Lucia had now, so to speak, developed her full horsepower. Pepino’s presence stoked her, Robert was stoking himself and might be disregarded, while Olga and Georgie were hanging on her words.
“But it isn’t the past only that we are thinking of,” she said, “but the present and the future. Of course our spiritual home is here—like Lord Haldane and Germany—and oh, how much we have learned at Riseholme, its lovely seriousness and its gaiety, its culture, its absorption in all that is worthy in art and literature, its old customs, its simplicity.”
“Yes,” said Olga. (She had meant long ago to tell Lucia that she had taken a house in Brompton Square exactly opposite Lucia’s, but who could interrupt the splendour that was pouring out on them?)
Lucia fumbled for a moment at the brooch containing Beethoven’s hair. She had a feeling that the pin had come undone. “Dear Miss Olga,” she said, “how good of you to take an interest, you with your great mission of melody in the world, in our little affairs! I am encouraged. Well, Pepino and I feel—don’t we, sposo mio?—that now that this opportunity has come to us, of perhaps having a little salon in London, we ought to take it. There are modern movements in the world we really know nothing about. We want to educate ourselves. We want to know what the cosmopolitan mind is thinking about. Of course we’re old, but it is never too late to learn. How we shall treasure all we are lucky enough to glean, and bring it back to our dear Riseholme.”
There was a slight and muffled thud on the ground, and Lucia’s fingers went back where the brooch should have been.
“Georgino, my brooch, the Beethoven brooch,” she said; “it has fallen.”
Georgie stooped rather stiffly to pick it up: that work with the garden roller had found out his lumbar muscles. Olga rose.
“Too thrilling, Mrs. Lucas!” she said. “You must tell me much more. Shall we go? And how lovely for me: I have just taken a house in Brompton Square for the season.”
“No!” said Lucia. “Which?”
“Oh, one of the little ones,” said Olga. “Just opposite yours. Forty-two A.”