to his friends, too. It's a splendid profession; I'm so glad I thought
of it. If I hadn't I should have had to go into a dye shop, or be a
weaver or something. It wouldn't have been good form; it wouldn't even
have been clean. I should have had a day-before-yesterday's handkerchief
and Rodney would have liked me more, but Denis would probably have cut
me. As it is I'm quite good form and quite clean, and I move in the best
circles. I love the Ignorant Rich; they're so amusing. I know such
a nice lady. She buys potato rings. She likes them to be Dublin
hall-marked and clearly dated seventeen hundred and something--so,
naturally, they always were till I began to buy them for her. I've
persuaded her to give away the most blatant forgeries to her god-children
at their baptisms. Babies like them, sham or genuine."

Peter was having tea with his cousin Lucy and Urquhart in the White City.
Peter and Lucy were very fond of the White City. Peter's cousin Lucy was
something like a small, gay spring flower, with wide, solemn grey eyes
that brimmed with sudden laughters, and a funny, infectious gurgle of a
laugh. She was a year younger than Peter, and they had all their lives
gone shares in their possessions, from guinea-pigs to ideas. They admired
the same china and the same people, with unquestioning unanimity. Lucy
lived in Chelsea, with an elder sister and a father who ran at his own
expense a revolutionary journal that didn't pay, because those who would
have liked to buy it couldn't, for the most part, afford to, and because
those who could have afforded to didn't want to, and because, in short,
journals run by nice people never do pay.

Lucy played the 'cello, the instrument usually selected by the small
in stature. In the intervals of this pursuit, she went about the world
open-eyed to all new-burnished joys that came within her vision, and
lived by admiration, hope and love, and played with Peter at any game,