Lucia in London

LUCIA IN LONDON
BY E. F. BENSON Pharisees and Publicans Mezzanine Visible and Invisible Dodo Dodo Wonders Robin Linnet Queen Lucia Miss Mapp Colin Colin II Rex Alan David Blaize of King’s Peter Lovers and Friends Across the Stream Up and Down An Autumn Sowing The Tortoise David Blaize David Blaize and the Blue Door Michael The Oakleyites Arundel Our Family Affairs
A Novel by : : : E. F. Benson
DOUBLEDAY, DORAN & COMPANY, INC. GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 1928 COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK.
CONSIDERING that Philip Lucas’s aunt who died early in April was no less than eighty-three years old, and had spent the last seven of them bedridden in a private lunatic asylum, it had been generally and perhaps reasonably hoped among his friends and those of his wife that the bereavement would not be regarded by either of them as an intolerable tragedy. Mrs. Quantock, in fact, who, like everybody else at Riseholme, had sent a neat little note of condolence to Mrs. Lucas, had, without using the actual words “happy release,” certainly implied it or its close equivalent.
She was hoping that there would be a reply to it, for though she had said in her note that her dear Lucia mustn’t dream of answering it, that was a mere figure of speech, and she had instructed her parlour-maid who took it across to “The Hurst” immediately after lunch to say that she didn’t know if there was an answer, and would wait to see, for Mrs. Lucas might perhaps give a little hint ever so vaguely about what the expectations were concerning which everybody was dying to get information....
While she waited for this, Daisy Quantock was busy, like everybody else in the village on this beautiful afternoon of spring, with her garden, hacking about with a small but destructive fork in her flower-beds. She was a gardener of the ruthless type, and went for any small green thing that incautiously showed a timid spike above the earth, suspecting it of being a weed. She had had a slight difference with the professional gardener who had hitherto worked for her on three afternoons during the week, and had told him that his services were no longer required. She meant to do her gardening herself this year, and was confident that a profusion of beautiful flowers and a plethora of delicious vegetables would be the result. At the end of her garden path was a barrow of rich manure, which she proposed, when she had finished the slaughter of the innocents, to dig into the depopulated beds. On the other side of her paling her neighbour Georgie Pillson was rolling his strip of lawn, on which during the summer he often played croquet on a small scale. Occasionally they shouted remarks to each other, but as they got more and more out of breath with their exertions the remarks got fewer. Mrs. Quantock’s last question had been “What do you do with slugs, Georgie?” and George had panted out, “Pretend you don’t see them.”