Lucy was among them, small and pale, and rather silent, and intensely alive.  She, of course, was a native not of Park Lane but of Chelsea; and the people who had frequented her home there were of a different sort.  They had had, mostly, a different kind of brain, a kind more restless and troublesome and untidy, and a different type of wit, more pungent and ironic, less well-fed and hilarious, and they were less well-dressed and agreeable to look at, and had (perhaps) higher thoughts (though how shall one measure height?) and ate (certainly) plainer food, for lack of richer.  These were the people Lucy knew.  Her father himself had been of these.  She now found her tent pitched among the prosperous; and the study of them touched her wide gaze with a new, pondering look.  Denis hadn’t any use for cranks.  None of his set were socialists, vegetarians, Quakers, geniuses, anarchists, drunkards, poets, anti-breakfasters, or anti-hatters; none of them, in fine, the sort of person Lucy was used to.  They never pawned their watches or walked down Bond Street in Norfolk coats.  They had, no doubt, their hobbies; but they were suitable, well-bred hobbies, that did not obtrude vulgarly on other people’s notice.  Peter had once said that if he were a plutocrat he would begin to dream dreams.  Lucy supposed that the seemingly undreaming people who were Denis’s friends were not rich enough; they hadn’t reached plutocracy, where romance resides, but merely prosperity, which has fewer possibilities.  Lucy began in these days to ponder on the exceeding evil of Socialism, which the devil has put it into certain men’s hearts to desire.  For, thought Lucy, sweep away the romantic rich, sweep away the dreaming destitute, and what have you left?  The prosperous; the comfortable; the serenely satisfied; the sanely reasonable.  Dives, with his purple and fine linen, his sublime outlook over a world he may possess at a touch, goes to his own place; Lazarus, with his wallet for crusts and his place among the dogs and his sharp wonder at the world’s black heart, is gathered to his fathers:  there remain the sanitary dwellings of the comfortable, the monotonous external adequacy that touches no man’s inner needs, the lifeless rigour of a superintended well-being.  Decidedly, thought Lucy, siding with the Holy Roman Church, a scheme of the devil’s.  Denis and his friends also thought it was rot.  So no doubt it was.  Denis belonged to the Conservative party.  Lucy thought parties funny things, and laughed.  Though she had of late taken to wandering far into seas of thought, so that her wide forehead was often puckered as she sat silent, she still laughed at the world.  Perhaps the more one thinks about it the more one laughs; the height and depth of its humour are certainly unfathomable.

On this last night of February, Lord Evelyn, when the other guests had gone, put his unsteady white hand under Lucy’s chin and raised her small pale face and looked at it out of his near-sighted, scrutinising eyes, and said: