CHAPTER III
Lucia's room was a big attic at the top of the house which she had got possession of not without debate. It seemed very odd to both her aunts that she should prefer this isolated room among the roofs to the spare room on the first floor with its thick carpet, its ubiquitous woollen mats, its impenetrable curtains across the pitch-pine windows and the solid suitability of the walnut suite of mid- Victorian date. But Lucia had urged, not without reason (though her real reasons were others), that she could not occupy the best spare bedroom if there was another guest in the house, but would have to transfer her goods on those occasions to the dressing-room adjoining. But if she might have the big attic, she would feel it was her own room in a way that the best spare bedroom could never be. This point of etiquette about the best spare bedroom, though there was practically never a guest in the house (during the last year a cousin of the aunts had spent a night there, because she missed a train), appealed to them, though Lucia's preference seemed to them unusual, and they had certain vague qualms as to whether it was proper for a girl to be cut off like this. A closer examination of these scruples showed them to be somewhat phantasmal, since the impropriety of Lucia's sleeping there with the cook and the housemaid immediately below, and themselves on the floor below that, could not exactly be defined when the girl pressed for a definition. Aunt Elizabeth began several sentences with—"But what would you do if" but her imagination was not equal to framing a contingency which should embody her objections.
Lucia's real reason for preferring the attic was simple enough. She wanted first of all a greater sense of privacy than could be obtained on the first floor, and she felt also she would be stifled in the heavy solemnities of the best bedroom. She had air and light upstairs, and a small sum of money which was left over
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