This affected her; she began to wonder how she could, through all these four years of war, have stayed so quietly in her remote Hawkesworth. She began to despise herself because she had stayed.
This excitement developed quickly into the same kind of premonition that she had had before leaving Hawkesworth. Something was about to happen to her! What would it be? She awoke every morning with a strange, burning excitement in her throat, a confused, thick beating of the heart.
Meanwhile, her month was drawing to its close, the days speeding on through a glittering pageant of wonderful May weather, when the town sparkled and quivered like a heap of quartz.
Simon Laud wrote that he was coming up to London to fetch her, to take her back with him to Hawkesworth—"that he could not wait any longer without seeing his pet."
When Lucy read those words she was strangely tranquillised. She did not know what it was that, during these days, she had been wanting. What so strangely had she been expecting? Whom?...
Her inexperience cried out to Simon Laud to come and defend her. She had a time of true terror, frightened by Aunt Harriet, by London, by strikes and wars and turbulences, above all, by her own self, and by the discontents and longings and desires to which some influence seemed to be urging her.
She wrote her first loving letter to Simon. She told him that she hoped that they would be married very soon, and that indeed he was to come and fetch her. It would be lovely to go back to Hawkesworth with him. And when she had posted her letter, she sat on her bed in her little room in Hortons with her face in her hands and cried bitterly, desperately—why, she did not know. Mrs. Comstock saw that she had been crying, and was moved by the child-like simplicity and innocence of "poor stupid Lucy," as she called her to herself. She was moved to unusual generosity, and suggested that they should go that night to a symphony concert at the Queen's Hall—"Although they are going to play Brahms, which I can't say that I approve of, because he was surely a German, if anyone ever was, and haven't we got plenty of good music of our own, I wonder? Anyway, you needn't listen to the Brahms, Lucy, if you don't want to. You won't understand him, anyway. I expect he's one of the most difficult of the composers, although he is dead."
Lucy paid small attention. She had been out only twice with her aunt in the evening during her London stay, once to a lecture on "Y.M.C.A. Work at the Front," and once to a musical play, Monsieur Beaucaire. She had liked the lecture, but she had adored Beaucaire, and she thought that perhaps the Queen's Hall would be something of the same kind.
She had never in all her life been to a "Symphony Concert."