out all day, is it not?" she said, "and come home to oneself in the evening, so to speak, with flowers gathered in one place and tall grasses in another, and