"There was nothing to spoil," she said with a sudden earnestness. "You can't spoil anything unless it is good to begin with. I turned over a new leaf, as I said, but why did I do that? Simply and solely, Maud, that I might have a more comfortable time. I want people to love me, but why? Because then they will be nice to me, and give me what I want. That's me—not pleasant, but me."
"Ah! you are mixing up two words which haven't anything to do with each other," said Maud. "We all find it convenient to be liked, because that does make things pleasant. But love is quite a different matter."
Lucia sat quite silent a moment. The simplicity and certainty of what Maud said struck some chord within her of which she was but seldom conscious. Just for these few seconds she felt on a plain immeasurably low compared to her friend: it was as if some unquiet wind was conscious for a moment of the stillness of the stars. Then Maud spoke again in that cool, slow voice that so admirably expressed her.
"How wilful you are sometimes, dear Lucia!" she said, "as now, when for some reason you seem to want to make yourself out so mean and unfeeling. Is it not a good thing that I see through you? You know the difference quite well. If one just likes a person, and there is a piece of pleasure going about, why, I am afraid one grabs it very often, and doesn't mind much whether the other person has to go without it. But if you love anybody, you grab the pleasure in order to give it to the person you love. And the fact that you deprive yourself of it is just what makes the giving it away so delightful. I dare say that is selfish in its way, too; giving it, is to give yourself the highest possible enjoyment. You delight in the cost of it. Dear me, what very commonplace sentiments! I apologize."
Maud, always slow with her tongue, always reticent about what she felt keenly, stopped abruptly. She saw that something in what she said had affected Lucia—that her words, commonplace as they seemed to her, put something difficult before her friend. What it was she scarcely asked herself; far less did she dream of asking Lucia.
But poor Lucia—she saw the idea like a view of distant mountains, intolerably far and intolerably above her. And her next feeling was one of resentment and rebellion at the presentation of what was but barely intelligible to her. She felt impatient with it, as a man feels impatient at some sentence spoken to him in a
