It was.  “Horace,” she said, “would you like to ask him here?”

“No, Lucy, I wouldn’t.  I don’t think it would do.”

“But why not—­if he’s your friend?”

“If he’s my friend.”

“You said he was your friend.  You did, you know.” (Another awkward consequence of a cousin’s adoration; she is apt to remember and attach importance to your most trivial utterances.)

“Pardon me, I said he was my find.”

“Where did you find him?”

“I found him in the City—­in a shop.”

She smiled at the rhythmic utterance.  The tragedy of the revelation was such that it could be expressed only in blank verse.

“The shop doesn’t matter.”

“No, but he does.  You couldn’t stand him, Lucia.  You see, for one thing, he sometimes drops his aitches.”

“Well, if he does,—­he’ll be out all day, and there’s the open country to drop them in.  I really don’t mind, if you’d like to ask him.  Do you think he’d like to be asked?”

“There’s no possible doubt about that.”

“Then ask him.  Ask him now.  You can’t do it when father’s not at home.”

Jewdwine repressed a smile.  Even now, from the windows of the east wing, there burst, suddenly, the sound of fiddling, a masterly fiddling inspired by infernal passion, controlled by divine technique.  It was his uncle, Sir Frederick, and he wished him at the devil.  If all accounts were true, Sir Frederick, when not actually fiddling, was going there with a celerity that left nothing to be desired; he was, if you came to think of it, a rather amazing sort of chaperone.

And yet, but for that fleeting and tumultuous presence, Horace himself would not be staying at Court House.  Really, he reflected.  Lucia ought to get some lady to live with her.  It was the correct thing, and therefore it was not a little surprising that Lucia did not do it.  An expression of disapproval passed over his pale, fastidious face.

“Father won’t mind,” she said.

“No, but I should.”  He said it in a tone which was meant to settle the question.

She sat still, turning over the pages of the manuscript which she had again taken on her lap.

“I suppose he is very dreadful.  Still, I think we ought to do something for him.”

“And what would you propose to do?”

There was an irritating smile on her cousin’s face.  He was thinking, “So she wants to patronize him, does she?”

He did not say what he thought; with Lucia that was unnecessary, for she always knew.  He only said, “I don’t exactly see you playing Beatrice to his Dante.”

Lucia coloured, and Horace felt that he had been right.  The Hardens had always been patronizing; his mother and sister were the most superbly patronizing women he knew.  And Rickman might or might not be a great man, but Lucia, even at three and twenty, was a great lady in her way.  Why shouldn’t she patronize him, if she liked?  And he smiled again more irritatingly than ever.  Nobody could be more irritating than this Oxford don when he gave his mind to it.