“There is the English Garden,” remarked Caterina one day.
“Have you seen it?” asked Lucia.
“No, never.”
“Is it possible, four months of Centurano every year, and you have never seen the English Garden?”
“There has been no opportunity. I hardly ever enter the park. I will take you there, and we will see it together.”
“I do not care to see it. I hate English gardens.”
The subject dropped. Lucia was fond of staying indoors, but she spent many hours in dressing, continually changing her gowns. Her room was full of boxes and packing-cases; she had written to Naples for new “half-season” dresses, fresh from the milliner’s hands. She possessed every variety of teagown: white, ample, floating ones; short, coquettish, bunched-up Pompadour ones; lacy ethereal ones that you could blow away, and rich silken ones that opened over pleated satin skirts. They all became her as well as nearly everything suits a slight, lithe woman. When Caterina admired her, and told her that she was beautiful, and Andrea bowed ceremoniously before her, she would say with a placid smile:
“I dress for Alberto, not for myself.”
“Of course,” whispered Alberto to Caterina or Andrea, “poor Lucia sacrifices herself completely to me. She shall at least have the satisfaction of being beautiful for my sake.”
After her toilet, Lucia breakfasted and then ensconced herself in her favourite corner in Caterina’s drawing-room. She had begun a long fanciful piece of work on coarse, stout canvas, without any design. On it she embroidered the strangest things in loose stitches of wool and silk: a flower, a lobster, a white star, a cock, a crescent, a window grating, a serpent, a cart-wheel, haphazard from right to left. It was the last Paris fashion to have your drawing-room furniture covered with that coarse, quaintly embroidered canvas. It gave free scope to the imagination of the fair embroideress, and Lucia revelled in the strangest devices. Every one in the house was interested in the great undertaking and curious to know, from day to day, what Lucia would add to it.