The only drawback to Peter's life was the bronchitis that sprang at him out of the fogs and temporarily stopped work. He had just recovered from an attack of it on the day when he was having tea at the White City, and he looked a weak and washed-out rag, with sunken blue eyes smiling out of a very white face.
"You would think, to look at him," Urquhart said to Lucy, "that he had been going in extensively for the flip-flap this afternoon. It's a pity Stephen can't see you, Margery; you look starved enough to satisfy even him. You never come across Stephen now, I suppose? You wouldn't, of course. He has no opinion of the Ignorant Rich. Nor even of the well-informed rich, like me. He's blindly prejudiced in favour of the Ignorant Poor."
Lucy nodded. "I know. He's nice to me always. I go and play my 'cello to his friends."
"I always keep him in mind," said Peter, "for the day when my patrons get tired of me. I know Rodney will be kind to me directly I take to street peddling or any other thoroughly ill-bred profession. The kind he despises most, I suppose, are my dear Ignorant Rich—the ill-bred but by no means breadless. (That's my own and not very funny, by the way.) Did I tell you, Denis, that Leslie is going to begin educating the People in Appreciation of Objects of Art? Isn't it a nice idea? I'm to help. Leslie's a visionary, you know. I believe plutocrats often are. They've so much money and are so comfortable that they stop wanting material things and begin dreaming dreams. I should dream dreams if I was a plutocrat. As it is my mind is earthly. I don't want to educate anyone. Well, anyhow we're going to Italy in the spring, to pick things up, as Leslie puts it. That always sounds so much as if we didn't pay for them. Then we shall bring them home and have free exhibits for the Ignorant Poor, and I shall give free and instructive lectures. Isn't it a pleasant plan? We're going to Venice. There's a Berovieri goblet that some Venetian count has, that Leslie's set his heart on. We are to acquire it, regardless of expense, if it turns out to be all that is rumoured."
Urquhart scoffed here.
"Nice to be infallible, isn't it. You and your goblets and your Ignorant Rich. And your brother Hilary and my uncle Evelyn. Your great gifts seem to run in the family. My uncle, I hear, is ruining himself with buying the things your brother admires. My poor uncle, Miss Hope, is getting so weak-sighted that he can't judge for himself as he used, so he follows the advice of Margery's brother. It keeps him very happy and amused, though he'll soon be bankrupt, no doubt."
Lucy, as usual, laughed at the Urquhart family and the Margerison family and the world at large. When she laughed, she opened her grey eyes wide, while they twinkled with dancing light.
Then she said, "Oh, I want to go on the flip-flap. Peter mustn't come, because it always makes him sick; so will you?"
Urquhart said he would, so they did, and Peter watched them, hoping Urquhart didn't mind much. Urquhart never seemed to mind being ordered about by Lucy. And Lucy, of course, had accepted him as an intimate friend from the first, because Peter had said she was to, and because, as she remarked, he was so astonishingly nice to look at and to listen to.
Among the visitors who frequented Lucy's home, people whom she considered astonishingly pleasant to look at and to listen to did not abound; so Lucy enjoyed the change all the more.