Lucia in London

by E. F. Benson

That was something, anyhow, thought Lucia. One distinguished person had gone away from Riseholme. She waited, in slowly diminishing confidence, for Georgie to ask her to dine with him instead. Perhaps he would ask Pepino too, but if not, Pepino would be quite happy with his telescope and his cross-words all by himself. But it was odd and distasteful to wait to be asked to dinner by anybody in Riseholme instead of everyone wanting to be asked by her.

“She went away by the ten-thirty,” said Georgie, after an awful pause.

Lucia had already learned certain lessons in London. If you get a snub—and this seemed very like a snub—the only possible course was to be unaware of it. So, though the thought of being snubbed by Georgie nearly made her swoon, she was unaware of it.

“Such a good train,” she said, magnificently disregarding the well-known fact that it stopped at every station, and crawled in between.

“Excellent,” said Georgie with conviction. He had not the slightest intention of asking Lucia to dine, for he wanted his tête-à-tête with Olga. There would be such a lot to talk over, and besides it would be tiresome to have Lucia there, for she would be sure to gabble away about her wonderful life in London, and her music-room and her Chippendale chairs, and generally to lay down the law. She must be punished too, for her loathsome conduct in disregarding her old friends when she had her party from London, and be made to learn that her old friends were being much smarter than she was.

Lucia kept her end up nobly.

“Well, Georgie, I must trot away,” she said. “Such a lot of people to see. Look in, if you’ve got a spare minute. I’m off again to-morrow. Such a whirl of things in London this week.”

Lucia, instead of proceeding to see lots of people, went back to her house and saw Pepino. He was sitting in the garden in very old clothes, smoking a pipe, and thoroughly enjoying the complete absence of anything to do. He was aware that officially he loved the bustle of London, but it was extremely pleasant to sit in his garden and smoke a pipe, and above all to be rid of those rather hectic people who had talked quite incessantly from morning till night all Sunday. He had given up the cross-word, and was thinking over the material for a sonnet on Tranquillity, when Lucia came out to him.

“I was wondering, Pepino,” she said, “if it would not be pleasanter to go up to town this afternoon. We should get the cool of the evening for our drive, and really, now all our guests have gone, and we are going to-morrow, these hours will be rather tedious. We are spoilt, caro, you and I, by our full life up there, where any moment the telephone bell may ring with some delightful invitation. Of course in August we will be here, and settle down to our quaint old life again, but these little odds and ends of time, you know.”

Pepino was reasonably astonished. Half an hour ago Lucia had set out, burning with enthusiasm to pick up the “old threads,” and now all she seemed to want to do was to drop the old threads as quickly as possible. Though he knew himself to be incapable of following the swift and antic movements of Lucia’s mind, he was capable of putting two and two together. He had been faintly conscious all yesterday that matters were not going precisely as Lucia wished, and knew that her efforts to entice Olga and her guest to the house had been as barren as a fig-tree, but there must have been something more than that. Though not an imaginative man (except in thinking that words rhymed when they did not), it occurred to him that Riseholme was irritated with Lucia, and was indicating it in some unusual manner.