On the fifth day of her illness new interests sprang up for Lucia that led her to neglect Pope’s Iliad altogether. By the first post there came a letter from Georgie, containing an enclosure which Lucia saw (with a slight misgiving) was written in Italian. She turned first to Georgie’s letter.

The most wonderful thing has happened [wrote Georgie] and you will be pleased… There’s a family here with whom I’ve made friends, an English father, an Italian mother and a girl with a pigtail. Listen! The mother teaches the girl Italian, and sets her little themes to write on some subject or other, and then corrects them and writes a fair copy. Well, I was sitting in the lounge this morning while the girl was having her lesson, and Mrs Brocklebank (that’s her name) asked me to suggest a subject for the theme, and I had the most marvellous idea. I said ‘Let her write a letter to an Italian Countess whom she has never seen before, and say how she regretted having been obliged to put off her musical party to which she had asked the Countess and her brother, because she had caught influenza. She was so sorry not to meet her, and she was afraid that as the Countess was only staying a week in the place, she would not have the pleasure of seeing her at all.’ Mrs B. thought that would do beautifully for a theme, and I repeated it over again to make sure. Then the girl wrote it, and Mrs B. corrected it and made a fair copy. I begged her to give it me, because I adored Italian (though I couldn’t speak it) and it was so beautifully expressed. I haven’t told this very well, because I’m in a hurry to catch the post, but I enclose Mrs B.’s Italian letter, and you just see whether it doesn’t do the trick too marvellously. I’m having quite a gay time, music and drives and seeing the Channel boat come in, and aren’t I clever?

Your devoted,
Georgie

Foljambe and Cadman have had a row, but I’m afraid they’ve made it up.

Lucia, with her misgivings turned to joyful expectation, seized and read the enclosure. Indeed it was a miraculous piece of manna to one whom the very sight of it made hungry. It might have been the result of telepathy between Mrs Brocklebank and her own subconscious self, so aptly did that lady grasp her particular unspoken need. It expressed in the most elegant idiom precisely what met the situation, and she would copy out and send it today, without altering a single word. And how clever of Georgie to have thought of it. He deserved all the champagne he could drink.