ndreaming people
who were Denis's friends were not rich enough; they hadn't reached
plutocracy, where romance resides, but merely prosperity, which has fewer
possibilities. Lucy began in these days to ponder on the exceeding evil
of Socialism, which the devil has put it into certain men's hearts to
desire. For, thought Lucy, sweep away the romantic rich, sweep away
the dreaming destitute, and what have you left? The prosperous; the
comfortable; the serenely satisfied; the sanely reasonable. Dives, with
his purple and fine linen, his sublime outlook over a world he may
possess at a touch, goes to his own place; Lazarus, with his wallet for
crusts and his place among the dogs and his sharp wonder at the world's
black heart, is gathered to his fathers: there remain the sanitary
dwellings of the comfortable, the monotonous external adequacy that
touches no man's inner needs, the lifeless rigour of a superintended
well-being. Decidedly, thought Lucy, siding with the Holy Roman Church,
a scheme of the devil's. Denis and his friends also thought it was rot.
So no doubt it was. Denis belonged to the Conservative party. Lucy
thought parties funny things, and laughed. Though she had of late taken
to wandering far into seas of thought, so that her wide forehead was
often puckered as she sat silent, she still laughed at the world. Perhaps
the more one thinks about it the more one laughs; the height and depth of
its humour are certainly unfathomable.

On this last night of February, Lord Evelyn, when the other guests had
gone, put his unsteady white hand under Lucy's chin and raised her small
pale face and looked at it out of his near-sighted, scrutinising eyes,
and said:

"Humph. You're thinner."

Lucy's eyes laughed up at him.

"Am I? I suppose I'm growing old."

"You're worrying. What's it about?" asked Lord Evelyn.

They were in the library. Lord Evelyn and Denis sat by the fire in
leather chairs and smoked, and Lucy sat on a hassock between them, her
chin in her hands.

She was silent for a moment. Then she looked up at Denis, who was reading
Punch, and said, "I've had a letter from Peggy Margerison this morning."

Denis gave a sound between a grunt and a chuckle. The grunt element was
presumably for Peggy Margerison, the chuckle for Punch.

Lord Evelyn, tapping his eye-glass on the arm of his chair, said, "Well?
Well?" impatiently, nervously.

Lucy drew a note from her pocket (she was never pocketless) and spread i