more nearly so than before, in not only the beauty and vitality of this girl, but in the future she sketched. In that he, again, was the most important figure, but just as he was absorbed in her, so he was absorbed in her idea for those who surrounded him, his servants, his tenants, not farmers alone, but the inhabitants of such quiet commodious houses as this, which had proved to hold a pearl. And then he tried to banish the personal interest—how he, that is to say, would figure in this Academic Arcadia which she had "washed in" for him, and he framed his question altruistically.
"You said you were sure that I would care immensely about my dependents," he said. "That is vitally true. But make it more practical, dear Miss Grimson"
Lucia did not move a muscle, or dim the brilliance of her glance by surprise. The check in his speech, after he had said "dear Miss Grimson," was his own, not suggested by her. Indeed, on the moment, he thought that she had not noticed the epithet (which she had), and felt a thrill—though a small one—that there was something in her which answered to that in him which had made him say "dear Miss Grimson." But at the moment he was more interested in her scheme for him than he was either in her or in himself.
"Be more practical," he repeated. "You tell me that I will will make my aims felt by, and fulfilled in, those who surround me. I will not say dependent on me, for that savours of self-consciousness, does it not?"
(It did.)
Lucia carefully and naturally looked back from the railway embankment to him.
"No, it is a phrase merely," she said; "we mean the same people. Whether we say that they depend or surround, does not matter. But I chose to say dependents. By them I mean your scullery-maid, and your boot-boy, and your farmers, and your friends, and your tenants—we, I mean, who live in your houses."
"And I want to have friends among all those," he said. "You class my friends as separate from my servants and my farmers and my tenants. May I not have friends among them?"
This was an opportunity for a girl a little less clever than Lucia, though quite as determined a flirt, to set a new and more personal scene for the conversational drama. She could easily and naturally have said that he probably already had many friends among the tenants of this residential quarter, which would narrow and
