But now, better, a thousand times better, that Edith should have been forced to abdicate than that Lucia should have taken herself out of the way in this fashion; a fashion so hideously suggestive of social suicide; that she should be living within four miles of her fastidious and refined relations in a fifth-rate boarding-house inhabitated by goodness knows whom.  If only that had been all!  Of course it was intolerable to think of Lucia mixing with the sort of people whom nobody but Goodness ever does know; but, after all, she wouldn’t mix with them; she hadn’t had time to; and if instantly removed from the place of contamination she might yet be presented to society again without spot or taint.  But it was not all.  Out of the many hundred base abodes of Bloomsbury Lucia had picked out the one house she ought to have avoided, the one address which for five years her cousin Horace had been endeavouring to conceal from her; it being the address of the one disreputable, the one impossible person of his acquaintance.  Rickman had appeared, as strange people sometimes did, at Edith’s court; an appearance easily explained and justified by the fact that he was a genius of whom Horace Jewdwine hoped great things.  But he had never been suffered in that salon when Lucia had been there.  Horace had taken untold pains, he had even lied frequently and elaborately, to prevent Lucia’s encountering, were it only by accident, that one impossible person; and here she was living, actually living in the same house with him.  Even if Rickman could be trusted to efface himself (which wasn’t very likely; for if there is anything more irrepressible than a cockney vulgarian it is a poet; and Rickman was both!), could they, could anybody trust Lucia and her idiotic impulse to be kind?  To be kind at any cost.  She never calculated the cost of anything; which was another irritating reflection for Miss Jewdwine.  Poor as she was, she thought nothing of paying twenty-five or thirty shillings for her board and a miserable lodging, when she might—­she ought—­to have been living with her relations free of all expense.  But there was the sting, the unspeakable sting; for it meant that Lucia would do anything, pay anything, rather than stop another week in Hampstead.  And Edith knew that it was she who had made Lucia feel like that; she who had driven her to this deplorable step.  Not by anything done, or said, or even implied; but by things not done, things not said, things darkly or passionately thought.  For Lucia, with her terrible gift of intuition, must somehow have known all the time what Edith hardly knew, what at least she would never have recognized if she had not observed the effect on Lucia.  Edith had no patience with people who were so abominably sensitive.  It was all nerves, nerves, nerves.  Lucia was and always had been hopelessly neurotic.  And if people were to be shaken and upset by every passing current of another person’s thought, it was, Edith said to herself a little pathetically, rather hard upon