Urquhart scoffed here.

“Nice to be infallible, isn’t it.  You and your goblets and your Ignorant Rich.  And your brother Hilary and my uncle Evelyn.  Your great gifts seem to run in the family.  My uncle, I hear, is ruining himself with buying the things your brother admires.  My poor uncle, Miss Hope, is getting so weak-sighted that he can’t judge for himself as he used, so he follows the advice of Margery’s brother.  It keeps him very happy and amused, though he’ll soon be bankrupt, no doubt.”

Lucy, as usual, laughed at the Urquhart family and the Margerison family and the world at large.  When she laughed, she opened her grey eyes wide, while they twinkled with dancing light.

Then she said, “Oh, I want to go on the flip-flap.  Peter mustn’t come, because it always makes him sick; so will you?”

Urquhart said he would, so they did, and Peter watched them, hoping Urquhart didn’t mind much.  Urquhart never seemed to mind being ordered about by Lucy.  And Lucy, of course, had accepted him as an intimate friend from the first, because Peter had said she was to, and because, as she remarked, he was so astonishingly nice to look at and to listen to.

Among the visitors who frequented Lucy’s home, people whom she considered astonishingly pleasant to look at and to listen to did not abound; so Lucy enjoyed the change all the more.

The first time Peter took Urquhart down to Chelsea to call on his Hope uncle and cousins, one Sunday afternoon, he gave him a succinct account of the sort of people they would probably meet there.

“They have oddities in, you know—­and particularly on Sunday afternoons.  They usually have one or two staying in the house, too.  They keep open house for wastrels.  A lot of them are aliens—­Polish refugees, Russian anarchists, oppressed Finns, massacred Armenians who do embroidery; violinists who can’t earn a living, decayed chimney-sweeps and so forth.  ’Disillusioned (or still illusioned) geniuses, would-bes, theorists, artistic natures, failed reformers, knaves and fools incompetent or over-old, broken evangelists and debauchees, inebriates, criminals, cowards, virtual slaves’ ...  Anyhow it’s a home for Lost Hopes. (Do you see that?) My uncle is keen on anyone who tries to revolt against anything—­governments, Russians, proprieties, or anything else—­and Felicity is keen on anyone who fails.”

“And your other cousin—­what is she keen on?”

“Oh, Lucy’s too young for the Oddities, like me.  She and I sit in a corner and look on.  It’s my uncle and Felicity they like to talk to.  They talk about Liberty to them, you know.  My uncle is great on Liberty.  And they give them lemon in their tea, and say how wicked Russians are, and how stupid Royal Academicians are, and buy the Armenians’ embroidery, and so forth.  Lucy and I don’t do that well.  I disapprove of liberty for most people, I think, and certainly for them; and I don’t like lemon in my tea, and though I’m sure Russians are wicked, I believe oppressed Poles are as bad—­at least their hair is as bushy and their nails as long—­and I prefer the embroidery I do myself; I do it quite nicely, I think.  And I don’t consider that Celtic poets or Armenian Christians wash their hands often enough....  They nearly all asked me the time last Sunday.  I was sorry about it.”