how meet and right it was that she should be endowed with these brilliances), she sighed for this gift of spontaneous expression expression as spontaneous as the waving of a dog's tail to express pleasure, or the involuntary quickening of the heart-beat in anticipation or suspense.
"Go on and try," she said. "I want you, Lucia—oh, dear! I wish I could express myself—I want you to show me all yourself, to let me see you from all points just as—oh, just as one revolves slowly before the dressmaker when one is trying on."
Lucia nodded appreciatively at Maud.
"Ah! that's good," she said. "That expresses what you mean, anyhow, and that is what I find it so hard to do. All those dear—well, eight-day clocks down at Brixham say I always say more than I mean, and think to themselves, 'Oh, it's only Lucia.' Yes; they are eight-day clocks—seven-day, rather—and they strike with absolute regularity, and are wound up for the week at the cathedral service at half-past ten on Sunday morning. The cathedral service is the spring and centre of our life at Brixham: we draw life and inspiration from it. My grandpapa, the Dean, said that in a volume of brown sermons which I read to Aunt Cathie and Aunt Elizabeth on Sunday evening. There! You are beginning to look Judgment Day, but I don't care."
Lucia sat down on the floor at Maud's feet, pushing her knees apart with little burrowy movements of her shoulders, so that she sat hemmed in by her with her back against the front of the sofa where Maud sat. Her preparation for hair-brushing had been more complete than Maud's, and she had taken off her stockings and evening shoes, substituting for them red morocco slippers. These, too, as she talked, she had slipped off, and was pushing her bare feet into the long white wool of the sheepskin rug that lay in front of her dressing-table. All these attitudes and movements were very characteristic of her; she loved "getting close to things, like a cat," as she once expressed it, taking a somewhat sensuous, purring pleasure in the touch of things that were soft and warm. It was all done, too, with a cat's insinuating gracefulness.
"There, that makes me quite comfortable," she said. "Aren't you glad? I hate being not quite comfortable, and if somebody has to be, I would sooner it wasn't me, because I know I hate it more than most people. Yes; they are wound up by cathedral service, and it isn't in the least profane of me to say so. Ding,
