someone of her own corrupt world shining with the lambent vitality that was Lucia's, living purely, walking unstained and enthusiastic through the rainbow mud of life.
"It isn't only that," she said, speaking quickly and nervously; "what I have said to you is only the wisdom of the commonly prudent. Oh, Lucia, I beg you, as an inestimable personal gift, to do so much more. I and—I needn't mention who else, but people who are our friends, amuse ourselves tremendously, but they and I behave as if we lack all moral sense. And when you get older—you are so young, you know—you will see what that lack means. Before you are forty, you will find that you have run through everything, unless you put up a 'Trespasser' notice in your soul. That, too, is only an extension of the wisdom of the commonly prudent. But can't you—can't you go much higher than that? Show us the big good life, instead of the big bad life. Yes—good, bad: you think I am using obsolete terms. But when you are older you will wonder whether, after all, they are obsolete, and when you are older again you will know, too late, that they are not. How sickeningly stupid is the proverb that says it is never too late to mend! Of course, sometimes it is too late to mend, for the time comes when you remember the desire to have mended quite clearly, but you no longer know what it means."
She got up, taking her fan from the table.
"I suppose that is what they mean by hell," she said. "It is nonsensical, otherwise."
She had done her best; she had tried to put into words all that she was capable of feeling. But she did not wholly know of how utterly inferior a nature to herself was she to whom she was speaking. She had been in deadly earnest; every word she had spoken was quite true, as far as she knew, but she was speaking to one to whom the only reality was her own gratification, and who could not really grasp another point of view. Lucia could say of her own conduct that it "was so mean," but she said it merely as an actress might criticize the part for which she was cast. She did not feel abased because it was mean; she felt only that the playwright had given her a mean part, and that even as she was acting it, she could stand aside and criticize it.
She replied with a silken quietness.
"What has come to you, dear Madge," she said, "I mean the sense of its being too late, has already come to me. Thank
