Edith did not understand.  She thought that Lucia’s perceptions in this matter were blunt, when they were only superlatively fine.

“All this,” said she, “implies an amount of intimacy that I was not aware of.”

“Intimacy?  Yes, I suppose it is intimacy, of a sort.”

“And how it could have happened with a man like that—­”

“A man like what?”

“Well, my dear girl, a man that Horace wouldn’t dream of allowing you to meet, even in his own house.”

“Horace?  You talk about my being under an obligation.  It was he who helped to put me under it.”

“And how?”

“By never delivering one of my messages to him; by letting him believe that I behaved horribly to him; that I sent him away and never gave him a thought—­when he had been so magnificent.  There were a thousand things I wanted to explain and set right; and I asked Horace for an opportunity and he never gave it me.  He can’t blame me if I take it now.”

“If Horace did all these things, he did them for the best possible reasons.  He knows rather more of this young man than you do, or could have any idea of.  I don’t know what he is now, but he was, at one time, thoroughly disreputable.”

“Whatever did he do?”

“Do?  He did everything.  He drank; he ran after the worst sort of women—­he mixes now with the lowest class of journalists in town; he lived for months, Horace says, with a horrid little actress in the next house to this.”

Lucia’s face quivered like a pale flame.

“I don’t believe it.  I don’t believe it for a moment.”

“It’s absurd to say you don’t believe what everybody knows, and what anybody here can tell you.”

“I never heard a word against him here.  Ask Sophie She’s known him for five years.  Besides, I know him.  That’s enough.”

“Lucy, when you once get hold of an idea you’re blind to everything outside it.”

“I take after my family in that.  But no, I’m not blind.  He may have gone wrong once, at some time—­but never, no, I’m sure of it, since I knew him.”

“Still, when a man has once lived that sort of life, the coarseness must remain.”

“Coarseness?  There isn’t any refinement, any gentleness he isn’t capable of.  He’s fine through and through.  Stay and meet him, Edith, and see for yourself.”

“I have met him.”

“And yet you can’t see?”

“I’ve seen all I want to see.”

“Don’t, Edith—­”

There was a sound of feet running swiftly up the stair; the door of the adjoining room opened and shut, and a man’s voice was heard singing.  These sounds conveyed to Edith a frightful sense of the nearness and intimacy of the young man, and of the horror of Lucia’s position.  As she listened she held her cousin by her two hands in a dumb agony of entreaty.

“Horace is coming back,” she whispered.