“There she goes, talking about Riseholme as if it was some dreadful penance to go there,” said Adele. “You adore Riseholme, Lucia, at least if you don’t you ought to. Olga raves about it. She says she’s never really happy away from it. When are you going to ask me there?”
“Adele, as if you didn’t know that you weren’t always welcome,” said Lucia.
“Me, too,” said Marcia.
“A standing invitation to both of you always,” said Lucia. “Dear Marcia, how sweet of you to want to come! I go there on Tuesday, and there I remain. But it’s true, I do adore it. No balls, no parties, and such dear Arcadians. You couldn’t believe in them without seeing them. Life at its very simplest, dears.”
“It can’t be simpler than Scotland,” said Marcia. “In Scotland you kill birds and fish all day, and eat them at night. That’s all.”
Lucia through these months of strenuous effort had never perhaps felt herself so amply rewarded as she was at this moment. All evening she had talked in an effortless deshabille of mind to the great ones of the country, the noble, the distinguished, the accomplished, and now here she was in a duchess’s bedroom having a good-night talk. This was nearer Nirvana than even Marcia’s ball. And the three women there seemed to be grouped round her: they waited—there was no mistaking it—listening for something from her, just as Riseholme used to wait for her lead. She felt that she was truly attaining, and put her chin in her hand and looked a little upward.
“I shall get tremendously put in my place when I go back to Riseholme again,” she said. “I’m sure Riseholme thinks I have been wasting my time in idle frivolities. It sees perhaps in an evening paper that I have been to Aggie’s party, or Adele’s house or Marcia’s ball, and I assure you it will be very suspicious of me. Just as if I didn’t know that all these delightful things were symbols.”
Adele had got the cataleptic look of a figure in a stained glass window, so rapt she was. But she wanted to grasp this with full appreciation.
“Lucia, don’t be so dreadfully clever,” she said. “You’re talking high over my head: you’re like the whirr of an aëroplane. Explain what you mean by symbols.”
“My dear, you know,” she said. “All our runnings-about, all our gaieties are symbols of affection: we love to see each other because we partake of each other. Interesting people, distinguished people, obscure people, ordinary people, we long to bring them all into our lives in order to widen our horizons. We learn, or we try to learn of other interests besides our own. I shall have to make Riseholme understand that dear little Alf, playing the flute at my house, or half a dozen princes eating quails at Marcia’s mansion, it’s all the same, isn’t it? We get to know the point of view of prize-fighters and princes. And it seems to me, it seems to me——”