Page:The Climber (Benson).djvu/95

Rh parlour-maid here called Jane. She used to sing "Two Lovely Black Eyes" when she was washing up. But now she sings the melody of the first movement of the "Unfinished." It is quite excruciating, but recognizable. That is the principle; multiply it by a hundred thousand for your own case."

He laughed.

"This very provincial town?" he suggested, leading her back, and wishing Aunt Cathie did not walk so quickly up the garden path.

"Yes; we want to be stirred, to be made busy with beautiful things. Set us an example, for, as I said, there is no instinct so strong as the imitative, and—ah, dear Aunt Cathie, how are the beans?"

Lucia rose, as if to join her aunt. Then she turned to him once more, and spoke quickly and low the last private words they would have together just now.

"Show us a man who does not live on the suburban scale," she said, "who is wide and busy. We want—we want radium!"

Edgar went back to Brayton that afternoon with a braced and tingling mind. Lucia had put into words for him all that had been as yet but of the consistency of thought. Her ideal life, it seemed, was just the ideal life which he had intended and meant to aim at and to realize, but which hitherto had seemed distant and elusive. She, with her practical grasp, had taken him and led him right up to it, made him look it in the face, made him convince himself that the stuff of which his dreams were made was capable of being materialized. She did not shirk the details or blur the outlines of them; she did not, either, shirk the difficulties, or think that the artistic intellectual life which he wanted to bring within the reach of those round him was to be done by putting Botticellis in the still-room and copies of standard works in the stables. And how right she was throughout! He must create the atmosphere, which should spread like the flooding light of dawn, not manufacture little pillules of culture and give them to other people to eat. How well she understood!

Though he knew that it was he who was to be the centre of this, and though that knowledge intensely gratified him, he scarcely thought of himself as the centre, but of the rest of the circle to its farthest circumference. What if a great renaissance, a return to the love of art, of culture, began to dawn? Mixed with the senseless and selfish expenditure that went on in the world, he