Aunt Elizabeth would get up and do her worsted work, and live over again the triumph over the Demon. In a few month's time there would be the unparalleled excitement of alternate Tuesdays, and then they would to to Sea View. And in a few years' time everybody would be dead.
The rattling on of an approaching train, getting rapidly louder, caught her ear, and the next moment with a shriek the engine belching fire, followed by its train of illuminated carriages, tore past along the embankment, swift and alive, carrying its fortunate freight at top speed by the sleepy town. That was the contrast Lucia wanted; even though the tennis-net drooped in the garden, and Aunt Elizabeth had gone to bed, out in the world there was life and movement day and night.
Though it was late before she went to bed, she woke next morning every early, and found that her mind flew back like an uncoiled spring to the train of thought and that study of herself which had so occupied her the night before. Already, by that strange assimilative process of the mind which goes on in sleep, that which had been almost revelation to her the night before was familiar now, and part of her, and those flashes of consciousness of herself and her own nature had passed in the very tissues of her brain. The feverish excitement of her discoveries was over, and in the cool pearliness of dawn she thought of it all quietly, and turned her mind to the practical consideration which it suggested. And the first practical consideration was this.
Opportunities, occasions of being able to realize one's desires, she saw, certainly came from without, but she had hitherto neglected to be at home, so to speak, to opportunities. Narrow and tedious as she felt her life here to be, she had herself assisted in adding to the tediousness at which she so rebelled, by making the worst of it, not only in mental attitude, but in her practical aloofness from such humdrum life as there was. She must change all that, for she whose determination now was to get from life all that life had to offer, had up until now been doing the very opposite down in Brixham; and having assumed that it offered nothing at all, it was not surprising that she found nothing here. She had not troubled to look and search in this room, simply because she had believed it to be quite dark. She had been so occupied in wondering at the futilities in which Aunt Elizabeth's days were passed, that her own had been just as futile. That was bad practice for one who was going to press the last ounce of pleasure out of life
