But it was the time when the first vigorous spring of feminine revolt was in the air.  Rosa Bonheur, George Eliot, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other leaders were setting the pace for the advanced women, and George Sand was still a popular romancer.  As a reminiscence of George Sand, Luccia to this day pretends that she prefers to smoke cigars to cigarettes, though, as a matter of fact, she has never smoked either, and has, indeed, an ultra-feminine detestation of tobacco—­even in the form of her husband’s pipe.  She only says it, of course, for the fun of seeming “naughty”; which recalls to my mind her shocking behaviour one day when I went with her to call on some very prim cousins in New York.  It was a household of an excessively brown-stone respectability, just the atmosphere to rouse the wickedness in Luccia.  As we sat together in an upright conversation that sounded like the rustling of dried leaves in a cemetery, why!  Luccia, for all her eighty years, seemed like a young wild-rose bush filling the tomb-like room with living light and fragrance.  I could see the wickedness in her surging for an outburst.  She was well aware that those respectable connections of hers had always looked upon her as a sort of “artistic” black sheep in the family.  Presently her opportunity came.  As our visit dragged mournfully towards its end, the butler entered, in pursuance of the early Victorian ritual on such occasions, bearing a tray on which was a decanter of sherry, some tiny wine-glasses, and some dry biscuits of a truly early Victorian dryness.  This ghostly hospitality was duly dispensed, and Luccia, who seldom drinks anything but tea, instead of sipping her sherry with a lady-like aloofness, drained her glass with a sudden devil-may-care abandon, and, to the evident amazement even of the furniture, held it out to be refilled.  Such pagan behaviour had never disgraced that scandalized drawing-room before.  And when to her action she added words, the room absolutely refused to believe its ears.  “I feel,” she said, with a deep-down mirth in her eyes which only I could suspect rather than see, “I feel today as if I should like to go on a real spree.  Do you ever feel that way?”

A palpable shudder passed through the room.

“Cousin Luccia!” cried out the three outraged mummies; the brother with actual sternness, and the sisters in plain fear.  Had their eccentric cousin really gone out of her mind at last?

“Never feel that way?” she added, delighting in the havoc she was making.  “You should.  It’s a wonderful feeling.”

Then she drained her second glass, and to the evident relief of all three, rose to go.  How we laughed together, as we sped away in our taxicab.  “It’s as well to live up to one’s reputation with such people,” she said, that dear, fantastic Luccia.