There was one note Lucia found she had to write before she went out, and she sent Pepino to show Georgie the house while she scribbled it, and addressing it to Mr. Stephen Merriall at the office of the _Evening Gazette_, sent it off by hand. This was hardly done when Mrs. Alingsby arrived, and they went off together to the private view of the Post-Cubists, and revelled in the works of those remarkable artists. Some were portraits and some landscapes, and it was usually easy to tell which was which, because a careful scrutiny revealed an eye or a stray mouth in some, and a tree or a house in others. Lucia was specially enthusiastic over a picture of Waterloo Bridge, but she had mistaken the number in the catalogue, and it proved to be a portrait of the artist’s wife. Luckily she had not actually read out to Sophy that it was Waterloo Bridge, though she had said something about the river, but this was easily covered up in appreciation. “Too wonderful,” she said. “How they get to the very soul of things! What is it that Wordsworth says? ‘The very pulse of the machine.’ Pulsating, is it not?” Mrs. Alingsby was tall and weird and intense, dressed rather like a bird-of-paradise that had been out in a high gale, but very well connected. She had long straight hair which fell over her forehead, and sometimes got in her eyes, and she wore on her head a scarlet jockey-cap with an immense cameo in front of it. She hated all art that was earlier than 1923, and a considerable lot of what was later. In music, on the other hand, she was primitive, and thought Bach decadent: in literature her taste was for stories without a story, and poems without metre or meaning. But she had collected round her a group of interesting outlaws, of whom the men looked like women, and the women like nothing at all, and though nobody ever knew what they were talking about, they themselves were talked about. Lucia had been to a party of hers, where they all sat in a room with black walls, and listened to early Italian music on a spinet while a charcoal brazier on a blue hearth was fed with incense.... Lucia’s general opinion of her was that she might be useful up to a point, for she certainly excited interest. “Wordsworth?” she asked. “Oh, yes, I remember who you mean. About the Westmorland Lakes. Such a kill-joy.” She put on her large horn spectacles to look at the picture of the artist’s wife, and her body began to sway with a lithe circular motion. “Marvellous! What a rhythm!” she said. “Sigismund is the most rhythmical of them all. You ought to be painted by him. He would make something wonderful of you. Something _andante, adagio_ almost. He’s coming to see me on Sunday. Come and meet him. Breakfast about half-past twelve. Vegetarian with cocktails.”