"He suspects," thought Kitty, "and he's testing her."
But Lucia's equanimity survived. "Am I to read it now?"
"As you like."
She carried the book up to her own room and did not appear till lunch-time. In her absence Horace seemed a little uneasy; but he went on making himself agreeable to Kitty. "He must be pretty desperate," thought she, "if he thinks it worth while." Apparently he did think it worth while, though he allowed no sign of desperation to appear. Lucia, equally discreet, avoided ostentatious privacy. They sat out all afternoon under the beechtrees while she read, flaunting The Triumph of Life in his very eyes. He watched every movement of her face that changed as it were to the cadence of the verse. It was always so, he remembered, when she was strongly moved. At last she finished and he smiled.
"You like your birthday present?"
"Very much. But Horace, he has done what you said was impossible."
"Anybody would have said it was impossible. Modern drama in blank verse, you know—"
"Yes. It ought to have been all wrong. But because he's both a great poet and a great dramatist, it's all right, you see. Look," she said, pointing to a passage that she dared not read. "Those are human voices. Could anything be simpler and more natural? But it's blank verse because it couldn't be more perfectly expressed in prose."
"Yes, yes. I wonder how he does it."
"It would have been impossible to anybody else."