Lucia did not consider herself by any means an object of pity.  She was happy.  The absence of intolerable tension was enough to make her so.  As for the society she was thrown with, after the wear of incessant subtleties and uncertainties there was something positively soothing in straightforward uninspired vulgarity.  These people knew their own minds, if their minds were not worth knowing; and that was something.  It seemed to her that her own mind was growing healthier every day; till, by the time Edith visited her, there was no need to feign recovery, for recovery had come.  And with it had come many benign and salutary things; the old delicious joy of giving pleasure; a new sense of the redeeming and atoning pathos of the world; all manner of sweet compunctions and tender tolerances; the divine chance, she told herself, for all the charities in which she might have failed.  There had come Sophie.  And there had come, at last, in spite of everything, Keith Rickman.

As for Keith Rickman, her interest in him was not only a strong personal matter, but it had been part of the cool intellectual game she had played, for Horace’s distraction and her own deception; a game which Horace, with his subterfuges and suppressions, had not played fair.  But when, seeking to excuse him, she began to consider the possible motives of her cousin’s behaviour, Lucia was profoundly disturbed.

It had come to this:  if Horace had cared for her he might have had a right to interfere.  But he did not care.  Therefore, no interference, she vowed, should come between her and her friendship for the poet who had honoured her by trusting her.  She could not help feeling a little bitter with Horace for the harm he had done her, or rather, might have done her in Keith Rickman’s eyes.

For all that she had now to make amends.

CHAPTER LVIII

Meanwhile the Beaver, like a sensible Beaver, went on calmly furnishing her house.  She thoroughly approved of Keith’s acquaintance with Miss Harden, as she approved of everything that gave importance to the man she was going to marry.  If she had not yet given a thought to his work, except as a way (rather more uncertain and unsatisfactory than most ways) of making money, she thought a great deal of the consideration it brought him with that lady.  She was prouder of Keith now than she ever had been before.  But the Beaver was before all things a practical person; and she had perceived further that for Keith to make up to people like Miss Harden was one of the surest and quickest means of getting on.  Hitherto she had been both distressed and annoyed by his backwardness in making up to anybody.  And when Keith told her that he wanted to pay some attention to his editor’s cousin, if she was a little surprised at this unusual display of smartness (for when had Keith been known to pay attention to any editors, let alone their cousins?), she accepted the