moment directly afterwards she had, still reading snippets from the paper, told him that there was a book-sale at Sotheby's.
As a girl Lucia never wasted much time over regrets, and she wasted very little time over this now. She was going to have a little dinner-party this evening, and a North Pole explorer had sent regrets this morning, saying that he had influenza and could not come. That seemed very absurd, and it was ridiculous that people who exposed themselves to the rigours of these extreme latitudes should get these mild complaints; but there it was, and she was a man short. Edgar (he was a little old-fashioned in some ways) had then volunteered to go out and see if at the club or elsewhere he could find a man, rejecting her proposal to telephone instead until somebody said "yes." That, again, had seemed to her absurd. What were telephones for except to get people at the last minute? Edgar, however, held a husband's and a dissentient view. He said that anyone who came to fill up a place at the last moment was a benefactor, and that such a man ought to be approached verbatim, with gratitude and apology, not with a telephone. So he went out, armed with gratitude and apology, to seek one.
Lucia, having looked with chastened appreciation at the back of the vellum Kelmscotts, devoted a little time to the general contemplation of those reflections to which Edgar's scruples gave rise. It was her birthday, and therefore a day on which, most naturally, the thoughts are as a header-board to project the person who has been born into either the future or the past. Lucia took a neat plunge into the past.
It was a very sunny sea; all had gone extremely well, and even if there were occasional clouds, the amount of sunshine registered was certainly above the normal. She did not seek to deny that she had made certain sacrifices to keep it at the desirable level, but up to the present she saw that her sacrifices had been quite worth while. Yet they had not been inconsiderable. For the first year of their marriage Edgar and she had hardly been in England at all, but had widened their mental horizon by prolonged foreign travel. They had been through Canada, through Egypt, through Japan, through India, and had spent certain dolorous veeks in the South Sea Islands. Then they had come to London for some six weeks of the season, and had started off again almost immediately afterwards to visit other more rarely-travelled countries. There was nothing haphazard, there was no idea of
