“I can’t imagine,” said Daisy. “She’s got everything she wants now. Perhaps they’ll just hoard it, in order that when Pepino dies we may all see how much richer he was than we ever imagined. That’s too posthumous for me. Give me what I want now, and a pauper’s funeral afterward.”
“Me too,” said Georgie, waving his leg. “But I don’t think Lucia will do that. It did occur to me——”
“The house in London, you mean,” said Daisy, swiftly interrupting. “Of course if they kept both houses open, with a staff in each, so that they could run up and down as they chose, that would make a big hole in it. Lucia has always said that she couldn’t live in London, but she may manage it if she’s got a house there.”
“I’m dining with her to-night,” said Georgie. “Perhaps she’ll say something.”
Mrs. Quantock was very thirsty with her gardening, and the tea was very hot. She poured it into her saucer and blew on it.
“Lucia would be wise not to waste any time,” she said, “if she intends to have any fun out of it, for, you know, Georgie, we’re beginning to get old. I’m fifty-two. How old are you?”
Georgie disliked that barbarous sort of question. He had been the young man of Riseholme so long that the habit was ingrained, and he hardly believed that he was forty-eight.
“Forty-three,” he said, “but what does it matter how old we are, as long as we’re busy and amused? And I’m sure Lucia has got all the energy and life she ever had. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if she made a start in London, and went in for all that. Then of course, there’s Pepino, but he only cares for writing his poetry and looking through his telescope.”
“I hate that telescope,” said Daisy. “He took me up on to the roof the other night and showed me what he said was Mars, and I’ll take my oath he said that the same one was Venus only a week before. But as I couldn’t see anything either time, it didn’t make much difference.”
The door opened, and Mr. Quantock came in. Robert was like a little round brown sarcastic beetle. Georgie got up to greet him, and stood in the full blaze of the light. Robert certainly saw his trousers, for his eyes seemed unable to quit the spreading folds that lay round Georgie’s ankles: he looked at them as if he was Cortez and they some new planet. Then without a word he folded his arms and danced a few steps of what was clearly meant to be a sailor’s hornpipe.