"
Secrecy has this disadvantage: we lose the sense of proportion;
we cannot tell whether our secret is important or not. Were Lucy
and her cousin closeted with a great thing which would destroy
Cecil's life if he discovered it, or with a little thing which he
would laugh at? Miss Bartlett suggested the former. Perhaps she
was right. It had become a great thing now. Left to herself, Lucy
would have told her mother and her lover ingenuously, and it
would have remained a little thing. "Emerson, not Harris"; it was
only that a few weeks ago. She tried to tell Cecil even now when
they were laughing about some beautiful lady who had smitten his
heart at school. But her body behaved so ridiculously that she
stopped.
She and her secret stayed ten days longer in the deserted
Metropolis visiting the scenes they were to know so well later
on. It did her no harm, Cecil thought, to learn the framework of
society, while society itself was absent on the golf-links or the
moors. The weather was cool, and it did her no harm.
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