could. Whatever was the conduct of the possible winds and clouds, she had to be prepared with a counter-check to any devilish manœuvres on their part. She was climbing, and knew it; the essential thing was that nobody else should see she was climbing. She must appear to the world as having arrived; appear as one who had only to write a few notes in order to fill her country house with guests while yet July was scarcely middle-aged. She had done that. She had done it in such a way that it appeared effortless. There happened to be a French company playing at Brayton, and an excellent band; there were a few special trains to be arranged for, all of which, though hideously expensive from one point of view, were extraordinarily cheap, if they got her what she wanted—namely, a fashionable exodus from town. And Edgar wanted that sort of thing no less than she. The intellectual renaissance which Lady Heron had spoken of had impressed him enormously. It bore out Lucia's original prophecy for him, and he felt confidence, as was most reasonable, in her power of getting into practical shape what she had prophesied about. Even the special trains did not stagger him, To entice fifty people out of town in order to have dinner, a play, and go back again that night, was clearly a feat. He respected feats, being himself capable of imagining them, but wholly incapable of doing them.
No feat can be perfectly calculated; blind luck may spoil the most thorough plans, but in regard to the Brayton week, blind luck had arranged itself on Lucia's side. It was not merely that a spell of prodigious heat drove the gasping out of town, or that the weather, so intolerable there, was of brisk warmth only down in Hampshire; it was that the world in general was interested at that particular and psychological moment in Lucia, the girl from nowhere, who looked like Aphrodite fresh from the sea, and had had the cheek—yes, the cheek—to ask everybody to leave London at its midmost and spend quiet days in the country. But what was originally cheek became, as the week went on the kind of genius that London respected. Lucia did not give them the precepts of the lecture on the delectable life; she gave the delectable life itself. She had anticipated their inclinations and anybody who felt inclined to do anything found that the implements and adjuncts of his inclinations were to hand. Among her guests, for instance, there were two or three socialistic aristocrats. They found a Labour Member or two coming down by special train, and a polished writer of suburban plays who
