He was smiling still, while his imagination dallied with the monstrous
vision.

"I wouldn't have suggested it," she said coldly, "if I hadn't thought
you'd like it."

Horace felt a little ashamed of himself. He knew he had only to think
about Lucia in her presence to change the colour on her cheeks, and
his last thought had left a stain there like the mark of a blow. Never
had he known any woman so sensitive as his cousin Lucia.

"So I should like it, dear, if it were possible, or rather if _he_
were not impossible. His manners have not that repose which
distinguishes his _Helen_. Really, for two and twenty, he is
marvellously restrained."

"Restrained? Do you think so?"

"Certainly," he said, his thought gaining precision in opposition to
her vagueness, "his _Helen_ is pure Vere de Vere. You might read me
some of it."

She read, and in the golden afternoon her voice built up the cold,
polished marble of the verse. She had not been able to tell him what
she thought of Rickman; but her voice, in its profound vibrations,
made apparent that which she, and she only, had discerned in him, the
troubled pulse of youth, the passion of the imprisoned and tumultuous
soul, the soul which Horace had assured her inhabited the body of an
aitchless shopman. Lucia might not have the intuition of genius, but