Lucia threw her hands wide.
"But I can't give it up," she said. "I can't! I could as easily commit suicide. Besides, you don't know Maud as I do. I believe that she could not do anything that would injure me. She is the finest woman I know—the most generous."
Calm and controlled as Lucia usually was, a sudden agitation began to shake her hold over herself. Certainly she had woke up last August, and she had woke to find herself a woman who knew forces that seemed stronger than herself. As a matter of fact, it was only the full power of her own temperament, which had slept hitherto, that then gripped her, but it seemed as if the force came from without. And since, in spite of her transcendent selfishness, she had not absolutely lost sight of something a little finer and better than the life she led, though, like some distant mountain-peak, it was unscalable by her, there were still moments when she could see the horror of her doings, and pour bitter irony on herself for those things which even in the same breath she would declare to be resistless.
"And what a fine friend I have been to her," she said. "It was always the same; whatever Maud had, I wanted and got. It was like that at Cambridge, when I knew her first; all her things were mine. She told me that, and she meant it. And I've taken them all. She had a sort of girlish attachment to Edgar, you know. So I cut her out, and took him myself. If it had not been for me, I think it very likely he would have married her. I never loved him, never for a single moment. I just wanted what he could give me. And got it. Then Maud got Charlie, so I took him, too. That's me."
Lucia's beautiful mouth was curled in scorn of herself, and the words came with the sharpness of hammer-blows on a steel anvil. Then she went on more calmly, but still with the egoist's passionate interest in herself.
"I have always been greedy," she said, "and greedy people always go from bad to worse. Their greediness coarsens even that in them which might have been fine. Even things like love, which are supposed to ennoble, get infected by their coarseness. For them there is no such thing as the light of love; there are only lumps of love. And they eat them up, and get stouter. I am huge, let me tell you, bloated, monstrous. I suck out the juice from everything, and leave dry skins behind."
Madge found herself suddenly wondering how much of was this genuine. She need not; it was all perfectly genuine. Lucia
