yhow we're going to Italy in the spring, to pick things up, as
Leslie puts it. That always sounds so much as if we didn't pay for them.
Then we shall bring them home and have free exhibits for the Ignorant
Poor, and I shall give free and instructive lectures. Isn't it a pleasant
plan? We're going to Venice. There's a Berovieri goblet that some
Venetian count has, that Leslie's set his heart on. We are to acquire
it, regardless of expense, if it turns out to be all that is rumoured."

Urquhart scoffed here.

"Nice to be infallible, isn't it. You and your goblets and your Ignorant
Rich. And your brother Hilary and my uncle Evelyn. Your great gifts seem
to run in the family. My uncle, I hear, is ruining himself with buying
the things your brother admires. My poor uncle, Miss Hope, is getting so
weak-sighted that he can't judge for himself as he used, so he follows
the advice of Margery's brother. It keeps him very happy and amused,
though he'll soon be bankrupt, no doubt."

Lucy, as usual, laughed at the Urquhart family and the Margerison family
and the world at large. When she laughed, she opened her grey eyes wide,
while they twinkled with dancing light.

Then she said, "Oh, I want to go on the flip-flap. Peter mustn't come,
because it always makes him sick; so will you?"

Urquhart said he would, so they did, and Peter watched them, hoping
Urquhart didn't mind much. Urquhart never seemed to mind being ordered
about by Lucy. And Lucy, of course, had accepted him as an intimate
friend from the first, because Peter had said she was to, and because, as
she remarked, he was so astonishingly nice to look at and to listen to.

Among the visitors who frequented Lucy's home, people whom she considered
astonishingly pleasant to look at and to listen to did not abound; so
Lucy enjoyed the change all the more.

The first time Peter took Urquhart down to Chelsea to call on his Hope
uncle and cousins, one Sunday afternoon, he gave him a succinct account
of the sort of people they would probably meet there.

"They have oddities in, you know--and particularly on Sunday afternoons.
They usually have one or two staying in the house, too. They keep open
house for wastrels. A lot of them are aliens--Polish refugees, Russian
anarchists, oppressed Finns, massacred Armenians who do embroidery;
violinists who can't earn a living, decayed chimney-sweeps and so forth.
'Disillusioned (or still illusioned) geniuses, would-bes, theorists,
ar