Having gone the round of the gallery, he paused before the modern
portraits which brought him again to the door of the drawing-room. Sir
Frederick held him with his joyous satyr-face, for it was curiously,
incredibly like his daughter's (to be sure, Sir Frederick had blue
eyes and reddish hair, which made a difference). His eyebrows had a
far-off hint of her; she lingered in the tilted corners of his mouth
and eyes. And if there could be any likeness between a thing so gross
and a thing so spiritual, his upper lip took a sweep that suggested
Lucia's with its long-drawn subtle curve.
He was startled out of these reflections by the opening of the door.
Lucia stood beside him. She had a lamp in her hand which she raised
for an instant, so that the light fell full upon the portrait. Her own
face appeared as if illuminated from within by the flaming spirit of
love.
"That is my father," she said simply, and passed on.
He looked again at the portrait, but the likeness had vanished. In the
frank sensuality of Sir Frederick's crimson smirk he could find no
affinity to Lucia's grave and tender smile.
"There are some things," he said to himself, "that she could never
see."
CHAPTER XXV
If Lucia was not, as her father had pronounced her, the worst educated
young woman in Europe, there was a sense (not intended by Sir
Frederick) in which her education might be called incomplete. She had
learnt the things that she liked, and she had left unlearnt the things
that she did not like. It was the method of discreet skipping; and it
answered so well in the world of books that she had applied it to the
world of men and women. She knew the people she liked, and she left
unknown those whom she did not like. Here in Harmouth her peculiar art
or instinct of selection earned for her, as Kitty Palliser had lately
told her, the character of exclusiveness. This, by the way was family
tradition again. From time immemorial there had been a certain
well-recognized distance between Court House and the little Georgian
town. And when Harmouth was discovered by a stock-broker and became a
watering-place, and people began to talk about Harmouth society, Court
House remained innocently unaware that anything of the sort existed.
Lucia selected her friends elsewhere with such supreme fastidiousness
that she could count them on the fingers of one hand, her instinct,
like all great natural gifts, being entirely spontaneous and
unconscious.
And now it seemed she had added Mr. Savage Keith Rickman to the list.
She owned quite frankly that in spite of everything she liked him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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