And then, my Lucia, we will come back to make our home, not complete—Heaven forbid I should say that!—but open—open, and ready to catch any thistledown of suggestion that floats by, learning, not by hearsay only, but by sight and experience, all that there is of wonder and interest among the other civilizations. And Russia—we must certainly go through Russia on our way back from Japan. And let us end up with Greece, and the Isles of Greece. The yacht can meet us at Constantinople."
To Lucia now this formed one concrete speech. The voice paused, and made one addition.
"And Minorca on the way home," it said. "Chopin, you know. That Polish exile in the blue sea."
Lucia knew that she parodied in her own mind her husband's voice and her husband's ideas. She made it sound priggish to herself, but she knew that she might have projected any part of that programme, or the whole of it, without the slightest taint of priggishness coming in. He loved Chopin, for instance, and what could be more simple and natural than that he should suggest that they should stop at Minorca (or was it Majorca?) on the way home, to see the place where the preludes were written, and where the rain dropped on the iron roof? Yet she framed the sentence he had spoken about it in priggish fashion. She, in her own mind, made him say priggish things even about San Francisco. As a matter of fact, it was she who had suggested the interest of seeing a town spring up mushroom-like again after the catastrophe. He had merely adopted her suggestion, and had—had phrased it. But that made the whole difference.
He phrased things; that was one of the occasional clouds. He could not avoid seeing things in an improving light. If they went to the National Gallery to see the new Velasquez, he would not look at the picture; he would only look at the impression the picture made on him. And all the time it was she, he told her, who had re-created the world anew for him; it was she who had put into words, and therefore into being, his earlier ideals. She was responsible for the realization of what he had dreamed of—that cultured, critical life of the educated and trained taster. He had only vaguely striven after a life that should be less idle, less card-playing, than that of the ambient world. So, while the world went to Goodwood, Lord and Lady Brayton went to Japan; while the world watched horses racing, they rode donkeys to the tomb of the kings; while the world (which was crazy on teetotalism just now) drank barley-water, he and Lucia imbibed knowledge.
