and the lamp of Art must shine in the kitchen, no less than from glowing canvas and the piercing sweetness of the horns. Nor did this renaissance cause an emptying of ball-rooms. Dancing was an exquisite thing, an art; so, too, was the music of voices, the gleam of diamonds, the great staircase hung upon, as with a swarm of bees, by the brilliant crowd, the entrancing rhythm of the band.
All this to Lucia and to many others was absolutely real. She, like a large minority of those among whom she moved, had a potential passion for the beautiful and exquisite things of Life; but she became, as has been said, the centre of what in the microcosm of London was a real movement, because her passion for these things was articulate; she understood with her fine taste what was fine, and she could talk about it in a way that was marvellous to all those whose emotions, as is generally the case with English people, are the subject on which they are most dumb. She enjoyed, too, but not pedantically, as it is to be feared her husband did; he could never completely get out of his head that it was more improving to the mind to listen to a Beethoven symphony than to hold four aces at bridge, whereas to Lucia these unimpeachable moral sentiments never occurred at all. She preferred Beethoven to bridge merely because she enjoyed it more, but she could and did play bridge with remarkable acuteness when, so to speak, Beethoven was not present. All that was sincere, but what was not less sincere was that it was all part of her plan. She had intended to have everything, and she was raking it in.
What had established her, had made her the authentic centre of this really considerable constellation, was the Brayton week. It was extremely daring, and, like all really daring things, unless it is a fool who has dared, it met with the success it merited, and she leaped on to her throne. Towards the end of June she had observed that the second week in July was a perfect congestion of gaiety in town, and she had then and there written thirty notes to her most intimate friends, who, like herself, would be engaged over the page on each day, and asked them to come down to Brayton for a full week from Monday to Monday. They were going, so ran the note, to have a really nice time. There would be a band in the house, and the French company were going to play two—well, two nice little plays; otherwise—it was a little scratch gathering—everyone would do exactly as he chose. There was golf and rather good fishing, and the garden was
