“I don’t want to urge you, caro,” she continued. “You know I never urge you to do what you don’t feel is best.”
“But you are urging me,” said Pepino.
“Only to do what you feel is best. As for the memories of Aunt Amy in Brompton Square, you must not allow false sentiment to come in. You never saw her there since you were a boy, and if you brought down here her portrait, and the wool-work rug which you remember her putting over her knees, I should say, without urging you, mind, that that was ample.... What a sweet morning! Come to the end of the garden and imagine what the meadow will look like with a paved walk and a blaze of daffodils.... The Chippendale chairs, I think I should sell.”
Lucia did not really want Aunt Amy’s portrait either, for she was aware she had said a good deal from time to time about Aunt Amy’s pearls, which were there, a little collar of very little seeds, faultlessly portrayed. But then Georgie had seen them on the night at the Opera, and Lucia felt that she knew Riseholme very poorly if it was not perfectly acquainted by now with the nature and minuteness of Aunt Amy’s pearls. The pearls had better be sold too, and also, she thought, her own portrait by Sigismund, for the post-cubists were not making much of a mark.
The determining factor in her mind, over this abandonment of her London career, to which in a few days, by incessant battering, she had got Pepino to consent, was Pepino himself. He could not be with her in London, and she could not leave him week after week (for nothing less than that, if you were to make any solid progress in London, was any good) alone in Riseholme. But a large factor, also, was the discovery of how little at present she counted for in Riseholme, and that could not be tolerated. Riseholme had deposed her, Riseholme was not intending to be managed by her from Brompton Square. The throne was vacant, for poor Daisy, and for the matter of that poor Georgie, were not the sort of people who could occupy thrones at all. She longed to queen it there again, and though she was aware that her utmost energies would be required, what were energies for except to get you what you wanted?
Just now she was nothing in Riseholme: they had been sorry for her because Pepino had been so ill, but as his steady convalescence proceeded, and she began to ring people up, and pop in, and make plans for them, she became aware that she mattered no more than Piggy and Goosie.... There on the Green, as she saw from the window of her hall, was Daisy, whirling her arms madly, and hitting a ball with a stick which had a steel blade at the end, and Georgie, she was rather horrified to observe, was there too, trying to do the same. Was Daisy reaping the reward of her persistence, and getting somebody interested in golf? And, good heavens, there were Piggy and Goosie also smacking away. Riseholme was clearly devoting itself to golf.
“I shall have to take to golf,” thought Lucia. “What a bore! Such a foolish game.”
At this moment a small white ball bounded over her yew-hedge, and tapped smartly against the front door.
“What an immense distance to have hit a ball,” she thought. “I wonder which of them did that?”
It was soon clear, for Daisy came tripping through the garden after it, and Lucia, all smiles, went out to meet her.