and she felt no more than she had felt when she played it on Aunt Cathie's piano at Fair View. But this performance, very meritorious in itself, for he played well, had been quite sufficient for him. He had put Chopin into his bag. That was just it; he put everything into a bag, having wrung the neck of each thing first. His bag bulged with dead, genuine specimens. Lucia's bag was nearly empty, but what there was in it was alive, and pulsating with her own blood. The tawdry Nubian dancing-girls were there, the smell of Egypt was there; there was a dusty crimson sunset, a wild thicket at the foot of Pentelicus. And privately she thought that, little as she had really got from this long tour, she had got far more than he. He, if you will, had learned a dozen new languages; the defect was that he had nothing worth saying to say in them, while she had but a few babbling words in the tongues in which he was so glib, but her words meant something; they signified.
There was one cloud more dangerous than all these, which she thought about also. It was no bigger than a man's hand, but it was well above the horizon at the close of their second year of marriage. Sometimes she questioned herself as to whether, if she had gone to all these magical lands, either alone, or with Maud, or even with Aunt Cathie, she would not have had a richer harvesting. And as soon as she asked herself that question, there was no longer any need to ask it, for it was already answered. There was something in Edgar that, for her, killed romance. More than once, on an evening on the Nile, for instance, she had felt the romance of the ancient mysterious land floating like some dim beautiful bird above her, drawing nearer to her in the dusk. Then Edgar, with an apt quotation, or a few remarks about Amen-hotep, had shot it quite dead, so that not a single heart's beat was left in it, when it fell, a bundle of bones, at her feet. He, satisfied both with his fresh addition to the bag, and also with Lucia's lip-appreciation, so to speak, of his marksmanship, remained completely unconscious of his fatal aim, but Lucia already wondered what would happen when that man's-hand-cloud cast a shadow over him also, when he saw that he, who should have been for her incarnate romance, was the agent who, not in Egypt only, or in Greece, but wherever the two were together, unintentionally and unerringly destroyed all romance for Lucia.
Probably he would never know that; Lucia felt that it would be a supreme stupidity on her part if she let him.
