Lucia gave him his tea, and presently getting up, reseated herself negligently on the sofa beside Stephen. She was a shade too close at first, and edged slightly away.
“Wonderful play of Tchekov’s the other day,” she said. “Such a strange, unhappy atmosphere. We came out, didn’t we, Stephen, feeling as if we had been in some remote dream. I saw you there, Lord Tony, with Adele who had been lunching with me.”
Tony knew that: was not that the birthday of the Luciaphils?
“It was a dream I wasn’t sorry to wake from,” he said. “I found it a boring dream.”
“Ah, how can you say so? Such an experience! I felt as if the woe of a thousand years had come upon me, some old anguish which I had forgotten. With the effect, too, that I wanted to live more fully and vividly than ever, till the dusk closed round.”
Stephen waved his hands, as he edged a little further away from Lucia. There was something strange about Lucia to-day. In those few minutes when they had been alone she had been quite normal, but both before, when Adele was here, and now after Lord Limpsfield’s entry, she seemed to be implying a certain intimacy, to which he felt he ought to respond.
“Morbid fancies, Lucia,” he said, “I sha’n’t let you go to a Tchekov play again.”
“Horrid boy,” said Lucia daringly. “But that’s the way with all you men. You want women to be gay and bright and thoughtless, and have no other ideas except to amuse you. I sha’n’t ever talk to either of you again about my real feelings. We will talk about the trial to-day. My entire sympathies are with Babs, Lord Tony. I’m sure yours are too.”
Lord Limpsfield left Stephen there when he took his leave, after a quarter of an hour’s lighter conversation, and as nobody else dropped in, Lucia only asked her lover to dine on two or three nights the next week, to meet her at the private view of Herbert Alton’s Exhibition next morning, and let him go in a slightly bewildered frame of mind.
Stephen walked slowly up the Brompton Road, looking into the shop windows, and puzzling this out. She had held his hand oddly, she had sat close to him on the sofa, she had waved a dozen of those little signals of intimacy which gave colour to a supposition which, though it did not actually make his blood run cold, certainly did not make it run hot.... He and Lucia were excellent friends, they had many tastes in common, but Stephen knew that he would sooner never see her again than have an intrigue with her. He was no hand, to begin with, at amorous adventures, and even if he had been he could not conceive a woman more ill-adapted to dally with than Lucia. “Galahad and Artemis would make a better job of it than Lucia and me,” he muttered to himself, turning hastily away from a window full of dainty underclothing for ladies. In vain he searched the blameless records of his intercourse with Lucia: he could not accuse himself of thought, word or deed which could possibly have given rise to any disordered fancy of hers that he observed her with a lascivious eye.