"That looks like the little button thing off my shoe," she said.
" Your shoe?"
"Yes. Those black pump things that one wore at dancing class. I hung on to them because they are so lovely when one's feet are tired. Like gloves. I can still wear the shoes I wore when I was fourteen. I always had enormous feet for my age, and believe me it was no consolation to be told that you were going to be tall." Her attention went back to the thing she was holding. "So this is where I lost it," she said. "You know, I wondered quite a lot about that." She dropped it into her pocket. "You'll have to sit on this case, I'm afraid. You sit on it and I'll wrestle with the locks."
Automatically Lucy sat on it.
She wondered why she had never noticed before how cold those blue eyes were. Brilliant and cold and shallow.
The bright hair fell over her lap as Beau wrestled with the locks. The locks would do what she wanted, of course. Everything and everyone, always, since the day she was born, had done what she wanted. If they hadn't, she took steps to see that they did. At the age of four, Lucy remembered, she had defeated a whole adult world because her will to have things her way was greater than all the wills combined against her.
She had never known frustration.
She could not visualise the possibility of frustration.
If her friend had the obvious right to Arlinghurst, then to Arlinghurst she should go.
"There! That's done it. Stand by to sit on the other if I can't manage it. I see Giddy's given you one of his loathsome little plants. What a bore for you. Perhaps you can exchange it for a bowl at the back door one day."