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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1263 ***
+
+THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON
+
+By Edith Wharton
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+I
+
+IT rose for them--their honey-moon--over the waters of a lake so famed
+as the scene of romantic raptures that they were rather proud of not
+having been afraid to choose it as the setting of their own.
+
+“It required a total lack of humour, or as great a gift for it as ours,
+to risk the experiment,” Susy Lansing opined, as they hung over the
+inevitable marble balustrade and watched their tutelary orb roll its
+magic carpet across the waters to their feet.
+
+“Yes--or the loan of Strefford’s villa,” her husband emended, glancing
+upward through the branches at a long low patch of paleness to which the
+moonlight was beginning to give the form of a white house-front.
+
+“Oh, come when we’d five to choose from. At least if you count the
+Chicago flat.”
+
+“So we had--you wonder!” He laid his hand on hers, and his touch renewed
+the sense of marvelling exultation which the deliberate survey of their
+adventure always roused in her.... It was characteristic that she merely
+added, in her steady laughing tone: “Or, not counting the flat--for
+I hate to brag--just consider the others: Violet Melrose’s place at
+Versailles, your aunt’s villa at Monte Carlo--and a moor!”
+
+She was conscious of throwing in the moor tentatively, and yet with
+a somewhat exaggerated emphasis, as if to make sure that he shouldn’t
+accuse her of slurring it over. But he seemed to have no desire to
+do so. “Poor old Fred!” he merely remarked; and she breathed out
+carelessly: “Oh, well--”
+
+His hand still lay on hers, and for a long interval, while they stood
+silent in the enveloping loveliness of the night, she was aware only of
+the warm current running from palm to palm, as the moonlight below them
+drew its line of magic from shore to shore.
+
+Nick Lansing spoke at last. “Versailles in May would have been
+impossible: all our Paris crowd would have run us down within
+twenty-four hours. And Monte Carlo is ruled out because it’s exactly
+the kind of place everybody expected us to go. So--with all respect to
+you--it wasn’t much of a mental strain to decide on Como.”
+
+His wife instantly challenged this belittling of her capacity. “It took
+a good deal of argument to convince you that we could face the ridicule
+of Como!”
+
+“Well, I should have preferred something in a lower key; at least I
+thought I should till we got here. Now I see that this place is idiotic
+unless one is perfectly happy; and that then it’s--as good as any other.”
+
+She sighed out a blissful assent. “And I must say that Streffy has done
+things to a turn. Even the cigars--who do you suppose gave him those
+cigars?” She added thoughtfully: “You’ll miss them when we have to go.”
+
+“Oh, I say, don’t let’s talk to-night about going. Aren’t we outside of
+time and space...? Smell that guinea-a-bottle stuff over there: what is
+it? Stephanotis?”
+
+“Y--yes.... I suppose so. Or gardenias.... Oh, the fire-flies! Look...
+there, against that splash of moonlight on the water. Apples of silver
+in a net-work of gold....” They leaned together, one flesh from shoulder
+to finger-tips, their eyes held by the snared glitter of the ripples.
+
+“I could bear,” Lansing remarked, “even a nightingale at this
+moment....”
+
+A faint gurgle shook the magnolias behind them, and a long liquid
+whisper answered it from the thicket of laurel above their heads.
+
+“It’s a little late in the year for them: they’re ending just as we
+begin.”
+
+Susy laughed. “I hope when our turn comes we shall say good-bye to each
+other as sweetly.”
+
+It was in her husband’s mind to answer: “They’re not saying good-bye,
+but only settling down to family cares.” But as this did not happen to
+be in his plan, or in Susy’s, he merely echoed her laugh and pressed her
+closer.
+
+The spring night drew them into its deepening embrace. The ripples of
+the lake had gradually widened and faded into a silken smoothness, and
+high above the mountains the moon was turning from gold to white in
+a sky powdered with vanishing stars. Across the lake the lights of a
+little town went out, one after another, and the distant shore became a
+floating blackness. A breeze that rose and sank brushed their faces with
+the scents of the garden; once it blew out over the water a great white
+moth like a drifting magnolia petal. The nightingales had paused and the
+trickle of the fountain behind the house grew suddenly insistent.
+
+When Susy spoke it was in a voice languid with visions. “I have been
+thinking,” she said, “that we ought to be able to make it last at least
+a year longer.”
+
+Her husband received the remark without any sign of surprise or
+disapprobation; his answer showed that he not only understood her, but
+had been inwardly following the same train of thought.
+
+“You mean,” he enquired after a pause, “without counting your
+grandmother’s pearls?”
+
+“Yes--without the pearls.”
+
+He pondered a while, and then rejoined in a tender whisper: “Tell me
+again just how.”
+
+“Let’s sit down, then. No, I like the cushions best.” He stretched
+himself in a long willow chair, and she curled up on a heap of
+boat-cushions and leaned her head against his knee. Just above her,
+when she lifted her lids, she saw bits of moon-flooded sky incrusted
+like silver in a sharp black patterning of plane-boughs. All about them
+breathed of peace and beauty and stability, and her happiness was so
+acute that it was almost a relief to remember the stormy background of
+bills and borrowing against which its frail structure had been reared.
+“People with a balance can’t be as happy as all this,” Susy mused,
+letting the moonlight filter through her lazy lashes.
+
+People with a balance had always been Susy Branch’s bugbear; they were
+still, and more dangerously, to be Susy Lansing’s. She detested them,
+detested them doubly, as the natural enemies of mankind and as the
+people one always had to put one’s self out for. The greater part of her
+life having been passed among them, she knew nearly all that there was
+to know about them, and judged them with the contemptuous lucidity
+of nearly twenty years of dependence. But at the present moment her
+animosity was diminished not only by the softening effect of love but
+by the fact that she had got out of those very people more--yes, ever so
+much more--than she and Nick, in their hours of most reckless planning,
+had ever dared to hope for.
+
+“After all, we owe them this!” she mused.
+
+Her husband, lost in the drowsy beatitude of the hour, had not repeated
+his question; but she was still on the trail of the thought he had
+started. A year--yes, she was sure now that with a little management
+they could have a whole year of it! “It” was their marriage, their being
+together, and away from bores and bothers, in a comradeship of which
+both of them had long ago guessed the immediate pleasure, but she at
+least had never imagined the deeper harmony.
+
+It was at one of their earliest meetings--at one of the heterogeneous
+dinners that the Fred Gillows tried to think “literary”--that the young
+man who chanced to sit next to her, and of whom it was vaguely rumoured
+that he had “written,” had presented himself to her imagination as the
+sort of luxury to which Susy Branch, heiress, might conceivably have
+treated herself as a crowning folly. Susy Branch, pauper, was fond of
+picturing how this fancied double would employ her millions: it was one
+of her chief grievances against her rich friends that they disposed of
+theirs so unimaginatively.
+
+“I’d rather have a husband like that than a steam-yacht!” she had
+thought at the end of her talk with the young man who had written, and
+as to whom it had at once been clear to her that nothing his pen had
+produced, or might hereafter set down, would put him in a position to
+offer his wife anything more costly than a row-boat.
+
+“His wife! As if he could ever have one! For he’s not the kind to marry
+for a yacht either.” In spite of her past, Susy had preserved enough
+inner independence to detect the latent signs of it in others, and also
+to ascribe it impulsively to those of the opposite sex who happened to
+interest her. She had a natural contempt for people who gloried in what
+they need only have endured. She herself meant eventually to marry,
+because one couldn’t forever hang on to rich people; but she was going
+to wait till she found some one who combined the maximum of wealth with
+at least a minimum of companionableness.
+
+She had at once perceived young Lansing’s case to be exactly the
+opposite: he was as poor as he could be, and as companionable as it was
+possible to imagine. She therefore decided to see as much of him as her
+hurried and entangled life permitted; and this, thanks to a series of
+adroit adjustments, turned out to be a good deal. They met frequently
+all the rest of that winter; so frequently that Mrs. Fred Gillow one
+day abruptly and sharply gave Susy to understand that she was “making
+herself ridiculous.”
+
+“Ah--” said Susy with a long breath, looking her friend and patroness
+straight in the painted eyes.
+
+“Yes,” cried Ursula Gillow in a sob, “before you interfered Nick liked
+me awfully... and, of course, I don’t want to reproach you... but when I
+think....”
+
+Susy made no answer. How could she, when she thought? The dress she had
+on had been given her by Ursula; Ursula’s motor had carried her to the
+feast from which they were both returning. She counted on spending the
+following August with the Gillows at Newport... and the only alternative
+was to go to California with the Bockheimers, whom she had hitherto
+refused even to dine with.
+
+“Of course, what you fancy is perfect nonsense, Ursula; and as to my
+interfering--” Susy hesitated, and then murmured: “But if it will make
+you any happier I’ll arrange to see him less often....” She sounded the
+lowest depths of subservience in returning Ursula’s tearful kiss....
+
+Susy Branch had a masculine respect for her word; and the next day she
+put on her most becoming hat and sought out young Mr. Lansing in his
+lodgings. She was determined to keep her promise to Ursula; but she
+meant to look her best when she did it.
+
+She knew at what time the young man was likely to be found, for he was
+doing a dreary job on a popular encyclopaedia (V to X), and had told her
+what hours were dedicated to the hateful task. “Oh, if only it were a
+novel!” she thought as she mounted his dingy stairs; but immediately
+reflected that, if it were the kind that she could bear to read, it
+probably wouldn’t bring him in much more than his encyclopaedia. Miss
+Branch had her standards in literature....
+
+The apartment to which Mr. Lansing admitted her was a good deal cleaner,
+but hardly less dingy, than his staircase. Susy, knowing him to be
+addicted to Oriental archaeology, had pictured him in a bare room
+adorned by a single Chinese bronze of flawless shape, or by some
+precious fragment of Asiatic pottery. But such redeeming features were
+conspicuously absent, and no attempt had been made to disguise the
+decent indigence of the bed-sitting-room.
+
+Lansing welcomed his visitor with every sign of pleasure, and with
+apparent indifference as to what she thought of his furniture. He seemed
+to be conscious only of his luck in seeing her on a day when they had
+not expected to meet. This made Susy all the sorrier to execute her
+promise, and the gladder that she had put on her prettiest hat; and for
+a moment or two she looked at him in silence from under its conniving
+brim.
+
+Warm as their mutual liking was, Lansing had never said a word of love
+to her; but this was no deterrent to his visitor, whose habit it was
+to speak her meaning clearly when there were no reasons, worldly or
+pecuniary, for its concealment. After a moment, therefore, she told him
+why she had come; it was a nuisance, of course, but he would understand.
+Ursula Gillow was jealous, and they would have to give up seeing each
+other.
+
+The young man’s burst of laughter was music to her; for, after all, she
+had been rather afraid that being devoted to Ursula might be as much in
+his day’s work as doing the encyclopaedia.
+
+“But I give you my word it’s a raving-mad mistake! And I don’t believe
+she ever meant me, to begin with--” he protested; but Susy, her
+common-sense returning with her reassurance, promptly cut short his
+denial.
+
+“You can trust Ursula to make herself clear on such occasions. And it
+doesn’t make any difference what you think. All that matters is what she
+believes.”
+
+“Oh, come! I’ve got a word to say about that too, haven’t I?”
+
+Susy looked slowly and consideringly about the room. There was nothing
+in it, absolutely nothing, to show that he had ever possessed a spare
+dollar--or accepted a present.
+
+“Not as far as I’m concerned,” she finally pronounced.
+
+“How do you mean? If I’m as free as air--?”
+
+“I’m not.”
+
+He grew thoughtful. “Oh, then, of course--. It only seems a little odd,”
+ he added drily, “that in that case, the protest should have come from
+Mrs. Gillow.”
+
+“Instead of coming from my millionaire bridegroom, Oh, I haven’t any; in
+that respect I’m as free as you.”
+
+“Well, then--? Haven’t we only got to stay free?”
+
+Susy drew her brows together anxiously. It was going to be rather more
+difficult than she had supposed.
+
+“I said I was as free in that respect. I’m not going to marry--and I
+don’t suppose you are?”
+
+“God, no!” he ejaculated fervently.
+
+“But that doesn’t always imply complete freedom....”
+
+He stood just above her, leaning his elbow against the hideous black
+marble arch that framed his fireless grate. As she glanced up she saw
+his face harden, and the colour flew to hers.
+
+“Was that what you came to tell me?” he asked.
+
+“Oh, you don’t understand--and I don’t see why you don’t, since we’ve
+knocked about so long among exactly the same kind of people.” She stood
+up impulsively and laid her hand on his arm. “I do wish you’d help
+me--!”
+
+He remained motionless, letting the hand lie untouched.
+
+“Help you to tell me that poor Ursula was a pretext, but that there IS
+someone who--for one reason or another--really has a right to object to
+your seeing me too often?”
+
+Susy laughed impatiently. “You talk like the hero of a novel--the kind
+my governess used to read. In the first place I should never recognize
+that kind of right, as you call it--never!”
+
+“Then what kind do you?” he asked with a clearing brow.
+
+“Why--the kind I suppose you recognize on the part of your publisher.”
+ This evoked a hollow laugh from him. “A business claim, call it,” she
+pursued. “Ursula does a lot for me: I live on her for half the year.
+This dress I’ve got on now is one she gave me. Her motor is going to
+take me to a dinner to-night. I’m going to spend next summer with her
+at Newport.... If I don’t, I’ve got to go to California with the
+Bockheimers--so good-bye.”
+
+Suddenly in tears, she was out of the door and down his steep three
+flights before he could stop her--though, in thinking it over, she
+didn’t even remember if he had tried to. She only recalled having stood
+a long time on the corner of Fifth Avenue, in the harsh winter radiance,
+waiting till a break in the torrent of motors laden with fashionable
+women should let her cross, and saying to herself: “After all, I might
+have promised Ursula... and kept on seeing him....”
+
+Instead of which, when Lansing wrote the next day entreating a word with
+her, she had sent back a friendly but firm refusal; and had managed soon
+afterward to get taken to Canada for a fortnight’s ski-ing, and then to
+Florida for six weeks in a house-boat....
+
+As she reached this point in her retrospect the remembrance of Florida
+called up a vision of moonlit waters, magnolia fragrance and balmy airs;
+merging with the circumambient sweetness, it laid a drowsy spell upon
+her lids. Yes, there had been a bad moment: but it was over; and she was
+here, safe and blissful, and with Nick; and this was his knee her head
+rested on, and they had a year ahead of them... a whole year.... “Not
+counting the pearls,” she murmured, shutting her eyes....
+
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+
+LANSING threw the end of Strefford’s expensive cigar into the lake, and
+bent over his wife. Poor child! She had fallen asleep.... He leaned
+back and stared up again at the silver-flooded sky. How queer--how
+inexpressibly queer--it was to think that that light was shed by his
+honey-moon! A year ago, if anyone had predicted his risking such an
+adventure, he would have replied by asking to be locked up at the first
+symptoms....
+
+There was still no doubt in his mind that the adventure was a mad one.
+It was all very well for Susy to remind him twenty times a day that they
+had pulled it off--and so why should he worry? Even in the light of her
+far-seeing cleverness, and of his own present bliss, he knew the future
+would not bear the examination of sober thought. And as he sat there
+in the summer moonlight, with her head on his knee, he tried to
+recapitulate the successive steps that had landed them on Streffy’s
+lake-front.
+
+On Lansing’s side, no doubt, it dated back to his leaving Harvard with
+the large resolve not to miss anything. There stood the evergreen Tree
+of Life, the Four Rivers flowing from its foot; and on every one of the
+four currents he meant to launch his little skiff. On two of them he had
+not gone very far, on the third he had nearly stuck in the mud; but the
+fourth had carried him to the very heart of wonder. It was the stream of
+his lively imagination, of his inexhaustible interest in every form of
+beauty and strangeness and folly. On this stream, sitting in the stout
+little craft of his poverty, his insignificance and his independence, he
+had made some notable voyages.... And so, when Susy Branch, whom he had
+sought out through a New York season as the prettiest and most amusing
+girl in sight, had surprised him with the contradictory revelation of
+her modern sense of expediency and her old-fashioned standard of good
+faith, he had felt an irresistible desire to put off on one more cruise
+into the unknown.
+
+It was of the essence of the adventure that, after her one brief visit
+to his lodgings, he should have kept his promise and not tried to see
+her again. Even if her straightforwardness had not roused his emulation,
+his understanding of her difficulties would have moved his pity. He knew
+on how frail a thread the popularity of the penniless hangs, and how
+miserably a girl like Susy was the sport of other people’s moods and
+whims. It was a part of his difficulty and of hers that to get what they
+liked they so often had to do what they disliked. But the keeping of his
+promise was a greater bore than he had expected. Susy Branch had become
+a delightful habit in a life where most of the fixed things were
+dull, and her disappearance had made it suddenly clear to him that his
+resources were growing more and more limited. Much that had once amused
+him hugely now amused him less, or not at all: a good part of his world
+of wonder had shrunk to a village peep-show. And the things which had
+kept their stimulating power--distant journeys, the enjoyment of art,
+the contact with new scenes and strange societies--were becoming less
+and less attainable. Lansing had never had more than a pittance; he had
+spent rather too much of it in his first plunge into life, and the best
+he could look forward to was a middle-age of poorly-paid hack-work,
+mitigated by brief and frugal holidays. He knew that he was more
+intelligent than the average, but he had long since concluded that
+his talents were not marketable. Of the thin volume of sonnets which a
+friendly publisher had launched for him, just seventy copies had been
+sold; and though his essay on “Chinese Influences in Greek Art” had
+created a passing stir, it had resulted in controversial correspondence
+and dinner invitations rather than in more substantial benefits.
+There seemed, in short, no prospect of his ever earning money, and his
+restricted future made him attach an increasing value to the kind of
+friendship that Susy Branch had given him. Apart from the pleasure of
+looking at her and listening to her--of enjoying in her what others less
+discriminatingly but as liberally appreciated--he had the sense, between
+himself and her, of a kind of free-masonry of precocious tolerance and
+irony. They had both, in early youth, taken the measure of the world
+they happened to live in: they knew just what it was worth to them
+and for what reasons, and the community of these reasons lent to their
+intimacy its last exquisite touch. And now, because of some jealous whim
+of a dissatisfied fool of a woman, as to whom he felt himself no more to
+blame than any young man who has paid for good dinners by good manners,
+he was to be deprived of the one complete companionship he had ever
+known....
+
+His thoughts travelled on. He recalled the long dull spring in New York
+after his break with Susy, the weary grind on his last articles,
+his listless speculations as to the cheapest and least boring way of
+disposing of the summer; and then the amazing luck of going, reluctantly
+and at the last minute, to spend a Sunday with the poor Nat Fulmers, in
+the wilds of New Hampshire, and of finding Susy there--Susy, whom he had
+never even suspected of knowing anybody in the Fulmers’ set!
+
+She had behaved perfectly--and so had he--but they were obviously much
+too glad to see each other. And then it was unsettling to be with her in
+such a house as the Fulmers’, away from the large setting of luxury
+they were both used to, in the cramped cottage where their host had
+his studio in the verandah, their hostess practiced her violin in the
+dining-room, and five ubiquitous children sprawled and shouted and blew
+trumpets and put tadpoles in the water-jugs, and the mid-day dinner was
+two hours late--and proportionately bad--because the Italian cook was
+posing for Fulmer.
+
+Lansing’s first thought had been that meeting Susy in such circumstances
+would be the quickest way to cure them both of their regrets. The case
+of the Fulmers was an awful object-lesson in what happened to young
+people who lost their heads; poor Nat, whose pictures nobody bought, had
+gone to seed so terribly--and Grace, at twenty-nine, would never again be
+anything but the woman of whom people say, “I can remember her when she
+was lovely.”
+
+But the devil of it was that Nat had never been such good company, or
+Grace so free from care and so full of music; and that, in spite of
+their disorder and dishevelment, and the bad food and general crazy
+discomfort, there was more amusement to be got out of their society
+than out of the most opulently staged house-party through which Susy and
+Lansing had ever yawned their way.
+
+It was almost a relief to the young man when, on the second afternoon,
+Miss Branch drew him into the narrow hall to say: “I really can’t
+stand the combination of Grace’s violin and little Nat’s motor-horn any
+longer. Do let us slip out till the duet is over.”
+
+“How do they stand it, I wonder?” he basely echoed, as he followed her
+up the wooded path behind the house.
+
+“It might be worth finding out,” she rejoined with a musing smile.
+
+But he remained resolutely skeptical. “Oh, give them a year or two more
+and they’ll collapse--! His pictures will never sell, you know. He’ll
+never even get them into a show.”
+
+“I suppose not. And she’ll never have time to do anything worth while
+with her music.”
+
+They had reached a piny knoll high above the ledge on which the house
+was perched. All about them stretched an empty landscape of endless
+featureless wooded hills. “Think of sticking here all the year round!”
+ Lansing groaned.
+
+“I know. But then think of wandering over the world with some people!”
+
+“Oh, Lord, yes. For instance, my trip to India with the Mortimer
+Hickses. But it was my only chance and what the deuce is one to do?”
+
+“I wish I knew!” she sighed, thinking of the Bockheimers; and he turned
+and looked at her.
+
+“Knew what?”
+
+“The answer to your question. What is one to do--when one sees both
+sides of the problem? Or every possible side of it, indeed?”
+
+They had seated themselves on a commanding rock under the pines, but
+Lansing could not see the view at their feet for the stir of the brown
+lashes on her cheek.
+
+“You mean: Nat and Grace may after all be having the best of it?”
+
+“How can I say, when I’ve told you I see all the sides? Of course,”
+ Susy added hastily, “I couldn’t live as they do for a week. But it’s
+wonderful how little it’s dimmed them.”
+
+“Certainly Nat was never more coruscating. And she keeps it up even
+better.” He reflected. “We do them good, I daresay.”
+
+“Yes--or they us. I wonder which?”
+
+After that, he seemed to remember that they sat a long time silent, and
+that his next utterance was a boyish outburst against the tyranny of the
+existing order of things, abruptly followed by the passionate query why,
+since he and she couldn’t alter it, and since they both had the habit of
+looking at facts as they were, they wouldn’t be utter fools not to take
+their chance of being happy in the only way that was open to them, To
+this challenge he did not recall Susy’s making any definite answer; but
+after another interval, in which all the world seemed framed in a
+sudden kiss, he heard her murmur to herself in a brooding tone: “I don’t
+suppose it’s ever been tried before; but we might--.” And then and there
+she had laid before him the very experiment they had since hazarded.
+
+She would have none of surreptitious bliss, she began by declaring;
+and she set forth her reasons with her usual lucid impartiality. In the
+first place, she should have to marry some day, and when she made the
+bargain she meant it to be an honest one; and secondly, in the matter
+of love, she would never give herself to anyone she did not really care
+for, and if such happiness ever came to her she did not want it shorn of
+half its brightness by the need of fibbing and plotting and dodging.
+
+“I’ve seen too much of that kind of thing. Half the women I know who’ve
+had lovers have had them for the fun of sneaking and lying about it; but
+the other half have been miserable. And I should be miserable.”
+
+It was at this point that she unfolded her plan. Why shouldn’t they
+marry; belong to each other openly and honourably, if for ever so short
+a time, and with the definite understanding that whenever either of them
+got the chance to do better he or she should be immediately released?
+The law of their country facilitated such exchanges, and society was
+beginning to view them as indulgently as the law. As Susy talked, she
+warmed to her theme and began to develop its endless possibilities.
+
+“We should really, in a way, help more than we should hamper each
+other,” she ardently explained. “We both know the ropes so well; what
+one of us didn’t see the other might--in the way of opportunities, I
+mean. And then we should be a novelty as married people. We’re both
+rather unusually popular--why not be frank!--and it’s such a blessing
+for dinner-givers to be able to count on a couple of whom neither one is
+a blank. Yes, I really believe we should be more than twice the success
+we are now; at least,” she added with a smile, “if there’s that amount
+of room for improvement. I don’t know how you feel; a man’s popularity
+is so much less precarious than a girl’s--but I know it would furbish me
+up tremendously to reappear as a married woman.” She glanced away from
+him down the long valley at their feet, and added in a lower tone: “And
+I should like, just for a little while, to feel I had something in life
+of my very own--something that nobody had lent me, like a fancy-dress or
+a motor or an opera cloak.”
+
+The suggestion, at first, had seemed to Lansing as mad as it was
+enchanting: it had thoroughly frightened him. But Susy’s arguments were
+irrefutable, her ingenuities inexhaustible. Had he ever thought it all
+out? She asked. No. Well, she had; and would he kindly not interrupt? In
+the first place, there would be all the wedding-presents. Jewels, and a
+motor, and a silver dinner service, did she mean? Not a bit of it! She
+could see he’d never given the question proper thought. Cheques, my
+dear, nothing but cheques--she undertook to manage that on her side: she
+really thought she could count on about fifty, and she supposed he could
+rake up a few more? Well, all that would simply represent pocket-money!
+For they would have plenty of houses to live in: he’d see. People were
+always glad to lend their house to a newly-married couple. It was such
+fun to pop down and see them: it made one feel romantic and jolly. All
+they need do was to accept the houses in turn: go on honey-mooning for
+a year! What was he afraid of? Didn’t he think they’d be happy enough to
+want to keep it up? And why not at least try--get engaged, and then
+see what would happen? Even if she was all wrong, and her plan failed,
+wouldn’t it have been rather nice, just for a month or two, to fancy
+they were going to be happy? “I’ve often fancied it all by myself,”
+ she concluded; “but fancying it with you would somehow be so awfully
+different....”
+
+That was how it began: and this lakeside dream was what it had led up
+to. Fantastically improbable as they had seemed, all her previsions had
+come true. If there were certain links in the chain that Lansing
+had never been able to put his hand on, certain arrangements and
+contrivances that still needed further elucidation, why, he was lazily
+resolved to clear them up with her some day; and meanwhile it was worth
+all the past might have cost, and every penalty the future might exact
+of him, just to be sitting here in the silence and sweetness, her
+sleeping head on his knee, clasped in his joy as the hushed world was
+clasped in moonlight.
+
+He stooped down and kissed her. “Wake up,” he whispered, “it’s
+bed-time.”
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+THEIR month of Como was within a few hours of ending. Till the last
+moment they had hoped for a reprieve; but the accommodating Streffy had
+been unable to put the villa at their disposal for a longer time, since
+he had had the luck to let it for a thumping price to some beastly
+bouncers who insisted on taking possession at the date agreed on.
+
+Lansing, leaving Susy’s side at dawn, had gone down to the lake for a
+last plunge; and swimming homeward through the crystal light he looked
+up at the garden brimming with flowers, the long low house with the
+cypress wood above it, and the window behind which his wife still
+slept. The month had been exquisite, and their happiness as rare, as
+fantastically complete, as the scene before him. He sank his chin into
+the sunlit ripples and sighed for sheer content....
+
+It was a bore to be leaving the scene of such complete well-being, but
+the next stage in their progress promised to be hardly less delightful.
+Susy was a magician: everything she predicted came true. Houses were
+being showered on them; on all sides he seemed to see beneficent spirits
+winging toward them, laden with everything from a piano nobile in Venice
+to a camp in the Adirondacks. For the present, they had decided on the
+former. Other considerations apart, they dared not risk the expense of a
+journey across the Atlantic; so they were heading instead for the Nelson
+Vanderlyns’ palace on the Giudecca. They were agreed that, for reasons
+of expediency, it might be wise to return to New York for the coming
+winter. It would keep them in view, and probably lead to fresh
+opportunities; indeed, Susy already had in mind the convenient flat that
+she was sure a migratory cousin (if tactfully handled, and assured that
+they would not overwork her cook) could certainly be induced to lend
+them. Meanwhile the need of making plans was still remote; and if there
+was one art in which young Lansing’s twenty-eight years of existence had
+perfected him it was that of living completely and unconcernedly in the
+present....
+
+If of late he had tried to look into the future more insistently than
+was his habit, it was only because of Susy. He had meant, when they
+married, to be as philosophic for her as for himself; and he knew she
+would have resented above everything his regarding their partnership as
+a reason for anxious thought. But since they had been together she had
+given him glimpses of her past that made him angrily long to shelter
+and defend her future. It was intolerable that a spirit as fine as hers
+should be ever so little dulled or diminished by the kind of compromises
+out of which their wretched lives were made. For himself, he didn’t care
+a hang: he had composed for his own guidance a rough-and-ready code,
+a short set of “mays” and “mustn’ts” which immensely simplified his
+course. There were things a fellow put up with for the sake of certain
+definite and otherwise unattainable advantages; there were other things
+he wouldn’t traffic with at any price. But for a woman, he began to
+see, it might be different. The temptations might be greater, the cost
+considerably higher, the dividing line between the “mays” and “mustn’ts”
+ more fluctuating and less sharply drawn. Susy, thrown on the world
+at seventeen, with only a weak wastrel of a father to define that
+treacherous line for her, and with every circumstance soliciting her to
+overstep it, seemed to have been preserved chiefly by an innate scorn
+of most of the objects of human folly. “Such trash as he went to pieces
+for,” was her curt comment on her parent’s premature demise: as
+though she accepted in advance the necessity of ruining one’s self for
+something, but was resolved to discriminate firmly between what was
+worth it and what wasn’t.
+
+This philosophy had at first enchanted Lansing; but now it began to
+rouse vague fears. The fine armour of her fastidiousness had preserved
+her from the kind of risks she had hitherto been exposed to; but what if
+others, more subtle, found a joint in it? Was there, among her delicate
+discriminations, any equivalent to his own rules? Might not her taste
+for the best and rarest be the very instrument of her undoing; and if
+something that wasn’t “trash” came her way, would she hesitate a second
+to go to pieces for it?
+
+He was determined to stick to the compact that they should do nothing to
+interfere with what each referred to as the other’s “chance”; but what
+if, when hers came, he couldn’t agree with her in recognizing it? He
+wanted for her, oh, so passionately, the best; but his conception of
+that best had so insensibly, so subtly been transformed in the light of
+their first month together!
+
+His lazy strokes were carrying him slowly shoreward; but the hour was so
+exquisite that a few yards from the landing he laid hold of the mooring
+rope of Streffy’s boat and floated there, following his dream.... It
+was a bore to be leaving; no doubt that was what made him turn things
+inside-out so uselessly. Venice would be delicious, of course; but
+nothing would ever again be as sweet as this. And then they had only a
+year of security before them; and of that year a month was gone.
+
+Reluctantly he swam ashore, walked up to the house, and pushed open a
+window of the cool painted drawing-room. Signs of departure were already
+visible. There were trunks in the hall, tennis rackets on the stairs; on
+the landing, the cook Giulietta had both arms around a slippery hold-all
+that refused to let itself be strapped. It all gave him a chill sense
+of unreality, as if the past month had been an act on the stage, and its
+setting were being folded away and rolled into the wings to make room
+for another play in which he and Susy had no part.
+
+By the time he came down again, dressed and hungry, to the terrace
+where coffee awaited him, he had recovered his usual pleasant sense of
+security. Susy was there, fresh and gay, a rose in her breast and the
+sun in her hair: her head was bowed over Bradshaw, but she waved a fond
+hand across the breakfast things, and presently looked up to say: “Yes,
+I believe we can just manage it.”
+
+“Manage what?”
+
+“To catch the train at Milan--if we start in the motor at ten sharp.”
+
+He stared. “The motor? What motor?”
+
+“Why, the new people’s--Streffy’s tenants. He’s never told me their
+name, and the chauffeur says he can’t pronounce it. The chauffeur’s is
+Ottaviano, anyhow; I’ve been making friends with him. He arrived last
+night, and he says they’re not due at Como till this evening. He simply
+jumped at the idea of running us over to Milan.”
+
+“Good Lord--” said Lansing, when she stopped.
+
+She sprang up from the table with a laugh. “It will be a scramble; but
+I’ll manage it, if you’ll go up at once and pitch the last things into
+your trunk.”
+
+“Yes; but look here--have you any idea what it’s going to cost?”
+
+She raised her eyebrows gaily. “Why, a good deal less than our railway
+tickets. Ottaviano’s got a sweetheart in Milan, and hasn’t seen her for
+six months. When I found that out I knew he’d be going there anyhow.”
+
+It was clever of her, and he laughed. But why was it that he had grown
+to shrink from even such harmless evidence of her always knowing how to
+“manage”? “Oh, well,” he said to himself, “she’s right: the fellow would
+be sure to be going to Milan.”
+
+Upstairs, on the way to his dressing room, he found her in a cloud of
+finery which her skilful hands were forcibly compressing into a last
+portmanteau. He had never seen anyone pack as cleverly as Susy: the way
+she coaxed reluctant things into a trunk was a symbol of the way she
+fitted discordant facts into her life. “When I’m rich,” she often said,
+“the thing I shall hate most will be to see an idiot maid at my trunks.”
+
+As he passed, she glanced over her shoulder, her face pink with the
+struggle, and drew a cigar-box from the depths. “Dearest, do put a
+couple of cigars into your pocket as a tip for Ottaviano.”
+
+Lansing stared. “Why, what on earth are you doing with Streffy’s
+cigars?”
+
+“Packing them, of course.... You don’t suppose he meant them for those
+other people?” She gave him a look of honest wonder.
+
+“I don’t know whom he meant them for--but they’re not ours....”
+
+She continued to look at him wonderingly. “I don’t see what there is to
+be solemn about. The cigars are not Streffy’s either... you may be sure
+he got them out of some bounder. And there’s nothing he’d hate more than
+to have them passed on to another.”
+
+“Nonsense. If they’re not Streffy’s they’re much less mine. Hand them
+over, please, dear.”
+
+“Just as you like. But it does seem a waste; and, of course, the other
+people will never have one of them.... The gardener and Giulietta’s
+lover will see to that!”
+
+Lansing looked away from her at the waves of lace and muslin from which
+she emerged like a rosy Nereid. “How many boxes of them are left?”
+
+“Only four.”
+
+“Unpack them, please.”
+
+Before she moved there was a pause so full of challenge that Lansing had
+time for an exasperated sense of the disproportion between his anger and
+its cause. And this made him still angrier.
+
+She held out a box. “The others are in your suitcase downstairs. It’s
+locked and strapped.”
+
+“Give me the key, then.”
+
+“We might send them back from Venice, mightn’t we? That lock is so
+nasty: it will take you half an hour.”
+
+“Give me the key, please.” She gave it.
+
+He went downstairs and battled with the lock, for the allotted
+half-hour, under the puzzled eyes of Giulietta and the sardonic grin of
+the chauffeur, who now and then, from the threshold, politely reminded
+him how long it would take to get to Milan. Finally the key turned, and
+Lansing, broken-nailed and perspiring, extracted the cigars and stalked
+with them into the deserted drawing room. The great bunches of golden
+roses that he and Susy had gathered the day before were dropping their
+petals on the marble embroidery of the floor, pale camellias floated in
+the alabaster tazzas between the windows, haunting scents of the garden
+blew in on him with the breeze from the lake. Never had Streffy’s little
+house seemed so like a nest of pleasures. Lansing laid the cigar boxes
+on a console and ran upstairs to collect his last possessions. When
+he came down again, his wife, her eyes brilliant with achievement, was
+seated in their borrowed chariot, the luggage cleverly stowed away, and
+Giulietta and the gardener kissing her hand and weeping out inconsolable
+farewells.
+
+“I wonder what she’s given them?” he thought, as he jumped in beside her
+and the motor whirled them through the nightingale-thickets to the gate.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+CHARLIE STREFFORD’S villa was like a nest in a rose-bush; the Nelson
+Vanderlyns’ palace called for loftier analogies.
+
+Its vastness and splendour seemed, in comparison, oppressive to Susy.
+Their landing, after dark, at the foot of the great shadowy staircase,
+their dinner at a dimly-lit table under a ceiling weighed down with
+Olympians, their chilly evening in a corner of a drawing room where
+minuets should have been danced before a throne, contrasted with the
+happy intimacies of Como as their sudden sense of disaccord contrasted
+with the mutual confidence of the day before.
+
+The journey had been particularly jolly: both Susy and Lansing had had
+too long a discipline in the art of smoothing things over not to make
+a special effort to hide from each other the ravages of their first
+disagreement. But, deep down and invisible, the disagreement remained;
+and compunction for having been its cause gnawed at Susy’s bosom as she
+sat in her tapestried and vaulted bedroom, brushing her hair before a
+tarnished mirror.
+
+“I thought I liked grandeur; but this place is really out of scale,” she
+mused, watching the reflection of a pale hand move back and forward
+in the dim recesses of the mirror. “And yet,” she continued, “Ellie
+Vanderlyn’s hardly half an inch taller than I am; and she certainly
+isn’t a bit more dignified.... I wonder if it’s because I feel so
+horribly small to-night that the place seems so horribly big.”
+
+She loved luxury: splendid things always made her feel handsome and
+high ceilings arrogant; she did not remember having ever before been
+oppressed by the evidences of wealth.
+
+She laid down the brush and leaned her chin on her clasped hands....
+Even now she could not understand what had made her take the cigars.
+She had always been alive to the value of her inherited scruples: her
+reasoned opinions were unusually free, but with regard to the things
+one couldn’t reason about she was oddly tenacious. And yet she had taken
+Streffy’s cigars! She had taken them--yes, that was the point--she
+had taken them for Nick, because the desire to please him, to make
+the smallest details of his life easy and agreeable and luxurious,
+had become her absorbing preoccupation. She had committed, for him,
+precisely the kind of little baseness she would most have scorned to
+commit for herself; and, since he hadn’t instantly felt the difference,
+she would never be able to explain it to him.
+
+She stood up with a sigh, shook out her loosened hair, and glanced
+around the great frescoed room. The maid-servant had said something
+about the Signora’s having left a letter for her; and there it lay on
+the writing-table, with her mail and Nick’s; a thick envelope addressed
+in Ellie’s childish scrawl, with a glaring “Private” dashed across the
+corner.
+
+“What on earth can she have to say, when she hates writing so,” Susy
+mused.
+
+She broke open the envelope, and four or five stamped and sealed letters
+fell from it. All were addressed, in Ellie’s hand, to Nelson Vanderlyn
+Esqre; and in the corner of each was faintly pencilled a number and a
+date: one, two, three, four--with a week’s interval between the dates.
+
+“Goodness--” gasped Susy, understanding.
+
+She had dropped into an armchair near the table, and for a long time
+she sat staring at the numbered letters. A sheet of paper covered with
+Ellie’s writing had fluttered out among them, but she let it lie;
+she knew so well what it would say! She knew all about her friend, of
+course; except poor old Nelson, who didn’t, But she had never imagined
+that Ellie would dare to use her in this way. It was unbelievable... she
+had never pictured anything so vile.... The blood rushed to her face,
+and she sprang up angrily, half minded to tear the letters in bits and
+throw them all into the fire.
+
+She heard her husband’s knock on the door between their rooms, and swept
+the dangerous packet under the blotting-book.
+
+“Oh, go away, please, there’s a dear,” she called out; “I haven’t
+finished unpacking, and everything’s in such a mess.” Gathering up
+Nick’s papers and letters, she ran across the room and thrust them
+through the door. “Here’s something to keep you quiet,” she laughed,
+shining in on him an instant from the threshold.
+
+She turned back feeling weak with shame. Ellie’s letter lay on the
+floor: reluctantly she stooped to pick it up, and one by one the
+expected phrases sprang out at her.
+
+“One good turn deserves another.... Of course you and Nick are welcome
+to stay all summer.... There won’t be a particle of expense for you--the
+servants have orders.... If you’ll just be an angel and post these
+letters yourself.... It’s been my only chance for such an age; when we
+meet I’ll explain everything. And in a month at latest I’ll be back to
+fetch Clarissa....”
+
+Susy lifted the letter to the lamp to be sure she had read aright. To
+fetch Clarissa! Then Ellie’s child was here? Here, under the roof with
+them, left to their care? She read on, raging. “She’s so delighted, poor
+darling, to know you’re coming. I’ve had to sack her beastly governess
+for impertinence, and if it weren’t for you she’d be all alone with a
+lot of servants I don’t much trust. So for pity’s sake be good to my
+child, and forgive me for leaving her. She thinks I’ve gone to take a
+cure; and she knows she’s not to tell her Daddy that I’m away, because
+it would only worry him if he thought I was ill. She’s perfectly to be
+trusted; you’ll see what a clever angel she is....” And then, at the
+bottom of the page, in a last slanting postscript: “Susy darling, if
+you’ve ever owed me anything in the way of kindness, you won’t, on your
+sacred honour, say a word of this to any one, even to Nick. And I know I
+can count on you to rub out the numbers.”
+
+Susy sprang up and tossed Mrs. Vanderlyn’s letter into the fire: then
+she came slowly back to the chair. There, at her elbow, lay the four
+fatal envelopes; and her next affair was to make up her mind what to do
+with them.
+
+To destroy them on the spot had seemed, at first thought, inevitable: it
+might be saving Ellie as well as herself. But such a step seemed to Susy
+to involve departure on the morrow, and this in turn involved notifying
+Ellie, whose letter she had vainly scanned for an address. Well--perhaps
+Clarissa’s nurse would know where one could write to her mother; it was
+unlikely that even Ellie would go off without assuring some means of
+communication with her child. At any rate, there was nothing to be done
+that night: nothing but to work out the details of their flight on the
+morrow, and rack her brains to find a substitute for the hospitality
+they were rejecting. Susy did not disguise from herself how much she had
+counted on the Vanderlyn apartment for the summer: to be able to do
+so had singularly simplified the future. She knew Ellie’s largeness of
+hand, and had been sure in advance that as long as they were her guests
+their only expense would be an occasional present to the servants. And
+what would the alternative be? She and Lansing, in their endless talks,
+had so lived themselves into the vision of indolent summer days on the
+lagoon, of flaming hours on the beach of the Lido, and evenings of music
+and dreams on their broad balcony above the Giudecca, that the idea of
+having to renounce these joys, and deprive her Nick of them, filled Susy
+with a wrath intensified by his having confided in her that when they
+were quietly settled in Venice he “meant to write.” Already nascent in
+her breast was the fierce resolve of the author’s wife to defend her
+husband’s privacy and facilitate his encounters with the Muse. It was
+abominable, simply abominable, that Ellie Vanderlyn should have drawn
+her into such a trap!
+
+Well--there was nothing for it but to make a clean breast of the whole
+thing to Nick. The trivial incident of the cigars--how trivial it now
+seemed!--showed her the kind of stand he would take, and communicated to
+her something of his own uncompromising energy. She would tell him the
+whole story in the morning, and try to find a way out with him: Susy’s
+faith in her power of finding a way out was inexhaustible. But suddenly
+she remembered the adjuration at the end of Mrs. Vanderlyn’s letter: “If
+you’re ever owed me anything in the way of kindness, you won’t, on your
+sacred honour, say a word to Nick....”
+
+It was, of course, exactly what no one had the right to ask of her: if
+indeed the word “right”, could be used in any conceivable relation to
+this coil of wrongs. But the fact remained that, in the way of kindness,
+she did owe much to Ellie; and that this was the first payment her
+friend had ever exacted. She found herself, in fact, in exactly the same
+position as when Ursula Gillow, using the same argument, had appealed
+to her to give up Nick Lansing. Yes, Susy reflected; but then Nelson
+Vanderlyn had been kind to her too; and the money Ellie had been so kind
+with was Nelson’s.... The queer edifice of Susy’s standards tottered on
+its base she honestly didn’t know where fairness lay, as between so much
+that was foul.
+
+The very depth of her perplexity puzzled her. She had been in “tight
+places” before; had indeed been in so few that were not, in one way or
+another, constricting! As she looked back on her past it lay before her
+as a very network of perpetual concessions and contrivings. But
+never before had she had such a sense of being tripped up, gagged and
+pinioned. The little misery of the cigars still galled her, and now
+this big humiliation superposed itself on the raw wound. Decidedly, the
+second month of their honey-moon was beginning cloudily....
+
+She glanced at the enamel led travelling-clock on her dressing
+table--one of the few wedding-presents she had consented to accept in
+kind--and was startled at the lateness of the hour. In a moment Nick
+would be coming; and an uncomfortable sensation in her throat warned
+her that through sheer nervousness and exasperation she might blurt out
+something ill-advised. The old habit of being always on her guard made
+her turn once more to the looking-glass. Her face was pale and haggard;
+and having, by a swift and skilful application of cosmetics, increased
+its appearance of fatigue, she crossed the room and softly opened her
+husband’s door.
+
+He too sat by a lamp, reading a letter which he put aside as she
+entered. His face was grave, and she said to herself that he was
+certainly still thinking about the cigars.
+
+“I’m very tired, dearest, and my head aches so horribly that I’ve come
+to bid you good-night.” Bending over the back of his chair, she laid
+her arms on his shoulders. He lifted his hands to clasp hers, but, as
+he threw his head back to smile up at her she noticed that his look was
+still serious, almost remote. It was as if, for the first time, a faint
+veil hung between his eyes and hers.
+
+“I’m so sorry: it’s been a long day for you,” he said absently, pressing
+his lips to her hands
+
+She felt the dreaded twitch in her throat.
+
+“Nick!” she burst out, tightening her embrace, “before I go, you’ve got
+to swear to me on your honour that you know I should never have taken
+those cigars for myself!”
+
+For a moment he stared at her, and she stared back at him with equal
+gravity; then the same irresistible mirth welled up in both, and Susy’s
+compunctions were swept away on a gale of laughter.
+
+When she woke the next morning the sun was pouring in between her
+curtains of old brocade, and its refraction from the ripples of the
+Canal was drawing a network of golden scales across the vaulted ceiling.
+The maid had just placed a tray on a slim marquetry table near the bed,
+and over the edge of the tray Susy discovered the small serious face
+of Clarissa Vanderlyn. At the sight of the little girl all her dormant
+qualms awoke.
+
+Clarissa was just eight, and small for her age: her little round chin
+was barely on a level with the tea-service, and her clear brown eyes
+gazed at Susy between the ribs of the toast-rack and the single tea-rose
+in an old Murano glass. Susy had not seen her for two years, and she
+seemed, in the interval, to have passed from a thoughtful infancy to
+complete ripeness of feminine experience. She was looking with approval
+at her mother’s guest.
+
+“I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said in a small sweet voice. “I like you
+so very much. I know I’m not to be often with you; but at least you’ll
+have an eye on me, won’t you?”
+
+“An eye on you! I shall never want to have it off you, if you say such
+nice things to me!” Susy laughed, leaning from her pillows to draw the
+little girl up to her side.
+
+Clarissa smiled and settled herself down comfortably on the silken
+bedspread. “Oh, I know I’m not to be always about, because you’re just
+married; but could you see to it that I have my meals regularly?”
+
+“Why, you poor darling! Don’t you always?”
+
+“Not when mother’s away on these cures. The servants don’t always obey
+me: you see I’m so little for my age. In a few years, of course, they’ll
+have to--even if I don’t grow much,” she added judiciously. She put out
+her hand and touched the string of pearls about Susy’s throat. “They’re
+small, but they’re very good. I suppose you don’t take the others when
+you travel?”
+
+“The others? Bless you! I haven’t any others--and never shall have,
+probably.”
+
+“No other pearls?”
+
+“No other jewels at all.”
+
+Clarissa stared. “Is that really true?” she asked, as if in the presence
+of the unprecedented.
+
+“Awfully true,” Susy confessed. “But I think I can make the servants
+obey me all the same.”
+
+This point seemed to have lost its interest for Clarissa, who was still
+gravely scrutinizing her companion. After a while she brought forth
+another question.
+
+“Did you have to give up all your jewels when you were divorced?”
+
+“Divorced--?” Susy threw her head back against the pillows and laughed.
+“Why, what are you thinking of? Don’t you remember that I wasn’t even
+married the last time you saw me?”
+
+“Yes; I do. But that was two years ago.” The little girl wound her arms
+about Susy’s neck and leaned against her caressingly. “Are you going to
+be soon, then? I’ll promise not to tell if you don’t want me to.”
+
+“Going to be divorced? Of course not! What in the world made you think
+so? ”
+
+“Because you look so awfully happy,” said Clarissa Vanderlyn simply.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+IT was a trifling enough sign, but it had remained in Susy’s mind: that
+first morning in Venice Nick had gone out without first coming in to see
+her. She had stayed in bed late, chatting with Clarissa, and expecting
+to see the door open and her husband appear; and when the child left,
+and she had jumped up and looked into Nick’s room, she found it empty,
+and a line on his dressing table informed her that he had gone out to
+send a telegram.
+
+It was lover-like, and even boyish, of him to think it necessary to
+explain his absence; but why had he not simply come in and told her! She
+instinctively connected the little fact with the shade of preoccupation
+she had noticed on his face the night before, when she had gone to his
+room and found him absorbed in letter; and while she dressed she had
+continued to wonder what was in the letter, and whether the telegram he
+had hurried out to send was an answer to it.
+
+She had never found out. When he reappeared, handsome and happy as the
+morning, he proffered no explanation; and it was part of her life-long
+policy not to put uncalled-for questions. It was not only that her
+jealous regard for her own freedom was matched by an equal respect for
+that of others; she had steered too long among the social reefs and
+shoals not to know how narrow is the passage that leads to peace of
+mind, and she was determined to keep her little craft in mid-channel.
+But the incident had lodged itself in her memory, acquiring a sort of
+symbolic significance, as of a turning-point in her relations with her
+husband. Not that these were less happy, but that she now beheld them,
+as she had always formerly beheld such joys, as an unstable islet in
+a sea of storms. Her present bliss was as complete as ever, but it was
+ringed by the perpetual menace of all she knew she was hiding from Nick,
+and of all she suspected him of hiding from her....
+
+She was thinking of these things one afternoon about three weeks after
+their arrival in Venice. It was near sunset, and she sat alone on the
+balcony, watching the cross-lights on the water weave their pattern
+above the flushed reflection of old palace-basements. She was
+almost always alone at that hour. Nick had taken to writing in the
+afternoons--he had been as good as his word, and so, apparently, had the
+Muse and it was his habit to join his wife only at sunset, for a late
+row on the lagoon. She had taken Clarissa, as usual, to the Giardino
+Pubblico, where that obliging child had politely but indifferently
+“played”--Clarissa joined in the diversions of her age as if conforming
+to an obsolete tradition--and had brought her back for a music lesson,
+echoes of which now drifted down from a distant window.
+
+Susy had come to be extremely thankful for Clarissa. But for the little
+girl, her pride in her husband’s industry might have been tinged with
+a faint sense of being at times left out and forgotten; and as Nick’s
+industry was the completest justification for their being where they
+were, and for her having done what she had, she was grateful to Clarissa
+for helping her to feel less alone. Clarissa, indeed, represented the
+other half of her justification: it was as much on the child’s account
+as on Nick’s that Susy had held her tongue, remained in Venice, and
+slipped out once a week to post one of Ellie’s numbered letters. A
+day’s experience of the Palazzo Vanderlyn had convinced Susy of the
+impossibility of deserting Clarissa. Long experience had shown her that
+the most crowded households often contain the loneliest nurseries,
+and that the rich child is exposed to evils unknown to less pampered
+infancy; but hitherto such things had merely been to her one of the
+uglier bits in the big muddled pattern of life. Now she found herself
+feeling where before she had only judged: her precarious bliss came to
+her charged with a new weight of pity.
+
+She was thinking of these things, and of the approaching date of Ellie
+Vanderlyn’s return, and of the searching truths she was storing up for
+that lady’s private ear, when she noticed a gondola turning its
+prow toward the steps below the balcony. She leaned over, and a tall
+gentleman in shabby clothes, glancing up at her as he jumped out, waved
+a mouldy Panama in joyful greeting.
+
+“Streffy!” she exclaimed as joyfully; and she was half-way down the
+stairs when he ran up them followed by his luggage-laden boatman.
+
+“It’s all right, I suppose?--Ellie said I might come,” he explained in
+a shrill cheerful voice; “and I’m to have my same green room with the
+parrot-panels, because its furniture is already so frightfully stained
+with my hair-wash.”
+
+Susy was beaming on him with the deep sense of satisfaction which his
+presence always produced in his friends. There was no one in the world,
+they all agreed, half as ugly and untidy and delightful as Streffy; no
+one who combined such outspoken selfishness with such imperturbable good
+humour; no one who knew so well how to make you believe he was being
+charming to you when it was you who were being charming to him.
+
+In addition to these seductions, of which none estimated the value
+more accurately than their possessor, Strefford had for Susy another
+attraction of which he was probably unconscious. It was that of being
+the one rooted and stable being among the fluid and shifting figures
+that composed her world. Susy had always lived among people so
+denationalized that those one took for Russians generally turned out to
+be American, and those one was inclined to ascribe to New York proved to
+have originated in Rome or Bucharest. These cosmopolitan people, who, in
+countries not their own, lived in houses as big as hotels, or in
+hotels where the guests were as international as the waiters, had
+inter-married, inter-loved and inter-divorced each other over the whole
+face of Europe, and according to every code that attempts to regulate
+human ties. Strefford, too, had his home in this world, but only one
+of his homes. The other, the one he spoke of, and probably thought
+of, least often, was a great dull English country-house in a northern
+county, where a life as monotonous and self-contained as his own was
+chequered and dispersed had gone on for generation after generation;
+and it was the sense of that house, and of all it typified even to his
+vagrancy and irreverence, which, coming out now and then in his talk, or
+in his attitude toward something or somebody, gave him a firmer
+outline and a steadier footing than the other marionettes in the dance.
+Superficially so like them all, and so eager to outdo them in detachment
+and adaptability, ridiculing the prejudices he had shaken off, and the
+people to whom he belonged, he still kept, under his easy pliancy, the
+skeleton of old faiths and old fashions. “He talks every language as
+well as the rest of us,” Susy had once said of him, “but at least he
+talks one language better than the others”; and Strefford, told of the
+remark, had laughed, called her an idiot, and been pleased.
+
+As he shambled up the stairs with her, arm in arm, she was thinking of
+this quality with a new appreciation of its value. Even she and Lansing,
+in spite of their unmixed Americanism, their substantial background of
+old-fashioned cousinships in New York and Philadelphia, were as
+mentally detached, as universally at home, as touts at an International
+Exhibition. If they were usually recognized as Americans it was only
+because they spoke French so well, and because Nick was too fair to be
+“foreign,” and too sharp-featured to be English. But Charlie Strefford
+was English with all the strength of an inveterate habit; and something
+in Susy was slowly waking to a sense of the beauty of habit.
+
+Lounging on the balcony, whither he had followed her without pausing
+to remove the stains of travel, Strefford showed himself immensely
+interested in the last chapter of her history, greatly pleased at its
+having been enacted under his roof, and hugely and flippantly amused
+at the firmness with which she refused to let him see Nick till the
+latter’s daily task was over.
+
+“Writing? Rot! What’s he writing? He’s breaking you in, my dear; that’s
+what he’s doing: establishing an alibi. What’ll you bet he’s just
+sitting there smoking and reading Le Rire? Let’s go and see.”
+
+But Susy was firm. “He’s read me his first chapter: it’s wonderful. It’s
+a philosophic romance--rather like Marius, you know.”
+
+“Oh, yes--I do!” said Strefford, with a laugh that she thought idiotic.
+
+She flushed up like a child. “You’re stupid, Streffy. You forget that
+Nick and I don’t need alibis. We’ve got rid of all that hyprocrisy by
+agreeing that each will give the other a hand up when either of us wants
+a change. We’ve not married to spy and lie, and nag each other; we’ve
+formed a partnership for our mutual advantage.”
+
+“I see; that’s capital. But how can you be sure that, when Nick wants a
+change, you’ll consider it for his advantage to have one?”
+
+It was the point that had always secretly tormented Susy; she often
+wondered if it equally tormented Nick.
+
+“I hope I shall have enough common sense--” she began.
+
+“Oh, of course: common sense is what you’re both bound to base your
+argument on, whichever way you argue.”
+
+This flash of insight disconcerted her, and she said, a little
+irritably: “What should you do then, if you married?--Hush, Streffy! I
+forbid you to shout like that--all the gondolas are stopping to look!”
+
+“How can I help it?” He rocked backward and forward in his chair. “‘If
+you marry,’ she says: ‘Streffy, what have you decided to do if you
+suddenly become a raving maniac?’”
+
+“I said no such thing. If your uncle and your cousin died, you’d marry
+to-morrow; you know you would.”
+
+“Oh, now you’re talking business.” He folded his long arms and leaned
+over the balcony, looking down at the dusky ripples streaked with fire.
+“In that case I should say: ‘Susan, my dear--Susan--now that by
+the merciful intervention of Providence you have become Countess of
+Altringham in the peerage of Great Britain, and Baroness Dunsterville
+and d’Amblay in the peerages of Ireland and Scotland, I’ll thank you to
+remember that you are a member of one of the most ancient houses in the
+United Kingdom--and not to get found out.’”
+
+Susy laughed. “We know what those warnings mean! I pity my namesake.”
+
+He swung about and gave her a quick look out of his small ugly twinkling
+eyes. “Is there any other woman in the world named Susan?”
+
+“I hope so, if the name’s an essential. Even if Nick chucks me, don’t
+count on me to carry out that programme. I’ve seen it in practice too
+often.”
+
+“Oh, well: as far as I know, everybody’s in perfect health at
+Altringham.” He fumbled in his pocket and drew out a fountain pen,
+a handkerchief over which it had leaked, and a packet of dishevelled
+cigarettes. Lighting one, and restoring the other objects to his pocket,
+he continued calmly: “Tell me how did you manage to smooth things over
+with the Gillows? Ursula was running amuck when I was in Newport last
+Summer; it was just when people were beginning to say that you were
+going to marry Nick. I was afraid she’d put a spoke in your wheel; and I
+hear she put a big cheque in your hand instead.”
+
+Susy was silent. From the first moment of Strefford’s appearance she had
+known that in the course of time he would put that question. He was as
+inquisitive as a monkey, and when he had made up his mind to find out
+anything it was useless to try to divert his attention. After a moment’s
+hesitation she said: “I flirted with Fred. It was a bore but he was very
+decent.”
+
+“He would be--poor Fred. And you got Ursula thoroughly frightened!”
+
+“Well--enough. And then luckily that young Nerone Altineri turned up
+from Rome: he went over to New York to look for a job as an engineer,
+and Ursula made Fred put him in their iron works.” She paused again,
+and then added abruptly: “Streffy! If you knew how I hate that kind of
+thing. I’d rather have Nick come in now and tell me frankly, as I know
+he would, that he’s going off with--”
+
+“With Coral Hicks?” Strefford suggested.
+
+She laughed. “Poor Coral Hicks! What on earth made you think of the
+Hickses?”
+
+“Because I caught a glimpse of them the other day at Capri. They’re
+cruising about: they said they were coming in here.”
+
+“What a nuisance! I do hope they won’t find us out. They were
+awfully kind to Nick when he went to India with them, and they’re so
+simple-minded that they would expect him to be glad to see them.”
+
+Strefford aimed his cigarette-end at a tourist on a puggaree who was
+gazing up from his guidebook at the palace. “Ah,” he murmured with
+satisfaction, seeing the shot take effect; then he added: “Coral Hicks
+is growing up rather pretty.”
+
+“Oh, Streff--you’re dreaming! That lump of a girl with spectacles and
+thick ankles! Poor Mrs. Hicks used to say to Nick: ‘When Mr. Hicks and
+I had Coral educated we presumed culture was in greater demand in Europe
+than it appears to be.’”
+
+“Well, you’ll see: that girl’s education won’t interfere with her, once
+she’s started. So then: if Nick came in and told you he was going off--”
+
+“I should be so thankful if it was with a fright like Coral! But you
+know,” she added with a smile, “we’ve agreed that it’s not to happen for
+a year.”
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+SUSY found Strefford, after his first burst of nonsense, unusually kind
+and responsive. The interest he showed in her future and Nick’s seemed
+to proceed not so much from his habitual spirit of scientific curiosity
+as from simple friendliness. He was privileged to see Nick’s first
+chapter, of which he formed so favourable an impression that he spoke
+sternly to Susy on the importance of respecting her husband’s working
+hours; and he even carried his general benevolence to the length
+of showing a fatherly interest in Clarissa Vanderlyn. He was always
+charming to children, but fitfully and warily, with an eye on his
+independence, and on the possibility of being suddenly bored by them;
+Susy had never seen him abandon these precautions so completely as he
+did with Clarissa.
+
+“Poor little devil! Who looks after her when you and Nick are off
+together? Do you mean to tell me Ellie sacked the governess and went
+away without having anyone to take her place?”
+
+“I think she expected me to do it,” said Susy with a touch of asperity.
+There were moments when her duty to Clarissa weighed on her somewhat
+heavily; whenever she went off alone with Nick she was pursued by the
+vision of a little figure waving wistful farewells from the balcony.
+
+“Ah, that’s like Ellie: you might have known she’d get an equivalent
+when she lent you all this. But I don’t believe she thought you’d be so
+conscientious about it.”
+
+Susy considered. “I don’t suppose she did; and perhaps I shouldn’t have
+been, a year ago. But you see”--she hesitated--“Nick’s so awfully good:
+it’s made me look; at a lot of things differently....”
+
+“Oh, hang Nick’s goodness! It’s happiness that’s done it, my dear.
+You’re just one of the people with whom it happens to agree.”
+
+Susy, leaning back, scrutinized between her lashes his crooked ironic
+face.
+
+“What is it that’s agreeing with you, Streffy? I’ve never seen you so
+human. You must be getting an outrageous price for the villa.”
+
+Strefford laughed and clapped his hand on his breast-pocket. “I should
+be an ass not to: I’ve got a wire here saying they must have it for
+another month at any price.”
+
+“What luck! I’m so glad. Who are they, by the way?”
+
+He drew himself up out of the long chair in which he was disjointedly
+lounging, and looked down at her with a smile. “Another couple of
+love-sick idiots like you and Nick.... I say, before I spend it all
+let’s go out and buy something ripping for Clarissa.”
+
+The days passed so quickly and radiantly that, but for her concern
+for Clarissa, Susy would hardly have been conscious of her hostess’s
+protracted absence. Mrs. Vanderlyn had said: “Four weeks at the latest,”
+ and the four weeks were over, and she had neither arrived nor written
+to explain her non-appearance. She had, in fact, given no sign of life
+since her departure, save in the shape of a post-card which had
+reached Clarissa the day after the Lansings’ arrival, and in which Mrs.
+Vanderlyn instructed her child to be awfully good, and not to forget
+to feed the mongoose. Susy noticed that this missive had been posted in
+Milan.
+
+She communicated her apprehensions to Strefford. “I don’t trust
+that green-eyed nurse. She’s forever with the younger gondolier; and
+Clarissa’s so awfully sharp. I don’t see why Ellie hasn’t come: she was
+due last Monday.”
+
+Her companion laughed, and something in the sound of his laugh suggested
+that he probably knew as much of Ellie’s movements as she did, if not
+more. The sense of disgust which the subject always roused in her made
+her look away quickly from his tolerant smile. She would have given
+the world, at that moment, to have been free to tell Nick what she had
+learned on the night of their arrival, and then to have gone away with
+him, no matter where. But there was Clarissa--!
+
+To fortify herself against the temptation, she resolutely fixed her
+thoughts on her husband. Of Nick’s beatitude there could be no doubt.
+He adored her, he revelled in Venice, he rejoiced in his work; and
+concerning the quality of that work her judgment was as confident as
+her heart. She still doubted if he would ever earn a living by what
+he wrote, but she no longer doubted that he would write something
+remarkable. The mere fact that he was engaged on a philosophic romance,
+and not a mere novel, seemed the proof of an intrinsic superiority. And
+if she had mistrusted her impartiality Strefford’s approval would have
+reassured her. Among their friends Strefford passed as an authority on
+such matters: in summing him up his eulogists always added: “And you
+know he writes.” As a matter of fact, the paying public had remained
+cold to his few published pages; but he lived among the kind of people
+who confuse taste with talent, and are impressed by the most artless
+attempts at literary expression; and though he affected to disdain their
+judgment, and his own efforts, Susy knew he was not sorry to have it
+said of him: “Oh, if only Streffy had chosen--!”
+
+Strefford’s approval of the philosophic romance convinced her that it
+had been worth while staying in Venice for Nick’s sake; and if
+only Ellie would come back, and carry off Clarissa to St. Moritz or
+Deauville, the disagreeable episode on which their happiness was based
+would vanish like a cloud, and leave them to complete enjoyment.
+
+Ellie did not come; but the Mortimer Hickses did, and Nick Lansing was
+assailed by the scruples his wife had foreseen. Strefford, coming back
+one evening from the Lido, reported having recognized the huge outline
+of the Ibis among the pleasure craft of the outer harbour; and the very
+next evening, as the guests of Palazzo Vanderlyn were sipping their ices
+at Florian’s, the Hickses loomed up across the Piazza.
+
+Susy pleaded in vain with her husband in defence of his privacy.
+“Remember you’re here to write, dearest; it’s your duty not to let any
+one interfere with that. Why shouldn’t we tell them we’re just leaving!”
+
+“Because it’s no use: we’re sure to be always meeting them. And besides,
+I’ll be hanged if I’m going to shirk the Hickses. I spent five whole
+months on the Ibis, and if they bored me occasionally, India didn’t.”
+
+“We’ll make them take us to Aquileia anyhow,” said Strefford
+philosophically; and the next moment the Hickses were bearing down on
+the defenceless trio.
+
+They presented a formidable front, not only because of their mere
+physical bulk--Mr. and Mrs. Hicks were equally and majestically
+three-dimensional--but because they never moved abroad without the
+escort of two private secretaries (one for the foreign languages), Mr.
+Hicks’s doctor, a maiden lady known as Eldoradder Tooker, who was Mrs.
+Hicks’s cousin and stenographer, and finally their daughter, Coral
+Hicks.
+
+Coral Hicks, when Susy had last encountered the party, had been a
+fat spectacled school-girl, always lagging behind her parents, with a
+reluctant poodle in her wake. Now the poodle had gone, and his mistress
+led the procession. The fat school-girl had changed into a young lady
+of compact if not graceful outline; a long-handled eyeglass had replaced
+the spectacles, and through it, instead of a sullen glare, Miss Coral
+Hicks projected on the world a glance at once confident and critical.
+She looked so strong and so assured that Susy, taking her measure in
+a flash, saw that her position at the head of the procession was not
+fortuitous, and murmured inwardly: “Thank goodness she’s not pretty
+too!”
+
+If she was not pretty, she was well-dressed; and if she was
+overeducated, she seemed capable, as Strefford had suggested, of
+carrying off even this crowning disadvantage. At any rate, she was above
+disguising it; and before the whole party had been seated five minutes
+in front of a fresh supply of ices (with Eldorada and the secretaries
+at a table slightly in the background) she had taken up with Nick the
+question of exploration in Mesopotamia.
+
+“Queer child, Coral,” he said to Susy that night as they smoked a last
+cigarette on their balcony. “She told me this afternoon that she’d
+remembered lots of things she heard me say in India. I thought at the
+time that she cared only for caramels and picture-puzzles, but it seems
+she was listening to everything, and reading all the books she could lay
+her hands on; and she got so bitten with Oriental archaeology that she
+took a course last year at Bryn Mawr. She means to go to Bagdad next
+spring, and back by the Persian plateau and Turkestan.”
+
+Susy laughed luxuriously: she was sitting with her hand in Nick’s, while
+the late moon--theirs again--rounded its orange-coloured glory above the
+belfry of San Giorgio.
+
+“Poor Coral! How dreary--” Susy murmured
+
+“Dreary? Why? A trip like that is about as well worth doing as anything
+I know.”
+
+“Oh, I meant: dreary to do it without you or me,” she laughed, getting up
+lazily to go indoors. A broad band of moonlight, dividing her room onto
+two shadowy halves, lay on the painted Venetian bed with its folded-back
+sheet, its old damask coverlet and lace-edged pillows. She felt the
+warmth of Nick’s enfolding arm and lifted her face to his.
+
+The Hickses retained the most tender memory of Nick’s sojourn on the
+Ibis, and Susy, moved by their artless pleasure in meeting him again,
+was glad he had not followed her advice and tried to elude them. She had
+always admired Strefford’s ruthless talent for using and discarding the
+human material in his path, but now she began to hope that Nick would
+not remember her suggestion that he should mete out that measure to the
+Hickses. Even if it had been less pleasant to have a big yacht at their
+door during the long golden days and the nights of silver fire, the
+Hickses’ admiration for Nick would have made Susy suffer them gladly.
+She even began to be aware of a growing liking for them, a liking
+inspired by the very characteristics that would once have provoked her
+disapproval. Susy had had plenty of training in liking common people
+with big purses; in such cases her stock of allowances and extenuations
+was inexhaustible. But they had to be successful common people; and the
+trouble was that the Hickses, judged by her standards, were failures.
+It was not only that they were ridiculous; so, heaven knew, were many
+of their rivals. But the Hickses were both ridiculous and unsuccessful.
+They had consistently resisted the efforts of the experienced advisers
+who had first descried them on the horizon and tried to help them
+upward. They were always taking up the wrong people, giving the wrong
+kind of party, and spending millions on things that nobody who mattered
+cared about. They all believed passionately in “movements” and “causes”
+ and “ideals,” and were always attended by the exponents of their latest
+beliefs, always asking you to hear lectures by haggard women in peplums,
+and having their portraits painted by wild people who never turned out
+to be the fashion.
+
+All this would formerly have increased Susy’s contempt; now she found
+herself liking the Hickses most for their failings. She was touched by
+their simple good faith, their isolation in the midst of all their
+queer apostles and parasites, their way of drifting about an alien
+and indifferent world in a compactly clinging group of which Eldorada
+Tooker, the doctor and the two secretaries formed the outer fringe, and
+by their view of themselves as a kind of collective re-incarnation of
+some past state of princely culture, symbolised for Mrs. Hicks in what
+she called “the court of the Renaissance.” Eldorada, of course, was
+their chief prophetess; but even the intensely “bright” and modern young
+secretaries, Mr. Beck and Mr. Buttles, showed a touching tendency to
+share her view, and spoke of Mr. Hicks as “promoting art,” in the spirit
+of Pandolfino celebrating the munificence of the Medicis.
+
+“I’m getting really fond of the Hickses; I believe I should be nice to
+them even if they were staying at Danieli’s,” Susy said to Strefford.
+
+“And even if you owned the yacht?” he answered; and for once his banter
+struck her as beside the point.
+
+The Ibis carried them, during the endless June days, far and wide along
+the enchanted shores; they roamed among the Euganeans, they saw Aquileia
+and Pomposa and Ravenna. Their hosts would gladly have taken them
+farther, across the Adriatic and on into the golden network of the
+Ægean; but Susy resisted this infraction of Nick’s rules, and he
+himself preferred to stick to his task. Only now he wrote in the early
+mornings, so that on most days they could set out before noon and steam
+back late to the low fringe of lights on the lagoon. His work continued
+to progress, and as page was added to page Susy obscurely but surely
+perceived that each one corresponded with a hidden secretion of energy,
+the gradual forming within him of something that might eventually alter
+both their lives. In what sense she could not conjecture: she merely
+felt that the fact of his having chosen a job and stuck to it, if only
+through a few rosy summer weeks, had already given him a new way of
+saying “Yes” and “No.”
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+
+OF some new ferment at work in him Nick Lansing himself was equally
+aware. He was a better judge of the book he was trying to write than
+either Susy or Strefford; he knew its weaknesses, its treacheries,
+its tendency to slip through his fingers just as he thought his grasp
+tightest; but he knew also that at the very moment when it seemed to
+have failed him it would suddenly be back, beating its loud wings in his
+face.
+
+He had no delusions as to its commercial value, and had winced more than
+he triumphed when Susy produced her allusion to Marius. His book was to
+be called The Pageant of Alexander. His imagination had been enchanted
+by the idea of picturing the young conqueror’s advance through the
+fabulous landscapes of Asia: he liked writing descriptions, and vaguely
+felt that under the guise of fiction he could develop his theory of
+Oriental influences in Western art at the expense of less learning than
+if he had tried to put his ideas into an essay. He knew enough of his
+subject to know that he did not know enough to write about it; but he
+consoled himself by remembering that Wilhelm Meister has survived many
+weighty volumes on aesthetics; and between his moments of self-disgust
+he took himself at Susy’s valuation, and found an unmixed joy in his
+task.
+
+Never--no, never!--had he been so boundlessly, so confidently happy. His
+hack-work had given him the habit of application, and now habit wore the
+glow of inspiration. His previous literary ventures had been timid and
+tentative: if this one was growing and strengthening on his hands, it
+must be because the conditions were so different. He was at ease, he was
+secure, he was satisfied; and he had also, for the first time since his
+early youth, before his mother’s death, the sense of having some one to
+look after, some one who was his own particular care, and to whom he
+was answerable for himself and his actions, as he had never felt himself
+answerable to the hurried and indifferent people among whom he had
+chosen to live.
+
+Susy had the same standards as these people: she spoke their language,
+though she understood others, she required their pleasures if she did
+not revere their gods. But from the moment that she had become his
+property he had built up in himself a conception of her answering to
+some deep-seated need of veneration. She was his, he had chosen her,
+she had taken her place in the long line of Lansing women who had been
+loved, honoured, and probably deceived, by bygone Lansing men. He didn’t
+pretend to understand the logic of it; but the fact that she was his
+wife gave purpose and continuity to his scattered impulses, and a
+mysterious glow of consecration to his task.
+
+Once or twice, in the first days of his marriage, he had asked himself
+with a slight shiver what would happen if Susy should begin to bore
+him. The thing had happened to him with other women as to whom his first
+emotions had not differed in intensity from those she inspired. The part
+he had played in his previous love-affairs might indeed have been summed
+up in the memorable line: “I am the hunter and the prey,” for he had
+invariably ceased to be the first only to regard himself as the second.
+This experience had never ceased to cause him the liveliest pain, since
+his sympathy for his pursuer was only less keen than his commiseration
+for himself; but as he was always a little sorrier for himself, he had
+always ended by distancing the pursuer.
+
+All these pre-natal experiences now seemed utterly inapplicable to the
+new man he had become. He could not imagine being bored by Susy--or
+trying to escape from her if he were. He could not think of her as
+an enemy, or even as an accomplice, since accomplices are potential
+enemies: she was some one with whom, by some unheard-of miracle, joys
+above the joys of friendship were to be tasted, but who, even through
+these fleeting ecstasies, remained simply and securely his friend.
+
+These new feelings did not affect his general attitude toward life: they
+merely confirmed his faith in its ultimate “jolliness.” Never had he
+more thoroughly enjoyed the things he had always enjoyed. A good dinner
+had never been as good to him, a beautiful sunset as beautiful; he still
+rejoiced in the fact that he appreciated both with an equal acuity. He
+was as proud as ever of Susy’s cleverness and freedom from prejudice:
+she couldn’t be too “modern” for him now that she was his. He shared to
+the full her passionate enjoyment of the present, and all her feverish
+eagerness to make it last. He knew when she was thinking of ways of
+extending their golden opportunity, and he secretly thought with her,
+wondering what new means they could devise. He was thankful that Ellie
+Vanderlyn was still absent, and began to hope they might have the palace
+to themselves for the remainder of the summer. If they did, he would
+have time to finish his book, and Susy to lay up a little interest on
+their wedding cheques; and thus their enchanted year might conceivably
+be prolonged to two.
+
+Late as the season was, their presence and Strefford’s in Venice had
+already drawn thither several wandering members of their set. It was
+characteristic of these indifferent but agglutinative people that they
+could never remain long parted from each other without a dim sense of
+uneasiness. Lansing was familiar with the feeling. He had known slight
+twinges of it himself, and had often ministered to its qualms in others.
+It was hardly stronger than the faint gnawing which recalls the tea-hour
+to one who has lunched well and is sure of dining as abundantly; but it
+gave a purpose to the purposeless, and helped many hesitating spirits
+over the annual difficulty of deciding between Deauville and St. Moritz,
+Biarritz and Capri.
+
+Nick was not surprised to learn that it was becoming the fashion, that
+summer, to pop down to Venice and take a look at the Lansings. Streffy
+had set the example, and Streffy’s example was always followed. And then
+Susy’s marriage was still a subject of sympathetic speculation. People
+knew the story of the wedding cheques, and were interested in seeing
+how long they could be made to last. It was going to be the thing,
+that year, to help prolong the honey-moon by pressing houses on the
+adventurous couple. Before June was over a band of friends were basking
+with the Lansings on the Lido.
+
+Nick found himself unexpectedly disturbed by their arrival. To avoid
+comment and banter he put his book aside and forbade Susy to speak
+of it, explaining to her that he needed an interval of rest. His wife
+instantly and exaggeratedly adopted this view, guarding him from the
+temptation to work as jealously as she had discouraged him from idling;
+and he was careful not to let her find out that the change in his habits
+coincided with his having reached a difficult point in his book. But
+though he was not sorry to stop writing he found himself unexpectedly
+oppressed by the weight of his leisure. For the first time communal
+dawdling had lost its charm for him; not because his fellow dawdlers
+were less congenial than of old, but because in the interval he had
+known something so immeasurably better. He had always felt himself to be
+the superior of his habitual associates, but now the advantage was too
+great: really, in a sense, it was hardly fair to them.
+
+He had flattered himself that Susy would share this feeling; but he
+perceived with annoyance that the arrival of their friends heightened
+her animation. It was as if the inward glow which had given her a new
+beauty were now refracted upon her by the presence of the very people
+they had come to Venice to avoid.
+
+Lansing was vaguely irritated; and when he asked her how she liked being
+with their old crowd again his irritation was increased by her answering
+with a laugh that she only hoped the poor dears didn’t see too plainly
+how they bored her. The patent insincerity of the reply was a shock to
+Lansing. He knew that Susy was not really bored, and he understood that
+she had simply guessed his feelings and instinctively adopted them: that
+henceforth she was always going to think as he thought. To confirm this
+fear he said carelessly: “Oh, all the same, it’s rather jolly knocking
+about with them again for a bit;” and she answered at once, and with
+equal conviction: “Yes, isn’t it? The old darlings--all the same!”
+
+A fear of the future again laid its cold touch on Lansing. Susy’s
+independence and self-sufficiency had been among her chief attractions;
+if she were to turn into an echo their delicious duet ran the risk of
+becoming the dullest of monologues. He forgot that five minutes earlier
+he had resented her being glad to see their friends, and for a moment
+he found himself leaning dizzily over that insoluble riddle of the
+sentimental life: that to be differed with is exasperating, and to be
+agreed with monotonous.
+
+Once more he began to wonder if he were not fundamentally unfitted for
+the married state; and was saved from despair only by remembering that
+Susy’s subjection to his moods was not likely to last. But even then
+it never occurred to him to reflect that his apprehensions were
+superfluous, since their tie was avowedly a temporary one. Of the
+special understanding on which their marriage had been based not a trace
+remained in his thoughts of her; the idea that he or she might ever
+renounce each other for their mutual good had long since dwindled to the
+ghost of an old joke.
+
+It was borne in on him, after a week or two of unbroken sociability,
+that of all his old friends it was the Mortimer Hickses who bored him
+the least. The Hickses had left the Ibis for an apartment in a vast
+dilapidated palace near the Canareggio. They had hired the apartment
+from a painter (one of their newest discoveries), and they put up
+philosophically with the absence of modern conveniences in order to
+secure the inestimable advantage of “atmosphere.” In this privileged
+air they gathered about them their usual mixed company of quiet
+studious people and noisy exponents of new theories, themselves totally
+unconscious of the disparity between their different guests, and
+beamingly convinced that at last they were seated at the source of
+wisdom.
+
+In old days Lansing would have got half an hour’s amusement, followed
+by a long evening of boredom, from the sight of Mrs. Hicks, vast and
+jewelled, seated between a quiet-looking professor of archaeology and a
+large-browed composer, or the high priest of a new dance-step, while
+Mr. Hicks, beaming above his vast white waistcoat, saw to it that the
+champagne flowed more abundantly than the talk, and the bright young
+secretaries industriously “kept up” with the dizzy cross-current of
+prophecy and erudition. But a change had come over Lansing. Hitherto
+it was in contrast to his own friends that the Hickses had seemed most
+insufferable; now it was as an escape from these same friends that they
+had become not only sympathetic but even interesting. It was something,
+after all, to be with people who did not regard Venice simply as
+affording exceptional opportunities for bathing and adultery, but who
+were reverently if confusedly aware that they were in the presence of
+something unique and ineffable, and determined to make the utmost of
+their privilege.
+
+“After all,” he said to himself one evening, as his eyes wandered, with
+somewhat of a convalescent’s simple joy, from one to another of their
+large confiding faces, “after all, they’ve got a religion....” The
+phrase struck him, in the moment of using it, as indicating a new
+element in his own state of mind, and as being, in fact, the key to his
+new feeling about the Hickses. Their muddled ardour for great things
+was related to his own new view of the universe: the people who felt,
+however dimly, the wonder and weight of life must ever after be nearer
+to him than those to whom it was estimated solely by one’s balance at
+the bank. He supposed, on reflexion, that that was what he meant when he
+thought of the Hickses as having “a religion”....
+
+A few days later, his well-being was unexpectedly disturbed by the
+arrival of Fred Gillow. Lansing had always felt a tolerant liking for
+Gillow, a large smiling silent young man with an intense and serious
+desire to miss nothing attainable by one of his fortune and standing.
+What use he made of his experiences, Lansing, who had always gone into
+his own modest adventures rather thoroughly, had never been able to
+guess; but he had always suspected the prodigal Fred of being no more
+than a well-disguised looker-on. Now for the first time he began to view
+him with another eye. The Gillows were, in fact, the one uneasy point in
+Nick’s conscience. He and Susy from the first, had talked of them less
+than of any other members of their group: they had tacitly avoided the
+name from the day on which Susy had come to Lansing’s lodgings to say
+that Ursula Gillow had asked her to renounce him, till that other day,
+just before their marriage, when she had met him with the rapturous cry:
+“Here’s our first wedding present! Such a thumping big cheque from Fred
+and Ursula!”
+
+Plenty of sympathizing people were ready, Lansing knew, to tell him just
+what had happened in the interval between those two dates; but he had
+taken care not to ask. He had even affected an initiation so complete
+that the friends who burned to enlighten him were discouraged by his so
+obviously knowing more than they; and gradually he had worked himself
+around to their view, and had taken it for granted that he really did.
+
+Now he perceived that he knew nothing at all, and that the “Hullo, old
+Fred!” with which Susy hailed Gillow’s arrival might be either the usual
+tribal welcome--since they were all “old,” and all nicknamed, in their
+private jargon--or a greeting that concealed inscrutable depths of
+complicity.
+
+Susy was visibly glad to see Gillow; but she was glad of everything just
+then, and so glad to show her gladness! The fact disarmed her husband
+and made him ashamed of his uneasiness. “You ought to have thought this
+all out sooner, or else you ought to chuck thinking of it at all,”
+ was the sound but ineffectual advice he gave himself on the day after
+Gillow’s arrival; and immediately set to work to rethink the whole
+matter.
+
+Fred Gillow showed no consciousness of disturbing any one’s peace of
+mind. Day after day he sprawled for hours on the Lido sands, his arms
+folded under his head, listening to Streffy’s nonsense and watching Susy
+between sleepy lids; but he betrayed no desire to see her alone, or
+to draw her into talk apart from the others. More than ever he seemed
+content to be the gratified spectator of a costly show got up for his
+private entertainment. It was not until he heard her, one morning,
+grumble a little at the increasing heat and the menace of mosquitoes,
+that he said, quite as if they had talked the matter over long before,
+and finally settled it: “The moor will be ready any time after the first
+of August.”
+
+Nick fancied that Susy coloured a little, and drew herself up more
+defiantly than usual as she sent a pebble skimming across the dying
+ripples at their feet.
+
+“You’ll be a lot cooler in Scotland,” Fred added, with what, for him,
+was an unusual effort at explicitness.
+
+“Oh, shall we?” she retorted gaily; and added with an air of mystery
+and importance, pivoting about on her high heels: “Nick’s got work to do
+here. It will probably keep us all summer.”
+
+“Work? Rot! You’ll die of the smells.” Gillow stared perplexedly skyward
+from under his tilted hat-brim; and then brought out, as from the depth
+of a rankling grievance: “I thought it was all understood.”
+
+“Why,” Nick asked his wife that night, as they re-entered Ellie’s cool
+drawing-room after a late dinner at the Lido, “did Gillow think it was
+understood that we were going to his moor in August?” He was conscious
+of the oddness of speaking of their friend by his surname, and reddened
+at his blunder.
+
+Susy had let her lace cloak slide to her feet, and stood before him
+in the faintly-lit room, slim and shimmering-white through black
+transparencies.
+
+She raised her eyebrows carelessly. “I told you long ago he’d asked us
+there for August.”
+
+“You didn’t tell me you’d accepted.”
+
+She smiled as if he had said something as simple as Fred. “I accepted
+everything--from everybody!”
+
+What could he answer? It was the very principle on which their bargain
+had been struck. And if he were to say: “Ah, but this is different,
+because I’m jealous of Gillow,” what light would such an answer shed on
+his past? The time for being jealous--if so antiquated an attitude were
+on any ground defensible--would have been before his marriage, and before
+the acceptance of the bounties which had helped to make it possible. He
+wondered a little now that in those days such scruples had not troubled
+him. His inconsistency irritated him, and increased his irritation
+against Gillow. “I suppose he thinks he owns us!” he grumbled inwardly.
+
+He had thrown himself into an armchair, and Susy, advancing across the
+shining arabesques of the floor, slid down at his feet, pressed her
+slender length against him, and whispered with lifted face and lips
+close to his: “We needn’t ever go anywhere you don’t want to.” For
+once her submission was sweet, and folding her close he whispered back
+through his kiss: “Not there, then.”
+
+In her response to his embrace he felt the acquiescence of her whole
+happy self in whatever future he decided on, if only it gave them enough
+of such moments as this; and as they held each other fast in silence his
+doubts and distrust began to seem like a silly injustice.
+
+“Let us stay here as long as ever Ellie will let us,” he said, as if the
+shadowy walls and shining floors were a magic boundary drawn about his
+happiness.
+
+She murmured her assent and stood up, stretching her sleepy arm above
+her shoulders. “How dreadfully late it is.... Will you unhook me?... Oh,
+there’s a telegram.”
+
+She picked it up from the table, and tearing it open stared a moment at
+the message. “It’s from Ellie. She’s coming to-morrow.”
+
+She turned to the window and strayed out onto the balcony. Nick followed
+her with enlacing arm. The canal below them lay in moonless shadow,
+barred with a few lingering lights. A last snatch of gondola-music came
+from far off, carried upward on a sultry gust.
+
+“Dear old Ellie. All the same... I wish all this belonged to you and
+me.” Susy sighed.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+
+IT was not Mrs. Vanderlyn’s fault if, after her arrival, her palace
+seemed to belong any less to the Lansings.
+
+She arrived in a mood of such general benevolence that it was impossible
+for Susy, when they finally found themselves alone, to make her view
+even her own recent conduct in any but the most benevolent light.
+
+“I knew you’d be the veriest angel about it all, darling, because I knew
+you’d understand me--especially now,” she declared, her slim hands
+in Susy’s, her big eyes (so like Clarissa’s) resplendent with past
+pleasures and future plans.
+
+The expression of her confidence was unexpectedly distasteful to Susy
+Lansing, who had never lent so cold an ear to such warm avowals. She had
+always imagined that being happy one’s self made one--as Mrs. Vanderlyn
+appeared to assume--more tolerant of the happiness of others, of however
+doubtful elements composed; and she was almost ashamed of responding so
+languidly to her friend’s outpourings. But she herself had no desire to
+confide her bliss to Ellie; and why should not Ellie observe a similar
+reticence?
+
+“It was all so perfect--you see, dearest, I was meant to be happy,”
+ that lady continued, as if the possession of so unusual a characteristic
+singled her out for special privileges.
+
+Susy, with a certain sharpness, responded that she had always supposed
+we all were.
+
+“Oh, no, dearest: not governesses and mothers-in-law and companions, and
+that sort of people. They wouldn’t know how if they tried. But you and
+I, darling--”
+
+“Oh, I don’t consider myself in any way exceptional,” Susy intervened.
+She longed to add: “Not in your way, at any rate--” but a few minutes
+earlier Mrs. Vanderlyn had told her that the palace was at her disposal
+for the rest of the summer, and that she herself was only going to perch
+there--if they’d let her!--long enough to gather up her things and
+start for St. Moritz. The memory of this announcement had the effect of
+curbing Susy’s irony, and of making her shift the conversation to the
+safer if scarcely less absorbing topic of the number of day and evening
+dresses required for a season at St. Moritz.
+
+As she listened to Mrs. Vanderlyn--no less eloquent on this theme
+than on the other--Susy began to measure the gulf between her past and
+present. “This is the life I used to lead; these are the things I used
+to live for,” she thought, as she stood before the outspread glories of
+Mrs. Vanderlyn’s wardrobe. Not that she did not still care: she could
+not look at Ellie’s laces and silks and furs without picturing herself
+in them, and wondering by what new miracle of management she could give
+herself the air of being dressed by the same consummate artists. But
+these had become minor interests: the past few months had given her a
+new perspective, and the thing that most puzzled and disconcerted her
+about Ellie was the fact that love and finery and bridge and dining-out
+were seemingly all on the same plane to her.
+
+The inspection of the dresses lasted a long time, and was marked by
+many fluctuations of mood on the part of Mrs. Vanderlyn, who passed
+from comparative hopefulness to despair at the total inadequacy of her
+wardrobe. It wouldn’t do to go to St. Moritz looking like a frump, and
+yet there was no time to get anything sent from Paris, and, whatever she
+did, she wasn’t going to show herself in any dowdy re-arrangements done
+at home. But suddenly light broke on her, and she clasped her hands
+for joy. “Why, Nelson’ll bring them--I’d forgotten all about Nelson!
+There’ll be just time if I wire to him at once.”
+
+“Is Nelson going to join you at St. Moritz?” Susy asked, surprised.
+
+“Heavens, no! He’s coming here to pick up Clarissa and take her to some
+stuffy cure in Austria with his mother. It’s too lucky: there’s just
+time to telegraph him to bring my things. I didn’t mean to wait for him;
+but it won’t delay me more than day or two.”
+
+Susy’s heart sank. She was not much afraid of Ellie alone, but Ellie and
+Nelson together formed an incalculable menace. No one could tell what
+spark of truth might dash from their collision. Susy felt that she could
+deal with the two dangers separately and successively, but not together
+and simultaneously.
+
+“But, Ellie, why should you wait for Nelson? I’m certain to find someone
+here who’s going to St. Moritz and will take your things if he brings
+them. It’s a pity to risk losing your rooms.”
+
+This argument appealed for a moment to Mrs. Vanderlyn. “That’s
+true; they say all the hotels are jammed. You dear, you’re always
+so practical!” She clasped Susy to her scented bosom. “And you know,
+darling, I’m sure you’ll be glad to get rid of me--you and Nick! Oh,
+don’t be hypocritical and say ‘Nonsense!’ You see, I understand... I
+used to think of you so often, you two... during those blessed weeks
+when we two were alone....”
+
+The sudden tears, brimming over Ellie’s lovely eyes, and threatening to
+make the blue circles below them run into the adjoining carmine, filled
+Susy with compunction.
+
+“Poor thing--oh, poor thing!” she thought; and hearing herself called
+by Nick, who was waiting to take her out for their usual sunset on the
+lagoon, she felt a wave of pity for the deluded creature who would
+never taste that highest of imaginable joys. “But all the same,” Susy
+reflected, as she hurried down to her husband, “I’m glad I persuaded her
+not to wait for Nelson.”
+
+Some days had elapsed since Susy and Nick had had a sunset to
+themselves, and in the interval Susy had once again learned the superior
+quality of the sympathy that held them together. She now viewed all the
+rest of life as no more than a show: a jolly show which it would have
+been a thousand pities to miss, but which, if the need arose, they could
+get up and leave at any moment--provided that they left it together.
+
+In the dusk, while their prow slid over inverted palaces, and through
+the scent of hidden gardens, she leaned against him and murmured, her
+mind returning to the recent scene with Ellie: “Nick, should you hate me
+dreadfully if I had no clothes?”
+
+Her husband was kindling a cigarette, and the match lit up the grin
+with which he answered: “But, my dear, have I ever shown the slightest
+symptom--?”
+
+“Oh, rubbish! When a woman says: ‘No clothes,’ she means: ‘Not the right
+clothes.’”
+
+He took a meditative puff. “Ah, you’ve been going over Ellie’s finery
+with her.”
+
+“Yes: all those trunks and trunks full. And she finds she’s got nothing
+for St. Moritz!”
+
+“Of course,” he murmured, drowsy with content, and manifesting but a
+languid interest in the subject of Mrs. Vanderlyn’s wardrobe.
+
+“Only fancy--she very nearly decided to stop over for Nelson’s arrival
+next week, so that he might bring her two or three more trunkfuls from
+Paris. But mercifully I’ve managed to persuade her that it would be
+foolish to wait.”
+
+Susy felt a hardly perceptible shifting of her husband’s lounging body,
+and was aware, through all her watchful tentacles, of a widening of his
+half-closed lids.
+
+“You ‘managed’--?” She fancied he paused on the word ironically. “But
+why?”
+
+“Why--what?”
+
+“Why on earth should you try to prevent Ellie’s waiting for Nelson, if
+for once in her life she wants to?”
+
+Susy, conscious of reddening suddenly, drew back as though the leap
+of her tell-tale heart might have penetrated the blue flannel shoulder
+against which she leaned.
+
+“Really, dearest--!” she murmured; but with a sudden doggedness he
+renewed his “Why?”
+
+“Because she’s in such a fever to get to St. Moritz--and in such a funk
+lest the hotel shouldn’t keep her rooms,” Susy somewhat breathlessly
+produced.
+
+“Ah--I see.” Nick paused again. “You’re a devoted friend, aren’t you!”
+
+“What an odd question! There’s hardly anyone I’ve reason to be more
+devoted to than Ellie,” his wife answered; and she felt his contrite
+clasp on her hand.
+
+“Darling! No; nor I--. Or more grateful to for leaving us alone in this
+heaven.”
+
+Dimness had fallen on the waters, and her lifted lips met his bending
+ones.
+
+Trailing late into dinner that evening, Ellie announced that, after all,
+she had decided it was safest to wait for Nelson.
+
+“I should simply worry myself ill if I weren’t sure of getting my
+things,” she said, in the tone of tender solicitude with which she
+always discussed her own difficulties. “After all, people who deny
+themselves everything do get warped and bitter, don’t they?” she argued
+plaintively, her lovely eyes wandering from one to the other of her
+assembled friends.
+
+Strefford remarked gravely that it was the complaint which had fatally
+undermined his own health; and in the laugh that followed the party
+drifted into the great vaulted dining-room.
+
+“Oh, I don’t mind your laughing at me, Streffy darling,” his hostess
+retorted, pressing his arm against her own; and Susy, receiving the
+shock of their rapidly exchanged glance, said to herself, with a sharp
+twinge of apprehension: “Of course Streffy knows everything; he showed
+no surprise at finding Ellie away when he arrived. And if he knows,
+what’s to prevent Nelson’s finding out?” For Strefford, in a mood of
+mischief, was no more to be trusted than a malicious child.
+
+Susy instantly resolved to risk speaking to him, if need be even
+betraying to him the secret of the letters. Only by revealing the depth
+of her own danger could she hope to secure his silence.
+
+On the balcony, late in the evening, while the others were listening
+indoors to the low modulations of a young composer who had embroidered
+his fancies on Browning’s “Toccata,” Susy found her chance. Strefford,
+unsummoned, had followed her out, and stood silently smoking at her
+side.
+
+“You see, Streff--oh, why should you and I make mysteries to each
+other?” she suddenly began.
+
+“Why, indeed: but do we?”
+
+Susy glanced back at the group around the piano. “About Ellie, I
+mean--and Nelson.”
+
+“Lord! Ellie and Nelson? You call that a mystery? I should as soon apply
+the term to one of the million candle-power advertisements that adorn
+your native thoroughfares.”
+
+“Well, yes. But--” She stopped again. Had she not tacitly promised Ellie
+not to speak?
+
+“My Susan, what’s wrong?” Strefford asked.
+
+“I don’t know....”
+
+“Well, I do, then: you’re afraid that, if Ellie and Nelson meet here,
+she’ll blurt out something--injudicious.”
+
+“Oh, she won’t!” Susy cried with conviction.
+
+“Well, then--who will! I trust that superhuman child not to. And you and
+I and Nick--”
+
+“Oh,” she gasped, interrupting him, “that’s just it. Nick doesn’t
+know... doesn’t even suspect. And if he did....”
+
+Strefford flung away his cigar and turned to scrutinize her. “I don’t
+see--hanged if I do. What business is it of any of us, after all?”
+
+That, of course, was the old view that cloaked connivance in an air of
+decency. But to Susy it no longer carried conviction, and she hesitated.
+
+“If Nick should find out that I know....”
+
+“Good Lord--doesn’t he know that you know? After all, I suppose it’s not
+the first time--”
+
+She remained silent.
+
+“The first time you’ve received confidences--from married friends. Does
+Nick suppose you’ve lived even to your tender age without... Hang it,
+what’s come over you, child?”
+
+What had, indeed, that she could make clear to him? And yet more than
+ever she felt the need of having him securely on her side. Once his word
+was pledged, he was safe: otherwise there was no limit to his capacity
+for wilful harmfulness.
+
+“Look here, Streff, you and I know that Ellie hasn’t been away for a
+cure; and that if poor Clarissa was sworn to secrecy it was not because
+it ‘worries father’ to think that mother needs to take care of her
+health.” She paused, hating herself for the ironic note she had tried to
+sound.
+
+“Well--?” he questioned, from the depths of the chair into which he had
+sunk.
+
+“Well, Nick doesn’t... doesn’t dream of it. If he knew that we owed our
+summer here to... to my knowing....”
+
+Strefford sat silent: she felt his astonished stare through the
+darkness. “Jove!” he said at last, with a low whistle Susy bent over the
+balustrade, her heart thumping against the stone rail.
+
+“What was left of soul, I wonder--?” the young composer’s voice shrilled
+through the open windows.
+
+Strefford sank into another silence, from which he roused himself only
+as Susy turned back toward the lighted threshold.
+
+“Well, my dear, we’ll see it through between us; you and I--and
+Clarissa,” he said with his rasping laugh, rising to follow her. He
+caught her hand and gave it a short pressure as they re-entered the
+drawing-room, where Ellie was saying plaintively to Fred Gillow: “I can
+never hear that thing sung without wanting to cry like a baby.”
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+
+NELSON VANDERLYN, still in his travelling clothes, paused on the
+threshold of his own dining-room and surveyed the scene with pardonable
+satisfaction.
+
+He was a short round man, with a grizzled head, small facetious eyes and
+a large and credulous smile.
+
+At the luncheon table sat his wife, between Charlie Strefford and Nick
+Lansing. Next to Strefford, perched on her high chair, Clarissa throned
+in infant beauty, while Susy Lansing cut up a peach for her. Through
+wide orange awnings the sun slanted in upon the white-clad group.
+
+“Well--well--well! So I’ve caught you at it!” cried the happy father,
+whose inveterate habit it was to address his wife and friends as if he
+had surprised them at an inopportune moment. Stealing up from behind, he
+lifted his daughter into the air, while a chorus of “Hello, old Nelson,”
+ hailed his appearance.
+
+It was two or three years since Nick Lansing had seen Mr. Vanderlyn, who
+was now the London representative of the big New York bank of Vanderlyn
+& Co., and had exchanged his sumptuous house in Fifth Avenue for
+another, more sumptuous still, in Mayfair; and the young man looked
+curiously and attentively at his host.
+
+Mr. Vanderlyn had grown older and stouter, but his face still kept
+its look of somewhat worn optimism. He embraced his wife, greeted Susy
+affectionately, and distributed cordial hand-grasps to the two men.
+
+“Hullo,” he exclaimed, suddenly noticing a pearl and coral trinket
+hanging from Clarissa’s neck. “Who’s been giving my daughter jewellery,
+I’d like to know!”
+
+“Oh, Streffy did--just think, father! Because I said I’d rather have it
+than a book, you know,” Clarissa lucidly explained, her arms tight about
+her father’s neck, her beaming eyes on Strefford.
+
+Nelson Vanderlyn’s own eyes took on the look of shrewdness which came
+into them whenever there was a question of material values.
+
+“What, Streffy? Caught you at it, eh? Upon my soul-spoiling the brat
+like that! You’d no business to, my dear chap-a lovely baroque pearl--”
+ he protested, with the half-apologetic tone of the rich man embarrassed
+by too costly a gift from an impecunious friend.
+
+“Oh, hadn’t I? Why? Because it’s too good for Clarissa, or too expensive
+for me? Of course you daren’t imply the first; and as for me--I’ve had a
+windfall, and am blowing it in on the ladies.”
+
+Strefford, Lansing had noticed, always used American slang when he was
+slightly at a loss, and wished to divert attention from the main point.
+But why was he embarrassed, whose attention did he wish to divert, It
+was plain that Vanderlyn’s protest had been merely formal: like most of
+the wealthy, he had only the dimmest notion of what money represented
+to the poor. But it was unusual for Strefford to give any one a present,
+and especially an expensive one: perhaps that was what had fixed
+Vanderlyn’s attention.
+
+“A windfall?” he gaily repeated.
+
+“Oh, a tiny one: I was offered a thumping rent for my little place at
+Como, and dashed over here to squander my millions with the rest of
+you,” said Strefford imperturbably.
+
+Vanderlyn’s look immediately became interested and sympathetic.
+“What--the scene of the honey-moon?” He included Nick and Susy in his
+friendly smile.
+
+“Just so: the reward of virtue. I say, give me a cigar, will you, old
+man, I left some awfully good ones at Como, worse luck--and I don’t mind
+telling you that Ellie’s no judge of tobacco, and that Nick’s too far
+gone in bliss to care what he smokes,” Strefford grumbled, stretching a
+hand toward his host’s cigar-case.
+
+“I do like jewellery best,” Clarissa murmured, hugging her father.
+
+Nelson Vanderlyn’s first word to his wife had been that he had
+brought her all her toggery; and she had welcomed him with appropriate
+enthusiasm. In fact, to the lookers-on her joy at seeing him seemed
+rather too patently in proportion to her satisfaction at getting her
+clothes. But no such suspicion appeared to mar Mr. Vanderlyn’s happiness
+in being, for once, and for nearly twenty-four hours, under the same
+roof with his wife and child. He did not conceal his regret at having
+promised his mother to join her the next day; and added, with a wistful
+glance at Ellie: “If only I’d known you meant to wait for me!”
+
+But being a man of duty, in domestic as well as business affairs, he did
+not even consider the possibility of disappointing the exacting old lady
+to whom he owed his being. “Mother cares for so few people,” he used to
+say, not without a touch of filial pride in the parental exclusiveness,
+“that I have to be with her rather more than if she were more sociable”;
+and with smiling resignation he gave orders that Clarissa should be
+ready to start the next evening.
+
+“And meanwhile,” he concluded, “we’ll have all the good time that’s
+going.”
+
+The ladies of the party seemed united in the desire to further this
+resolve; and it was settled that as soon as Mr. Vanderlyn had despatched
+a hasty luncheon, his wife, Clarissa and Susy should carry him off for a
+tea-picnic at Torcello. They did not even suggest that Strefford or Nick
+should be of the party, or that any of the other young men of the group
+should be summoned; as Susy said, Nelson wanted to go off alone with his
+harem. And Lansing and Strefford were left to watch the departure of the
+happy Pasha ensconced between attentive beauties.
+
+“Well--that’s what you call being married!” Strefford commented, waving
+his battered Panama at Clarissa.
+
+“Oh, no, I don’t!” Lansing laughed.
+
+“He does. But do you know--” Strefford paused and swung about on his
+companion--“do you know, when the Rude Awakening comes, I don’t care to
+be there. I believe there’ll be some crockery broken.”
+
+“Shouldn’t wonder,” Lansing answered indifferently. He wandered away to
+his own room, leaving Strefford to philosophize to his pipe.
+
+Lansing had always known about poor old Nelson: who hadn’t, except poor
+old Nelson? The case had once seemed amusing because so typical; now, it
+rather irritated Nick that Vanderlyn should be so complete an ass. But
+he would be off the next day, and so would Ellie, and then, for many
+enchanted weeks, the palace would once more be the property of Nick and
+Susy. Of all the people who came and went in it, they were the only ones
+who appreciated it, or knew how it was meant to be lived in; and that
+made it theirs in the only valid sense. In this light it became easy to
+regard the Vanderlyns as mere transient intruders.
+
+Having relegated them to this convenient distance, Lansing shut himself
+up with his book. He had returned to it with fresh energy after his few
+weeks of holiday-making, and was determined to finish it quickly. He did
+not expect that it would bring in much money; but if it were moderately
+successful it might give him an opening in the reviews and magazines,
+and in that case he meant to abandon archaeology for novels, since
+it was only as a purveyor of fiction that he could count on earning a
+living for himself and Susy.
+
+Late in the afternoon he laid down his pen and wandered out of doors.
+He loved the increasing heat of the Venetian summer, the bruised
+peach-tints of worn house-fronts, the enamelling of sunlight on dark
+green canals, the smell of half-decayed fruits and flowers thickening
+the languid air. What visions he could build, if he dared, of being
+tucked away with Susy in the attic of some tumble-down palace, above
+a jade-green waterway, with a terrace overhanging a scrap of neglected
+garden--and cheques from the publishers dropping in at convenient
+intervals! Why should they not settle in Venice if he pulled it off!
+
+He found himself before the church of the Scalzi, and pushing open the
+leathern door wandered up the nave under the whirl of rose-and-lemon
+angels in Tiepolo’s great vault. It was not a church in which one was
+likely to run across sight-seers; but he presently remarked a young lady
+standing alone near the choir, and assiduously applying her field-glass
+to the celestial vortex, from which she occasionally glanced down at an
+open manual.
+
+As Lansing’s step sounded on the pavement, the young lady, turning,
+revealed herself as Miss Hicks.
+
+“Ah--you like this too? It’s several centuries out of your line, though,
+isn’t it!” Nick asked as they shook hands.
+
+She gazed at him gravely. “Why shouldn’t one like things that are out
+of one’s line?” she answered; and he agreed, with a laugh, that it was
+often an incentive.
+
+She continued to fix her grave eyes on him, and after one or two remarks
+about the Tiepolos he perceived that she was feeling her way toward a
+subject of more personal interest.
+
+“I’m glad to see you alone,” she said at length, with an abruptness that
+might have seemed awkward had it not been so completely unconscious.
+She turned toward a cluster of straw chairs, and signed to Nick to seat
+himself beside her.
+
+“I seldom do,” she added, with the serious smile that made her heavy
+face almost handsome; and she went on, giving him no time to protest: “I
+wanted to speak to you--to explain about father’s invitation to go with
+us to Persia and Turkestan.”
+
+“To explain?”
+
+“Yes. You found the letter when you arrived here just after your
+marriage, didn’t you? You must have thought it odd, our asking you just
+then; but we hadn’t heard that you were married.”
+
+“Oh, I guessed as much: it happened very quietly, and I was remiss about
+announcing it, even to old friends.”
+
+Lansing frowned. His thoughts had wandered away to the evening when he
+had found Mrs. Hicks’s letter in the mail awaiting him at Venice.
+The day was associated in his mind with the ridiculous and mortifying
+episode of the cigars--the expensive cigars that Susy had wanted to
+carry away from Strefford’s villa. Their brief exchange of views on the
+subject had left the first blur on the perfect surface of his happiness,
+and he still felt an uncomfortable heat at the remembrance. For a few
+hours the prospect of life with Susy had seemed unendurable; and it was
+just at that moment that he had found the letter from Mrs. Hicks, with
+its almost irresistible invitation. If only her daughter had known how
+nearly he had accepted it!
+
+“It was a dreadful temptation,” he said, smiling.
+
+“To go with us? Then why--?”
+
+“Oh, everything’s different now: I’ve got to stick to my writing.”
+
+Miss Hicks still bent on him the same unblinking scrutiny. “Does that
+mean that you’re going to give up your real work?”
+
+“My real work--archaeology?” He smiled again to hide a twitch of regret.
+“Why, I’m afraid it hardly produces a living wage; and I’ve got to think
+of that.” He coloured suddenly, as if suspecting that Miss Hicks might
+consider the avowal an opening for he hardly knew what ponderous
+offer of aid. The Hicks munificence was too uncalculating not to be
+occasionally oppressive. But looking at her again he saw that her eyes
+were full of tears.
+
+“I thought it was your vocation,” she said.
+
+“So did I. But life comes along, and upsets things.”
+
+“Oh, I understand. There may be things--worth giving up all other things
+for.”
+
+“There are!” cried Nick with beaming emphasis.
+
+He was conscious that Miss Hicks’s eyes demanded of him even more than
+this sweeping affirmation.
+
+“But your novel may fail,” she said with her odd harshness.
+
+“It may--it probably will,” he agreed. “But if one stopped to consider
+such possibilities--”
+
+“Don’t you have to, with a wife?”
+
+“Oh, my dear Coral--how old are you? Not twenty?” he questioned, laying
+a brotherly hand on hers.
+
+She stared at him a moment, and sprang up clumsily from her chair. “I
+was never young... if that’s what you mean. It’s lucky, isn’t it, that
+my parents gave me such a grand education? Because, you see, art’s a
+wonderful resource.” (She pronounced it RE-source.)
+
+He continued to look at her kindly. “You won’t need it--or any
+other--when you grow young, as you will some day,” he assured her.
+
+“Do you mean, when I fall in love? But I am in love--Oh, there’s
+Eldorada and Mr. Beck!” She broke off with a jerk, signalling with her
+field-glass to the pair who had just appeared at the farther end of the
+nave. “I told them that if they’d meet me here to-day I’d try to make
+them understand Tiepolo. Because, you see, at home we never really
+have understood Tiepolo; and Mr. Beck and Eldorada are the only ones to
+realize it. Mr. Buttles simply won’t.” She turned to Lansing and held
+out her hand. “I am in love,” she repeated earnestly, “and that’s the
+reason why I find art such a RE source.”
+
+She restored her eye-glasses, opened her manual, and strode across the
+church to the expectant neophytes.
+
+Lansing, looking after her, wondered for half a moment whether Mr. Beck
+were the object of this apparently unrequited sentiment; then, with a
+queer start of introspection, abruptly decided that, no, he certainly
+was not. But then--but then--. Well, there was no use in following up
+such conjectures.... He turned home-ward, wondering if the picnickers
+had already reached Palazzo Vanderlyn.
+
+They got back only in time for a late dinner, full of chaff and
+laughter, and apparently still enchanted with each other’s society.
+Nelson Vanderlyn beamed on his wife, sent his daughter off to bed with a
+kiss, and leaning back in his armchair before the fruit-and-flower-laden
+table, declared that he’d never spent a jollier day in his life. Susy
+seemed to come in for a full share of his approbation, and Lansing
+thought that Ellie was unusually demonstrative to her friend. Strefford,
+from his hostess’s side, glanced across now and then at young Mrs.
+Lansing, and his glance seemed to Lansing a confidential comment on the
+Vanderlyn raptures. But then Strefford was always having private jokes
+with people or about them; and Lansing was irritated with himself for
+perpetually suspecting his best friends of vague complicities at his
+expense. “If I’m going to be jealous of Streffy now--!” he concluded
+with a grimace of self-derision.
+
+Certainly Susy looked lovely enough to justify the most irrational
+pangs. As a girl she had been, for some people’s taste, a trifle
+fine-drawn and sharp-edged; now, to her old lightness of line was added
+a shadowy bloom, a sort of star-reflecting depth. Her movements were
+slower, less angular; her mouth had a needing droop, her lids seemed
+weighed down by their lashes; and then suddenly the old spirit would
+reveal itself through the new languor, like the tartness at the core
+of a sweet fruit. As her husband looked at her across the flowers and
+lights he laughed inwardly at the nothingness of all things else.
+
+Vanderlyn and Clarissa left betimes the next morning; and Mrs.
+Vanderlyn, who was to start for St. Moritz in the afternoon, devoted
+her last hours to anxious conferences with her maid and Susy. Strefford,
+with Fred Gillow and the others, had gone for a swim at the Lido, and
+Lansing seized the opportunity to get back to his book.
+
+The quietness of the great echoing place gave him a foretaste of the
+solitude to come. By mid-August all their party would be scattered: the
+Hickses off on a cruise to Crete and the AEgean, Fred Gillow on the way
+to his moor, Strefford to stay with friends in Capri till his annual
+visit to Northumberland in September. One by one the others would
+follow, and Lansing and Susy be left alone in the great sun-proof
+palace, alone under the star-laden skies, alone with the great orange
+moons--still theirs!--above the bell-tower of San Giorgio. The novel, in
+that blessed quiet, would unfold itself as harmoniously as his dreams.
+
+He wrote on, forgetful of the passing hours, till the door opened and he
+heard a step behind him. The next moment two hands were clasped over his
+eyes, and the air was full of Mrs. Vanderlyn’s last new scent.
+
+“You dear thing--I’m just off, you know,” she said. “Susy told me you
+were working, and I forbade her to call you down. She and Streffy are
+waiting to take me to the station, and I’ve run up to say good-bye.”
+
+“Ellie, dear!” Full of compunction, Lansing pushed aside his writing and
+started up; but she pressed him back into his seat.
+
+“No, no! I should never forgive myself if I’d interrupted you. I
+oughtn’t to have come up; Susy didn’t want me to. But I had to tell you,
+you dear.... I had to thank you...”
+
+In her dark travelling dress and hat, so discreetly conspicuous, so
+negligent and so studied, with a veil masking her paint, and gloves
+hiding her rings, she looked younger, simpler, more natural than he had
+ever seen her. Poor Ellie such a good fellow, after all!
+
+“To thank me? For what? For being so happy here?” he laughed, taking her
+hands.
+
+She looked at him, laughed back, and flung her arms about his neck.
+
+“For helping me to be so happy elsewhere--you and Susy, you two blessed
+darlings!” she cried, with a kiss on his cheek.
+
+Their eyes met for a second; then her arms slipped slowly downward,
+dropping to her sides. Lansing sat before her like a stone.
+
+“Oh,” she gasped, “why do you stare so? Didn’t you know...?”
+
+They heard Strefford’s shrill voice on the stairs. “Ellie, where the
+deuce are you? Susy’s in the gondola. You’ll miss the train!”
+
+Lansing stood up and caught Mrs. Vanderlyn by the wrist. “What do you
+mean? What are you talking about?”
+
+“Oh, nothing... But you were both such bricks about the letters.... And
+when Nelson was here, too.... Nick, don’t hurt my wrist so! I must run!”
+
+He dropped her hand and stood motionless, staring after her and
+listening to the click of her high heels as she fled across the room and
+along the echoing corridor.
+
+When he turned back to the table he noticed that a small morocco case
+had fallen among his papers. In falling it had opened, and before him,
+on the pale velvet lining, lay a scarf-pin set with a perfect pearl. He
+picked the box up, and was about to hasten after Mrs. Vanderlyn--it
+was so like her to shed jewels on her path!--when he noticed his own
+initials on the cover.
+
+He dropped the box as if it had been a hot coal, and sat for a long
+while gazing at the gold N. L., which seemed to have burnt itself into
+his flesh.
+
+At last he roused himself and stood up.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+
+WITH a sigh of relief Susy drew the pins from her hat and threw herself
+down on the lounge.
+
+The ordeal she had dreaded was over, and Mr. and Mrs. Vanderlyn had
+safely gone their several ways. Poor Ellie was not noted for prudence,
+and when life smiled on her she was given to betraying her gratitude too
+openly; but thanks to Susy’s vigilance (and, no doubt, to Strefford’s
+tacit co-operation), the dreaded twenty-four hours were happily over.
+Nelson Vanderlyn had departed without a shadow on his brow, and though
+Ellie’s, when she came down from bidding Nick good-bye, had seemed to
+Susy less serene than usual, she became her normal self as soon as it
+was discovered that the red morocco bag with her jewel-box was missing.
+Before it had been discovered in the depths of the gondola they had
+reached the station, and there was just time to thrust her into her
+“sleeper,” from which she was seen to wave an unperturbed farewell to
+her friends.
+
+“Well, my dear, we’ve been it through,” Strefford remarked with a deep
+breath as the St. Moritz express rolled away.
+
+“Oh,” Susy sighed in mute complicity; then, as if to cover her
+self-betrayal: “Poor darling, she does so like what she likes!”
+
+“Yes--even if it’s a rotten bounder,” Strefford agreed.
+
+“A rotten bounder? Why, I thought--”
+
+“That it was still young Davenant? Lord, no--not for the last six
+months. Didn’t she tell you--?”
+
+Susy felt herself redden. “I didn’t ask her--”
+
+“Ask her? You mean you didn’t let her!”
+
+“I didn’t let her. And I don’t let you,” Susy added sharply, as he
+helped her into the gondola.
+
+“Oh, all right: I daresay you’re right. It simplifies things,” Strefford
+placidly acquiesced.
+
+She made no answer, and in silence they glided homeward.
+
+Now, in the quiet of her own room, Susy lay and pondered on the distance
+she had travelled during the last year. Strefford had read her mind with
+his usual penetration. It was true that there had been a time when
+she would have thought it perfectly natural that Ellie should tell
+her everything; that the name of young Davenant’s successor should be
+confided to her as a matter of course. Apparently even Ellie had been
+obscurely aware of the change, for after a first attempt to force her
+confidences on Susy she had contented herself with vague expressions of
+gratitude, allusive smiles and sighs, and the pretty “surprise” of the
+sapphire bangle slipped onto her friend’s wrist in the act of their
+farewell embrace.
+
+The bangle was extremely handsome. Susy, who had an auctioneer’s eye
+for values, knew to a fraction the worth of those deep convex stones
+alternating with small emeralds and brilliants. She was glad to own the
+bracelet, and enchanted with the effect it produced on her slim wrist;
+yet, even while admiring it, and rejoicing that it was hers, she had
+already transmuted it into specie, and reckoned just how far it would go
+toward the paying of domestic necessities. For whatever came to her now
+interested her only as something more to be offered up to Nick.
+
+The door opened and Nick came in. Dusk had fallen, and she could not
+see his face; but something in the jerk of the door-handle roused her
+ever-wakeful apprehension. She hurried toward him with outstretched
+wrist.
+
+“Look, dearest--wasn’t it too darling of Ellie?”
+
+She pressed the button of the lamp that lit her dressing-table, and her
+husband’s face started unfamiliarly out of the twilight. She slipped off
+the bracelet and held it up to him.
+
+“Oh, I can go you one better,” he said with a laugh; and pulling a
+morocco case from his pocket he flung it down among the scent-bottles.
+
+Susy opened the case automatically, staring at the pearl because she was
+afraid to look again at Nick.
+
+“Ellie--gave you this?” she asked at length.
+
+“Yes. She gave me this.” There was a pause. “Would you mind telling
+me,” Lansing continued in the same dead-level tone, “exactly for what
+services we’ve both been so handsomely paid?”
+
+“The pearl is beautiful,” Susy murmured, to gain time, while her head
+spun round with unimaginable terrors.
+
+“So are your sapphires; though, on closer examination, my services would
+appear to have been valued rather higher than yours. Would you be kind
+enough to tell me just what they were?”
+
+Susy threw her head back and looked at him. “What on earth are you
+talking about, Nick! Why shouldn’t Ellie have given us these things? Do
+you forget that it’s like our giving her a pen-wiper or a button-hook?
+What is it you are trying to suggest?”
+
+It had cost her a considerable effort to hold his eyes while she put
+the questions. Something had happened between him and Ellie, that was
+evident--one of those hideous unforeseeable blunders that may cause one’s
+cleverest plans to crumble at a stroke; and again Susy shuddered at
+the frailty of her bliss. But her old training stood her in good stead.
+There had been more than one moment in her past when everything--somebody
+else’s everything--had depended on her keeping a cool head and a clear
+glance. It would have been a wonder if now, when she felt her own
+everything at stake, she had not been able to put up as good a defence.
+
+“What is it?” she repeated impatiently, as Lansing continued to remain
+silent.
+
+“That’s what I’m here to ask,” he returned, keeping his eyes as steady
+as she kept hers. “There’s no reason on earth, as you say, why Ellie
+shouldn’t give us presents--as expensive presents as she likes; and the
+pearl is a beauty. All I ask is: for what specific services were they
+given? For, allowing for all the absence of scruple that marks the
+intercourse of truly civilized people, you’ll probably agree that there
+are limits; at least up to now there have been limits....”
+
+“I really don’t know what you mean. I suppose Ellie wanted to show that
+she was grateful to us for looking after Clarissa.”
+
+“But she gave us all this in exchange for that, didn’t she?” he
+suggested, with a sweep of the hand around the beautiful shadowy room.
+“A whole summer of it if we choose.”
+
+Susy smiled. “Apparently she didn’t think that enough.”
+
+“What a doting mother! It shows the store she sets upon her child.”
+
+“Well, don’t you set store upon Clarissa?”
+
+“Clarissa is exquisite; but her mother didn’t mention her in offering me
+this recompense.”
+
+Susy lifted her head again. “Whom did she mention?”
+
+“Vanderlyn,” said Lansing.
+
+“Vanderlyn? Nelson?”
+
+“Yes--and some letters... something about letters.... What is it, my
+dear, that you and I have been hired to hide from Vanderlyn? Because I
+should like to know,” Nick broke out savagely, “if we’ve been adequately
+paid.”
+
+Susy was silent: she needed time to reckon up her forces, and study her
+next move; and her brain was in such a whirl of fear that she could at
+last only retort: “What is it that Ellie said to you?”
+
+Lansing laughed again. “That’s just what you’d like to find out--isn’t
+it?--in order to know the line to take in making your explanation.”
+
+The sneer had an effect that he could not have foreseen, and that Susy
+herself had not expected.
+
+“Oh, don’t--don’t let us speak to each other like that!” she cried; and
+sinking down by the dressing-table she hid her face in her hands.
+
+It seemed to her, now, that nothing mattered except that their love
+for each other, their faith in each other, should be saved from some
+unhealable hurt. She was willing to tell Nick everything--she wanted to
+tell him everything--if only she could be sure of reaching a responsive
+chord in him. But the scene of the cigars came back to her, and benumbed
+her. If only she could make him see that nothing was of any account as
+long as they continued to love each other!
+
+His touch fell compassionately on her shoulder. “Poor child--don’t,” he
+said.
+
+Their eyes met, but his expression checked the smile breaking through
+her tears. “Don’t you see,” he continued, “that we’ve got to have this
+thing out?”
+
+She continued to stare at him through a prism of tears. “I can’t--while
+you stand up like that,” she stammered, childishly.
+
+She had cowered down again into a corner of the lounge; but Lansing did
+not seat himself at her side. He took a chair facing her, like a caller
+on the farther side of a stately tea-tray. “Will that do?” he asked with
+a stiff smile, as if to humour her.
+
+“Nothing will do--as long as you’re not you!”
+
+“Not me?”
+
+She shook her head wearily. “What’s the use? You accept things
+theoretically--and then when they happen....”
+
+“What things? What has happened!”
+
+A sudden impatience mastered her. What did he suppose, after all--? “But
+you know all about Ellie. We used to talk about her often enough in old
+times,” she said.
+
+“Ellie and young Davenant?”
+
+“Young Davenant; or the others....”
+
+“Or the others. But what business was it of ours?”
+
+“Ah, that’s just what I think!” she cried, springing up with an
+explosion of relief. Lansing stood up also, but there was no answering
+light in his face.
+
+“We’re outside of all that; we’ve nothing to do with it, have we?” he
+pursued.
+
+“Nothing whatever.”
+
+“Then what on earth is the meaning of Ellie’s gratitude? Gratitude for
+what we’ve done about some letters--and about Vanderlyn?”
+
+“Oh, not you,” Susy cried, involuntarily.
+
+“Not I? Then you?” He came close and took her by the wrist. “Answer me.
+Have you been mixed up in some dirty business of Ellie’s?”
+
+There was a pause. She found it impossible to speak, with that burning
+grasp on the wrist where the bangle had been. At length he let her go
+and moved away. “Answer,” he repeated.
+
+“I’ve told you it was my business and not yours.”
+
+He received this in silence; then he questioned: “You’ve been sending
+letters for her, I suppose? To whom?”
+
+“Oh, why do you torment me? Nelson was not supposed to know that she’d
+been away. She left me the letters to post to him once a week. I found
+them here the night we arrived.... It was the price--for this. Oh,
+Nick, say it’s been worth it--say at least that it’s been worth it!” she
+implored him.
+
+He stood motionless, unresponding. One hand drummed on the corner of her
+dressing-table, making the jewelled bangle dance.
+
+“How many letters?”
+
+“I don’t know... four... five... What does it matter?”
+
+“And once a week, for six weeks--?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And you took it all as a matter of course?”
+
+“No: I hated it. But what could I do?”
+
+“What could you do?”
+
+“When our being together depended on it? Oh, Nick, how could you think
+I’d give you up?”
+
+“Give me up?” he echoed.
+
+“Well--doesn’t our being together depend on--on what we can get out of
+people? And hasn’t there always got to be some give-and-take? Did you
+ever in your life get anything for nothing?” she cried with sudden
+exasperation. “You’ve lived among these people as long as I have; I
+suppose it’s not the first time--”
+
+“By God, but it is,” he exclaimed, flushing. “And that’s the
+difference--the fundamental difference.”
+
+“The difference!”
+
+“Between you and me. I’ve never in my life done people’s dirty work for
+them--least of all for favours in return. I suppose you guessed it, or
+you wouldn’t have hidden this beastly business from me.”
+
+The blood rose to Susy’s temples also. Yes, she had guessed it;
+instinctively, from the day she had first visited him in his bare
+lodgings, she had been aware of his stricter standard. But how could she
+tell him that under his influence her standard had become stricter
+too, and that it was as much to hide her humiliation from herself as to
+escape his anger that she had held her tongue?
+
+“You knew I wouldn’t have stayed here another day if I’d known,” he
+continued.
+
+“Yes: and then where in the world should we have gone?”
+
+“You mean that--in one way or another--what you call give-and-take is
+the price of our remaining together?”
+
+“Well--isn’t it,” she faltered.
+
+“Then we’d better part, hadn’t we?”
+
+He spoke in a low tone, thoughtfully and deliberately, as if this had
+been the inevitable conclusion to which their passionate argument had
+led.
+
+Susy made no answer. For a moment she ceased to be conscious of the
+causes of what had happened; the thing itself seemed to have smothered
+her under its ruins.
+
+Nick wandered away from the dressing-table and stood gazing out of the
+window at the darkening canal flecked with lights. She looked at his
+back, and wondered what would happen if she were to go up to him and
+fling her arms about him. But even if her touch could have broken the
+spell, she was not sure she would have chosen that way of breaking it.
+Beneath her speechless anguish there burned the half-conscious sense
+of having been unfairly treated. When they had entered into their
+queer compact, Nick had known as well as she on what compromises and
+concessions the life they were to live together must be based. That he
+should have forgotten it seemed so unbelievable that she wondered, with
+a new leap of fear, if he were using the wretched Ellie’s indiscretion
+as a means of escape from a tie already wearied of. Suddenly she raised
+her head with a laugh.
+
+“After all--you were right when you wanted me to be your mistress.”
+
+He turned on her with an astonished stare. “You--my mistress?”
+
+Through all her pain she thrilled with pride at the discovery that
+such a possibility had long since become unthinkable to him. But she
+insisted. “That day at the Fulmers’--have you forgotten? When you said
+it would be sheer madness for us to marry.”
+
+Lansing stood leaning in the embrasure of the window, his eyes fixed on
+the mosaic volutes of the floor.
+
+“I was right enough when I said it would be sheer madness for us to
+marry,” he rejoined at length.
+
+She sprang up trembling. “Well, that’s easily settled. Our compact--”
+
+“Oh, that compact--” he interrupted her with an impatient laugh.
+
+“Aren’t you asking me to carry it out now?”
+
+“Because I said we’d better part?” He paused. “But the compact--I’d
+almost forgotten it--was to the effect, wasn’t it, that we were to give
+each other a helping hand if either of us had a better chance? The thing
+was absurd, of course; a mere joke; from my point of view, at least. I
+shall never want any better chance... any other chance....”
+
+“Oh, Nick, oh, Nick... but then....” She was close to him, his face
+looming down through her tears; but he put her back.
+
+“It would have been easy enough, wouldn’t it,” he rejoined, “if we’d
+been as detachable as all that? As it is, it’s going to hurt horribly.
+But talking it over won’t help. You were right just now when you asked
+how else we were going to live. We’re born parasites, both, I suppose,
+or we’d have found out some way long ago. But I find there are things I
+might put up with for myself, at a pinch--and should, probably, in time
+that I can’t let you put up with for me... ever.... Those cigars at
+Como: do you suppose I didn’t know it was for me? And this too? Well, it
+won’t do... it won’t do....”
+
+He stopped, as if his courage failed him; and she moaned out: “But your
+writing--if your book’s a success....”
+
+“My poor Susy--that’s all part of the humbug. We both know that my sort
+of writing will never pay. And what’s the alternative except more of
+the same kind of baseness? And getting more and more blunted to it? At
+least, till now, I’ve minded certain things; I don’t want to go on till
+I find myself taking them for granted.”
+
+She reached out a timid hand. “But you needn’t ever, dear... if you’d
+only leave it to me....”
+
+He drew back sharply. “That seems simple to you, I suppose? Well, men
+are different.” He walked toward the dressing-table and glanced at the
+little enamelled clock which had been one of her wedding-presents.
+
+“Time to dress, isn’t it? Shall you mind if I leave you to dine with
+Streffy, and whoever else is coming? I’d rather like a long tramp, and
+no more talking just at present except with myself.”
+
+He passed her by and walked rapidly out of the room. Susy stood
+motionless, unable to lift a detaining hand or to find a final word
+of appeal. On her disordered dressing-table Mrs. Vanderlyn’s gifts
+glittered in the rosy lamp-light.
+
+Yes: men were different, as he said.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+
+BUT there were necessary accommodations, there always had been; Nick in
+old times, had been the first to own it.... How they had laughed at the
+Perpendicular People, the people who went by on the other side (since
+you couldn’t be a good Samaritan without stooping over and poking
+into heaps of you didn’t know what)! And now Nick had suddenly become
+perpendicular....
+
+Susy, that evening, at the head of the dinner table, saw--in the breaks
+between her scudding thoughts--the nauseatingly familiar faces of the
+people she called her friends: Strefford, Fred Gillow, a giggling fool
+of a young Breckenridge, of their New York group, who had arrived that
+day, and Prince Nerone Altineri, Ursula’s Prince, who, in Ursula’s
+absence at a tiresome cure, had, quite simply and naturally, preferred
+to join her husband at Venice. Susy looked from one to the other of
+them, as if with newly-opened eyes, and wondered what life would be like
+with no faces but such as theirs to furnish it....
+
+Ah, Nick had become perpendicular!... After all, most people went
+through life making a given set of gestures, like dance-steps learned
+in advance. If your dancing manual told you at a given time to be
+perpendicular, you had to be, automatically--and that was Nick!
+
+“But what on earth, Susy,” Gillow’s puzzled voice suddenly came to her
+as from immeasurable distances, “Are you going to do in this beastly
+stifling hole for the rest of the summer?”
+
+“Ask Nick, my dear fellow,” Strefford answered for her; and: “By the
+way, where is Nick--if one may ask?” young Breckenridge interposed,
+glancing up to take belated note of his host’s absence.
+
+“Dining out,” said Susy glibly. “People turned up: blighting bores that
+I wouldn’t have dared to inflict on you.” How easily the old familiar
+fibbing came to her!
+
+“The kind to whom you say, ‘Now mind you look me up’; and then spend the
+rest of your life dodging-like our good Hickses,” Strefford amplified.
+
+The Hickses--but, of course, Nick was with the Hickses! It went through
+Susy like a knife, and the dinner she had so lightly fibbed became a
+hateful truth. She said to herself feverishly: “I’ll call him up there
+after dinner--and then he will feel silly”--but only to remember that
+the Hickses, in their mediaeval setting, had of course sternly denied
+themselves a telephone.
+
+The fact of Nick’s temporary inaccessibility--since she was now
+convinced that he was really at the Hickses’--turned her distress to a
+mocking irritation. Ah, that was where he carried his principles, his
+standards, or whatever he called the new set of rules he had suddenly
+begun to apply to the old game! It was stupid of her not to have guessed
+it at once.
+
+“Oh, the Hickses--Nick adores them, you know. He’s going to marry Coral
+next,” she laughed out, flashing the joke around the table with all her
+practiced flippancy.
+
+“Lord!” grasped Gillow, inarticulate: while the Prince displayed the
+unsurprised smile which Susy accused him of practicing every morning
+with his Mueller exercises.
+
+Suddenly Susy felt Strefford’s eyes upon her.
+
+“What’s the matter with me? Too much rouge?” she asked, passing her arm
+in his as they left the table.
+
+“No: too little. Look at yourself,” he answered in a low tone.
+
+“Oh, in these cadaverous old looking-glasses-everybody looks fished up
+from the canal!”
+
+She jerked away from him to spin down the long floor of the sala, hands
+on hips, whistling a rag-time tune. The Prince and young Breckenridge
+caught her up, and she spun back with the latter, while Gillow--it was
+believed to be his sole accomplishment--snapped his fingers in simulation
+of bones, and shuffled after the couple on stamping feet.
+
+Susy sank down on a sofa near the window, fanning herself with a
+floating scarf, and the men foraged for cigarettes, and rang for the
+gondoliers, who came in with trays of cooling drinks.
+
+“Well, what next--this ain’t all, is it?” Gillow presently queried, from
+the divan where he lolled half-asleep with dripping brow. Fred Gillow,
+like Nature, abhorred a void, and it was inconceivable to him that every
+hour of man’s rational existence should not furnish a motive for getting
+up and going somewhere else. Young Breckenridge, who took the same view,
+and the Prince, who earnestly desired to, reminded the company that
+somebody they knew was giving a dance that night at the Lido.
+
+Strefford vetoed the Lido, on the ground that he’d just come back from
+there, and proposed that they should go out on foot for a change.
+
+“Why not? What fun!” Susy was up in an instant. “Let’s pay somebody a
+surprise visit--I don’t know who! Streffy, Prince, can’t you think of
+somebody who’d be particularly annoyed by our arrival?”
+
+“Oh, the list’s too long. Let’s start, and choose our victim on the
+way,” Strefford suggested.
+
+Susy ran to her room for a light cloak, and without changing her
+high-heeled satin slippers went out with the four men. There was no
+moon--thank heaven there was no moon!--but the stars hung over them as
+close as fruit, and secret fragrances dropped on them from garden-walls.
+Susy’s heart tightened with memories of Como.
+
+They wandered on, laughing and dawdling, and yielding to the drifting
+whims of aimless people. Presently someone proposed taking a nearer look
+at the facade of San Giorgio Maggiore, and they hailed a gondola and
+were rowed out through the bobbing lanterns and twanging guitar-strings.
+When they landed again, Gillow, always acutely bored by scenery, and
+particularly resentful of midnight aesthetics, suggested a night club
+near at hand, which was said to be jolly. The Prince warmly supported
+this proposal; but on Susy’s curt refusal they started their rambling
+again, circuitously threading the vague dark lanes and making for the
+Piazza and Florian’s ices. Suddenly, at a calle-corner, unfamiliar and
+yet somehow known to her, Susy paused to stare about her with a laugh.
+
+“But the Hickses--surely that’s their palace? And the windows all lit
+up! They must be giving a party! Oh, do let’s go up and surprise them!”
+ The idea struck her as one of the drollest that she had ever originated,
+and she wondered that her companions should respond so languidly.
+
+“I can’t see anything very thrilling in surprising the Hickses,” Gillow
+protested, defrauded of possible excitements; and Strefford added: “It
+would surprise me more than them if I went.”
+
+But Susy insisted feverishly: “You don’t know. It may be awfully
+exciting! I have an idea that Coral’s announcing her engagement--her
+engagement to Nick! Come, give me a hand, Streff--and you the other,
+Fred-” she began to hum the first bars of Donna Anna’s entrance in Don
+Giovanni. “Pity I haven’t got a black cloak and a mask....”
+
+“Oh, your face will do,” said Strefford, laying his hand on her arm.
+
+She drew back, flushing crimson. Breckenridge and the Prince had sprung
+on ahead, and Gillow, lumbering after them, was already halfway up the
+stairs.
+
+“My face? My face? What’s the matter with my face? Do you know any
+reason why I shouldn’t go to the Hickses to-night?” Susy broke out in
+sudden wrath.
+
+“None whatever; except that if you do it will bore me to death,”
+ Strefford returned, with serenity.
+
+“Oh, in that case--!”
+
+“No; come on. I hear those fools banging on the door already.” He caught
+her by the hand, and they started up the stairway. But on the first
+landing she paused, twisted her hand out of his, and without a word,
+without a conscious thought, dashed down the long flight, across the
+great resounding vestibule and out into the darkness of the calle.
+
+Strefford caught up with her, and they stood a moment silent in the
+night.
+
+“Susy--what the devil’s the matter?”
+
+“The matter? Can’t you see? That I’m tired, that I’ve got a splitting
+headache--that you bore me to death, one and all of you!” She turned and
+laid a deprecating hand on his arm. “Streffy, old dear, don’t mind me:
+but for God’s sake find a gondola and send me home.”
+
+“Alone?”
+
+“Alone.”
+
+It was never any concern of Streff’s if people wanted to do things he
+did not understand, and she knew that she could count on his obedience.
+They walked on in silence to the next canal, and he picked up a passing
+gondola and put her in it.
+
+“Now go and amuse yourself,” she called after him, as the boat shot
+under the nearest bridge. Anything, anything, to be alone, away from the
+folly and futility that would be all she had left if Nick were to drop
+out of her life....
+
+“But perhaps he has dropped already--dropped for good,” she thought as
+she set her foot on the Vanderlyn threshold.
+
+The short summer night was already growing transparent: a new born
+breeze stirred the soiled surface of the water and sent it lapping
+freshly against the old palace doorways. Nearly two o’clock! Nick had no
+doubt come back long ago. Susy hurried up the stairs, reassured by the
+mere thought of his nearness. She knew that when their eyes and their
+lips met it would be impossible for anything to keep them apart.
+
+The gondolier dozing on the landing roused himself to receive her, and
+to proffer two envelopes. The upper one was a telegram for Strefford:
+she threw it down again and paused under the lantern hanging from the
+painted vault, the other envelope in her hand. The address it bore was
+in Nick’s writing. “When did the signore leave this for me? Has he gone
+out again?”
+
+Gone out again? But the signore had not come in since dinner: of that
+the gondolier was positive, as he had been on duty all the evening.
+A boy had brought the letter--an unknown boy: he had left it without
+waiting. It must have been about half an hour after the signora had
+herself gone out with her guests.
+
+Susy, hardly hearing him, fled on to her own room, and there, beside the
+very lamp which, two months before, had illuminated Ellie Vanderlyn’s
+fatal letter, she opened Nick’s.
+
+“Don’t think me hard on you, dear; but I’ve got to work this thing out
+by myself. The sooner the better--don’t you agree? So I’m taking the
+express to Milan presently. You’ll get a proper letter in a day or two.
+I wish I could think, now, of something to say that would show you I’m
+not a brute--but I can’t. N. L.”
+
+There was not much of the night left in which to sleep, even had a
+semblance of sleep been achievable. The letter fell from Susy’s hands,
+and she crept out onto the balcony and cowered there, her forehead
+pressed against the balustrade, the dawn wind stirring in her thin
+laces. Through her closed eyelids and the tightly-clenched fingers
+pressed against them, she felt the penetration of the growing light,
+the relentless advance of another day--a day without purpose and without
+meaning--a day without Nick. At length she dropped her hands, and
+staring from dry lids saw a rim of fire above the roofs across the Grand
+Canal. She sprang up, ran back into her room, and dragging the heavy
+curtains shut across the windows, stumbled over in the darkness to the
+lounge and fell among its pillows-face downward--groping, delving for a
+deeper night....
+
+She started up, stiff and aching, to see a golden wedge of sun on the
+floor at her feet. She had slept, then--was it possible?--it must
+be eight or nine o’clock already! She had slept--slept like a
+drunkard--with that letter on the table at her elbow! Ah, now she
+remembered--she had dreamed that the letter was a dream! But there,
+inexorably, it lay; and she picked it up, and slowly, painfully re-read
+it. Then she tore it into shreds hunted for a match, and kneeling before
+the empty hearth, as though she were accomplishing some funeral rite,
+she burnt every shred of it to ashes. Nick would thank her for that some
+day!
+
+After a bath and a hurried toilet she began to be aware of feeling
+younger and more hopeful. After all, Nick had merely said that he was
+going away for “a day or two.” And the letter was not cruel: there
+were tender things in it, showing through the curt words. She smiled
+at herself a little stiffly in the glass, put a dash of red on her
+colourless lips, and rang for the maid.
+
+“Coffee, Giovanna, please; and will you tell Mr. Strefford that I should
+like to see him presently.”
+
+If Nick really kept to his intention of staying away for a few days she
+must trump up some explanation of his absence; but her mind refused to
+work, and the only thing she could think of was to take Strefford into
+her confidence. She knew that he could be trusted in a real difficulty;
+his impish malice transformed itself into a resourceful ingenuity when
+his friends required it.
+
+The maid stood looking at her with a puzzled gaze, and Susy somewhat
+sharply repeated her order. “But don’t wake him on purpose,” she added,
+foreseeing the probable effect on Strefford’s temper.
+
+“But, signora, the gentleman is already out.”
+
+“Already out?” Strefford, who could hardly be routed from his bed before
+luncheon-time! “Is it so late?” Susy cried, incredulous.
+
+“After nine. And the gentleman took the eight o’clock train for England.
+Gervaso said he had received a telegram. He left word that he would
+write to the signora.”
+
+The door closed upon the maid, and Susy continued to gaze at her painted
+image in the glass, as if she had been trying to outstare an importunate
+stranger. There was no one left for her to take counsel of, then--no one
+but poor Fred Gillow! She made a grimace at the idea.
+
+But what on earth could have summoned Strefford back to England?
+
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+
+
+NICK LANSING, in the Milan express, was roused by the same bar of
+sunshine lying across his knees. He yawned, looked with disgust at his
+stolidly sleeping neighbours, and wondered why he had decided to go to
+Milan, and what on earth he should do when he got there. The difficulty
+about trenchant decisions was that the next morning they generally left
+one facing a void....
+
+When the train drew into the station at Milan, he scrambled out, got
+some coffee, and having drunk it decided to continue his journey to
+Genoa. The state of being carried passively onward postponed action and
+dulled thought; and after twelve hours of furious mental activity that
+was exactly what he wanted.
+
+He fell into a doze again, waking now and then to haggard intervals
+of more thinking, and then dropping off to the clank and rattle of the
+train. Inside his head, in his waking intervals, the same clanking and
+grinding of wheels and chains went on unremittingly. He had done all his
+lucid thinking within an hour of leaving the Palazzo Vanderlyn the
+night before; since then, his brain had simply continued to revolve
+indefatigably about the same old problem. His cup of coffee, instead of
+clearing his thoughts, had merely accelerated their pace.
+
+At Genoa he wandered about in the hot streets, bought a cheap suit-case
+and some underclothes, and then went down to the port in search of a
+little hotel he remembered there. An hour later he was sitting in the
+coffee-room, smoking and glancing vacantly over the papers while he
+waited for dinner, when he became aware of being timidly but intently
+examined by a small round-faced gentleman with eyeglasses who sat alone
+at the adjoining table.
+
+“Hullo--Buttles!” Lansing exclaimed, recognising with surprise the
+recalcitrant secretary who had resisted Miss Hicks’s endeavour to
+convert him to Tiepolo.
+
+Mr. Buttles, blushing to the roots of his scant hair, half rose and
+bowed ceremoniously.
+
+Nick Lansing’s first feeling was of annoyance at being disturbed in his
+solitary broodings; his next, of relief at having to postpone them even
+to converse with Mr. Buttles.
+
+“No idea you were here: is the yacht in harbour?” he asked, remembering
+that the Ibis must be just about to spread her wings.
+
+Mr. Buttles, at salute behind his chair, signed a mute negation: for the
+moment he seemed too embarrassed to speak.
+
+“Ah--you’re here as an advance guard? I remember now--I saw Miss Hicks
+in Venice the day before yesterday,” Lansing continued, dazed at the
+thought that hardly forty-eight hours had passed since his encounter
+with Coral in the Scalzi.
+
+Mr. Buttles, instead of speaking, had tentatively approached his table.
+“May I take this seat for a moment, Mr. Lansing? Thank you. No, I am
+not here as an advance guard--though I believe the Ibis is due some
+time to-morrow.” He cleared his throat, wiped his eyeglasses on a silk
+handkerchief, replaced them on his nose, and went on solemnly: “Perhaps,
+to clear up any possible misunderstanding, I ought to say that I am no
+longer in the employ of Mr. Hicks.”
+
+Lansing glanced at him sympathetically. It was clear that he suffered
+horribly in imparting this information, though his compact face did not
+lend itself to any dramatic display of emotion.
+
+“Really,” Nick smiled, and then ventured: “I hope it’s not owing to
+conscientious objections to Tiepolo?”
+
+Mr. Buttles’s blush became a smouldering agony. “Ah, Miss Hicks
+mentioned to you... told you...? No, Mr. Lansing. I am principled
+against the effete art of Tiepolo, and of all his contemporaries, I
+confess; but if Miss Hicks chooses to surrender herself momentarily
+to the unwholesome spell of the Italian decadence it is not for me to
+protest or to criticize. Her intellectual and aesthetic range so far
+exceeds my humble capacity that it would be ridiculous, unbecoming....”
+
+He broke off, and once more wiped a faint moisture from his eyeglasses.
+It was evident that he was suffering from a distress which he longed and
+yet dreaded to communicate. But Nick made no farther effort to bridge
+the gulf of his own preoccupations; and Mr. Buttles, after an expectant
+pause, went on: “If you see me here to-day it is only because, after
+a somewhat abrupt departure, I find myself unable to take leave of
+our friends without a last look at the Ibis--the scene of so many
+stimulating hours. But I must beg you,” he added earnestly, “should you
+see Miss Hicks--or any other member of the party--to make no allusion
+to my presence in Genoa. I wish,” said Mr. Buttles with simplicity, “to
+preserve the strictest incognito.”
+
+Lansing glanced at him kindly. “Oh, but--isn’t that a little
+unfriendly?”
+
+“No other course is possible, Mr. Lansing,” said the ex-secretary, “and
+I commit myself to your discretion. The truth is, if I am here it is not
+to look once more at the Ibis, but at Miss Hicks: once only. You will
+understand me, and appreciate what I am suffering.”
+
+He bowed again, and trotted away on his small, tightly-booted feet;
+pausing on the threshold to say: “From the first it was hopeless,”
+ before he disappeared through the glass doors.
+
+A gleam of commiseration flashed through Nick’s mind: there was
+something quaintly poignant in the sight of the brisk and efficient
+Mr. Buttles reduced to a limp image of unrequited passion. And what
+a painful surprise to the Hickses to be thus suddenly deprived of the
+secretary who possessed “the foreign languages”! Mr. Beck kept the
+accounts and settled with the hotel-keepers; but it was Mr. Buttles’s
+loftier task to entertain in their own tongues the unknown geniuses who
+flocked about the Hickses, and Nick could imagine how disconcerting his
+departure must be on the eve of their Grecian cruise which Mrs. Hicks
+would certainly call an Odyssey.
+
+The next moment the vision of Coral’s hopeless suitor had faded, and
+Nick was once more spinning around on the wheel of his own woes.
+The night before, when he had sent his note to Susy, from a little
+restaurant close to Palazzo Vanderlyn that they often patronized, he had
+done so with the firm intention of going away for a day or two in order
+to collect his wits and think over the situation. But after his letter
+had been entrusted to the landlord’s little son, who was a particular
+friend of Susy’s, Nick had decided to await the lad’s return. The
+messenger had not been bidden to ask for an answer; but Nick, knowing
+the friendly and inquisitive Italian mind, was almost sure that the boy,
+in the hope of catching a glimpse of Susy, would linger about while the
+letter was carried up. And he pictured the maid knocking at his wife’s
+darkened room, and Susy dashing some powder on her tear-stained face
+before she turned on the light--poor foolish child!
+
+The boy had returned rather sooner than Nick expected, and he had
+brought no answer, but merely the statement that the signora was out:
+that everybody was out.
+
+“Everybody?”
+
+“The signora and the four gentlemen who were dining at the palace. They
+all went out together on foot soon after dinner. There was no one to
+whom I could give the note but the gondolier on the landing, for the
+signora had said she would be very late, and had sent the maid to bed;
+and the maid had, of course, gone out immediately with her innamorato.”
+
+“Ah--” said Nick, slipping his reward into the boy’s hand, and walking
+out of the restaurant.
+
+Susy had gone out--gone out with their usual band, as she did every
+night in these sultry summer weeks, gone out after her talk with Nick,
+as if nothing had happened, as if his whole world and hers had not
+crashed in ruins at their feet. Ah, poor Susy! After all, she had merely
+obeyed the instinct of self preservation, the old hard habit of keeping
+up, going ahead and hiding her troubles; unless indeed the habit had
+already engendered indifference, and it had become as easy for her as
+for most of her friends to pass from drama to dancing, from sorrow to
+the cinema. What of soul was left, he wondered--?
+
+His train did not start till midnight, and after leaving the restaurant
+Nick tramped the sultry by-ways till his tired legs brought him to a
+standstill under the vine-covered pergola of a gondolier’s wine-shop at
+a landing close to the Piazzetta. There he could absorb cooling drinks
+until it was time to go to the station.
+
+It was after eleven, and he was beginning to look about for a boat, when
+a black prow pushed up to the steps, and with much chaff and laughter a
+party of young people in evening dress jumped out. Nick, from under the
+darkness of the vine, saw that there was only one lady among them, and
+it did not need the lamp above the landing to reveal her identity. Susy,
+bareheaded and laughing, a light scarf slipping from her bare shoulders,
+a cigarette between her fingers, took Strefford’s arm and turned in the
+direction of Florian’s, with Gillow, the Prince and young Breckenridge
+in her wake....
+
+Nick had relived this rapid scene hundreds of times during his hours
+in the train and his aimless trampings through the streets of Genoa. In
+that squirrel-wheel of a world of his and Susy’s you had to keep going
+or drop out--and Susy, it was evident, had chosen to keep going. Under
+the lamp-flare on the landing he had had a good look at her face, and
+had seen that the mask of paint and powder was carefully enough adjusted
+to hide any ravages the scene between them might have left. He even
+fancied that she had dropped a little atropine into her eyes....
+
+There was no time to spare if he meant to catch the midnight train, and
+no gondola in sight but that which his wife had just left. He sprang
+into it, and bade the gondolier carry him to the station. The cushions,
+as he leaned back, gave out a breath of her scent; and in the glare of
+electric light at the station he saw at his feet a rose which had fallen
+from her dress. He ground his heel into it as he got out.
+
+There it was, then; that was the last picture he was to have of her. For
+he knew now that he was not going back; at least not to take up their
+life together. He supposed he should have to see her once, to talk
+things over, settle something for their future. He had been sincere in
+saying that he bore her no ill-will; only he could never go back into
+that slough again. If he did, he knew he would inevitably be drawn
+under, slipping downward from concession to concession....
+
+The noises of a hot summer night in the port of Genoa would have kept
+the most care-free from slumber; but though Nick lay awake he did
+not notice them, for the tumult in his brain was more deafening. Dawn
+brought a negative relief, and out of sheer weariness he dropped into a
+heavy sleep. When he woke it was nearly noon, and from his window he saw
+the well-known outline of the Ibis standing up dark against the glitter
+of the harbour. He had no fear of meeting her owners, who had doubtless
+long since landed and betaken themselves to cooler and more fashionable
+regions: oddly enough, the fact seemed to accentuate his loneliness, his
+sense of having no one on earth to turn to. He dressed, and wandered out
+disconsolately to pick up a cup of coffee in some shady corner.
+
+As he drank his coffee his thoughts gradually cleared. It became
+obvious to him that he had behaved like a madman or a petulant child--he
+preferred to think it was like a madman. If he and Susy were to separate
+there was no reason why it should not be done decently and quietly, as
+such transactions were habitually managed among people of their kind.
+It seemed grotesque to introduce melodrama into their little world
+of unruffled Sybarites, and he felt inclined, now, to smile at the
+incongruity of his gesture.... But suddenly his eyes filled with tears.
+The future without Susy was unbearable, inconceivable. Why, after all,
+should they separate? At the question, her soft face seemed close
+to his, and that slight lift of the upper lip that made her smile so
+exquisite. Well--he would go back. But not with any presence of going to
+talk things over, come to an agreement, wind up their joint life like
+a business association. No--if he went back he would go without
+conditions, for good, forever....
+
+Only, what about the future? What about the not far-distant day when
+the wedding cheques would have been spent, and Granny’s pearls sold,
+and nothing left except unconcealed and unconditional dependence on rich
+friends, the role of the acknowledged hangers-on? Was there no other
+possible solution, no new way of ordering their lives? No--there
+was none: he could not picture Susy out of her setting of luxury and
+leisure, could not picture either of them living such a life as the Nat
+Fulmers, for instance! He remembered the shabby untidy bungalow in
+New Hampshire, the slatternly servants, uneatable food and ubiquitous
+children. How could he ask Susy to share such a life with him? If he
+did, she would probably have the sense to refuse. Their alliance had
+been based on a moment’s midsummer madness; now the score must be
+paid....
+
+He decided to write. If they were to part he could not trust himself to
+see her. He called a waiter, asked for pen and paper, and pushed aside
+a pile of unread newspapers on the corner of the table where his coffee
+had been served. As he did so, his eye lit on a Daily Mail of two days
+before. As a pretext for postponing his letter, he took up the paper and
+glanced down the first page. He read:
+
+“Tragic Yachting Accident in the Solent. The Earl of Altringham and
+his son Viscount d’Amblay drowned in midnight collision. Both bodies
+recovered.”
+
+He read on. He grasped the fact that the disaster had happened the
+night before he had left Venice and that, as the result of a fog in
+the Solent, their old friend Strefford was now Earl of Altringham, and
+possessor of one of the largest private fortunes in England. It was
+vertiginous to think of their old impecunious Streff as the hero of such
+an adventure. And what irony in that double turn of the wheel which, in
+one day, had plunged him, Nick Lansing, into nethermost misery, while it
+tossed the other to the stars!
+
+With an intenser precision he saw again Susy’s descent from the gondola
+at the calle steps, the sound of her laughter and of Strefford’s chaff,
+the way she had caught his arm and clung to it, sweeping the other men
+on in her train. Strefford--Susy and Strefford!... More than once, Nick
+had noticed the softer inflections of his friend’s voice when he spoke
+to Susy, the brooding look in his lazy eyes when they rested on her. In
+the security of his wedded bliss Nick had made light of those signs. The
+only real jealousy he had felt had been of Fred Gillow, because of his
+unlimited power to satisfy a woman’s whims. Yet Nick knew that such
+material advantages would never again suffice for Susy. With Strefford
+it was different. She had delighted in his society while he was
+notoriously ineligible; might not she find him irresistible now?
+
+The forgotten terms of their bridal compact came back to Nick: the
+absurd agreement on which he and Susy had solemnly pledged their faith.
+But was it so absurd, after all? It had been Susy’s suggestion (not his,
+thank God!); and perhaps in making it she had been more serious than he
+imagined. Perhaps, even if their rupture had not occurred, Strefford’s
+sudden honours might have caused her to ask for her freedom....
+
+Money, luxury, fashion, pleasure: those were the four cornerstones
+of her existence. He had always known it--she herself had always
+acknowledged it, even in their last dreadful talk together; and once he
+had gloried in her frankness. How could he ever have imagined that, to
+have her fill of these things, she would not in time stoop lower than
+she had yet stooped? Perhaps in giving her up to Strefford he might be
+saving her. At any rate, the taste of the past was now so bitter to him
+that he was moved to thank whatever gods there were for pushing that
+mortuary paragraph under his eye....
+
+“Susy, dear [he wrote], the fates seem to have taken our future in hand,
+and spared us the trouble of unravelling it. If I have sometimes been
+selfish enough to forget the conditions on which you agreed to marry
+me, they have come back to me during these two days of solitude. You’ve
+given me the best a man can have, and nothing else will ever be worth
+much to me. But since I haven’t the ability to provide you with what you
+want, I recognize that I’ve no right to stand in your way. We must owe
+no more Venetian palaces to underhand services. I see by the newspapers
+that Streff can now give you as many palaces as you want. Let him have
+the chance--I fancy he’ll jump at it, and he’s the best man in sight. I
+wish I were in his shoes.
+
+“I’ll write again in a day or two, when I’ve collected my wits, and can
+give you an address. NICK.”
+
+He added a line on the subject of their modest funds, put the letter
+into an envelope, and addressed it to Mrs. Nicholas Lansing. As he did
+so, he reflected that it was the first time he had ever written his
+wife’s married name.
+
+“Well--by God, no other woman shall have it after her,” he vowed, as he
+groped in his pocketbook for a stamp.
+
+He stood up with a stretch of weariness--the heat was stifling!--and put
+the letter in his pocket.
+
+“I’ll post it myself, it’s safer,” he thought; “and then what in the
+name of goodness shall I do next, I wonder?” He jammed his hat down on
+his head and walked out into the sun-blaze.
+
+As he was turning away from the square by the general Post Office, a
+white parasol waved from a passing cab, and Coral Hicks leaned forward
+with outstretched hand. “I knew I’d find you,” she triumphed. “I’ve
+been driving up and down in this broiling sun for hours, shopping and
+watching for you at the same time.”
+
+He stared at her blankly, too bewildered even to wonder how she knew he
+was in Genoa; and she continued, with the kind of shy imperiousness that
+always made him feel, in her presence, like a member of an orchestra
+under a masterful baton; “Now please get right into this carriage, and
+don’t keep me roasting here another minute.” To the cabdriver she called
+out: “Al porto.”
+
+Nick Lansing sank down beside her. As he did so he noticed a heap of
+bundles at her feet, and felt that he had simply added one more to the
+number. He supposed that she was taking her spoils to the Ibis, and
+that he would be carried up to the deck-house to be displayed with the
+others. Well, it would all help to pass the day--and by night he would
+have reached some kind of a decision about his future.
+
+On the third day after Nick’s departure the post brought to the Palazzo
+Vanderlyn three letters for Mrs. Lansing.
+
+The first to arrive was a word from Strefford, scribbled in the train
+and posted at Turin. In it he briefly said that he had been called home
+by the dreadful accident of which Susy had probably read in the daily
+papers. He added that he would write again from England, and then--in
+a blotted postscript--: “I wanted uncommonly badly to see you for
+good-bye, but the hour was impossible. Regards to Nick. Do write me just
+a word to Altringham.”
+
+The other two letters, which came together in the afternoon, were both
+from Genoa. Susy scanned the addresses and fell upon the one in her
+husband’s writing. Her hand trembled so much that for a moment she could
+not open the envelope. When she had done so, she devoured the letter in
+a flash, and then sat and brooded over the outspread page as it lay on
+her knee. It might mean so many things--she could read into it so
+many harrowing alternatives of indifference and despair, of irony and
+tenderness! Was he suffering tortures when he wrote it, or seeking
+only to inflict them upon her? Or did the words represent his actual
+feelings, no more and no less, and did he really intend her to
+understand that he considered it his duty to abide by the letter of
+their preposterous compact? He had left her in wrath and indignation,
+yet, as a closer scrutiny revealed, there was not a word of reproach in
+his brief lines. Perhaps that was why, in the last issue, they seemed so
+cold to her.... She shivered and turned to the other envelope.
+
+The large stilted characters, though half-familiar, called up no
+definite image. She opened the envelope and discovered a post-card of
+the Ibis, canvas spread, bounding over a rippled sea. On the back was
+written:
+
+“So awfully dear of you to lend us Mr. Lansing for a little cruise. You
+may count on our taking the best of care of him.
+
+“CORAL”
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+XIII
+
+WHEN Violet Melrose had said to Susy Branch, the winter before in New
+York: “But why on earth don’t you and Nick go to my little place at
+Versailles for the honeymoon? I’m off to China, and you could have it to
+yourselves all summer,” the offer had been tempting enough to make the
+lovers waver.
+
+It was such an artless ingenuous little house, so full of the
+demoralizing simplicity of great wealth, that it seemed to Susy just the
+kind of place in which to take the first steps in renunciation. But Nick
+had objected that Paris, at that time of year, would be swarming with
+acquaintances who would hunt them down at all hours; and Susy’s own
+experience had led her to remark that there was nothing the very rich
+enjoyed more than taking pot-luck with the very poor. They therefore
+gave Strefford’s villa the preference, with an inward proviso (on Susy’s
+part) that Violet’s house might very conveniently serve their purpose at
+another season.
+
+These thoughts were in her mind as she drove up to Mrs. Melrose’s door
+on a rainy afternoon late in August, her boxes piled high on the roof of
+the cab she had taken at the station. She had travelled straight through
+from Venice, stopping in Milan just long enough to pick up a reply
+to the telegram she had despatched to the perfect housekeeper whose
+permanent presence enabled Mrs. Melrose to say: “Oh, when I’m sick
+of everything I just rush off without warning to my little shanty at
+Versailles, and live there all alone on scrambled eggs.”
+
+The perfect house-keeper had replied to Susy’s enquiry: “Am sure Mrs.
+Melrose most happy”; and Susy, without further thought, had jumped
+into a Versailles train, and now stood in the thin rain before the
+sphinx-guarded threshold of the pavilion.
+
+The revolving year had brought around the season at which Mrs. Melrose’s
+house might be convenient: no visitors were to be feared at Versailles
+at the end of August, and though Susy’s reasons for seeking solitude
+were so remote from those she had once prefigured, they were none the
+less cogent. To be alone--alone! After those first exposed days when,
+in the persistent presence of Fred Gillow and his satellites, and in the
+mocking radiance of late summer on the lagoons, she had fumed and turned
+about in her agony like a trapped animal in a cramping cage, to be alone
+had seemed the only respite, the one craving: to be alone somewhere in a
+setting as unlike as possible to the sensual splendours of Venice, under
+skies as unlike its azure roof. If she could have chosen she would have
+crawled away into a dingy inn in a rainy northern town, where she had
+never been and no one knew her. Failing that unobtainable luxury, here
+she was on the threshold of an empty house, in a deserted place, under
+lowering skies. She had shaken off Fred Gillow, sulkily departing for
+his moor (where she had half-promised to join him in September); the
+Prince, young Breckenridge, and the few remaining survivors of the
+Venetian group, had dispersed in the direction of the Engadine or
+Biarritz; and now she could at least collect her wits, take stock of
+herself, and prepare the countenance with which she was to face the next
+stage in her career. Thank God it was raining at Versailles!
+
+The door opened, she heard voices in the drawing-room, and a slender
+languishing figure appeared on the threshold.
+
+“Darling!” Violet Melrose cried in an embrace, drawing her into the
+dusky perfumed room.
+
+“But I thought you were in China!” Susy stammered.
+
+“In China... in China,” Mrs. Melrose stared with dreamy eyes, and Susy
+remembered her drifting disorganised life, a life more planless, more
+inexplicable than that of any of the other ephemeral beings blown about
+upon the same winds of pleasure.
+
+“Well, Madam, I thought so myself till I got a wire from Mrs. Melrose
+last evening,” remarked the perfect house-keeper, following with Susy’s
+handbag.
+
+Mrs. Melrose clutched her cavernous temples in her attenuated hands. “Of
+course, of course! I had meant to go to China--no, India.... But I’ve
+discovered a genius... and Genius, you know....” Unable to complete
+her thought, she sank down upon a pillowy divan, stretched out an arm,
+cried: “Fulmer! Fulmer!” and, while Susy Lansing stood in the middle
+of the room with widening eyes, a man emerged from the more deeply
+cushioned and scented twilight of some inner apartment, and she saw with
+surprise Nat Fulmer, the good Nat Fulmer of the New Hampshire bungalow
+and the ubiquitous progeny, standing before her in lordly ease, his
+hands in his pockets, a cigarette between his lips, his feet solidly
+planted in the insidious depths of one of Violet Melrose’s white leopard
+skins.
+
+“Susy!” he shouted with open arms; and Mrs. Melrose murmured: “You
+didn’t know, then? You hadn’t heard of his masterpieces?”
+
+In spite of herself, Susy burst into a laugh. “Is Nat your genius?”
+
+Mrs. Melrose looked at her reproachfully.
+
+Fulmer laughed. “No; I’m Grace’s. But Mrs. Melrose has been our
+Providence, and....”
+
+“Providence?” his hostess interrupted. “Don’t talk as if you were at
+a prayer-meeting! He had an exhibition in New York... it was the most
+fabulous success. He’s come abroad to make studies for the decoration of
+my music-room in New York. Ursula Gillow has given him her garden-house
+at Roslyn to do. And Mrs. Bockheimer’s ball-room--oh, Fulmer, where are
+the cartoons?” She sprang up, tossed about some fashion-papers heaped on
+a lacquer table, and sank back exhausted by the effort. “I’d got as far
+as Brindisi. I’ve travelled day and night to be here to meet him,” she
+declared. “But, you darling,” and she held out a caressing hand to Susy,
+“I’m forgetting to ask if you’ve had tea?”
+
+An hour later, over the tea-table, Susy already felt herself
+mysteriously reabsorbed into what had so long been her native element.
+Ellie Vanderlyn had brought a breath of it to Venice; but Susy was then
+nourished on another air, the air of Nick’s presence and personality;
+now that she was abandoned, left again to her own devices, she felt
+herself suddenly at the mercy of the influences from which she thought
+she had escaped.
+
+In the queer social whirligig from which she had so lately fled, it
+seemed natural enough that a shake of the box should have tossed Nat
+Fulmer into celebrity, and sent Violet Melrose chasing back from the
+ends of the earth to bask in his success. Susy knew that Mrs. Melrose
+belonged to the class of moral parasites; for in that strange world the
+parts were sometimes reversed, and the wealthy preyed upon the pauper.
+Wherever there was a reputation to batten on, there poor Violet
+appeared, a harmless vampire in pearls who sought only to feed on the
+notoriety which all her millions could not create for her. Any one less
+versed than Susy in the shallow mysteries of her little world would have
+seen in Violet Melrose a baleful enchantress, in Nat Fulmer her helpless
+victim. Susy knew better. Violet, poor Violet, was not even that. The
+insignificant Ellie Vanderlyn, with her brief trivial passions, her
+artless mixture of amorous and social interests, was a woman with
+a purpose, a creature who fulfilled herself; but Violet was only a
+drifting interrogation.
+
+And what of Fulmer? Mustering with new eyes his short sturdily-built
+figure, his nondescript bearded face, and the eyes that dreamed and
+wandered, and then suddenly sank into you like claws, Susy seemed to
+have found the key to all his years of dogged toil, his indifference
+to neglect, indifference to poverty, indifference to the needs of
+his growing family.... Yes: for the first time she saw that he looked
+commonplace enough to be a genius--was a genius, perhaps, even though
+it was Violet Melrose who affirmed it! Susy looked steadily at Fulmer,
+their eyes met, and he smiled at her faintly through his beard.
+
+“Yes, I did discover him--I did,” Mrs. Melrose was insisting, from the
+depths of the black velvet divan in which she lay sunk like a wan Nereid
+in a midnight sea. “You mustn’t believe a word that Ursula Gillow tells
+you about having pounced on his ‘Spring Snow Storm’ in a dark corner of
+the American Artists’ exhibition--skied, if you please! They skied him
+less than a year ago! And naturally Ursula never in her life looked
+higher than the first line at a picture-show. And now she actually
+pretends... oh, for pity’s sake don’t say it doesn’t matter, Fulmer!
+Your saying that just encourages her, and makes people think she
+did. When, in reality, any one who saw me at the exhibition on
+varnishing-day.... Who? Well, Eddy Breckenridge, for instance. He was
+in Egypt, you say? Perhaps he was! As if one could remember the people
+about one, when suddenly one comes upon a great work of art, as St.
+Paul did--didn’t he?--and the scales fell from his eyes. Well... that’s
+exactly what happened to me that day... and Ursula, everybody knows, was
+down at Roslyn at the time, and didn’t come up for the opening of the
+exhibition at all. And Fulmer sits there and laughs, and says it
+doesn’t matter, and that he’ll paint another picture any day for me to
+discover!”
+
+Susy had rung the door-bell with a hand trembling with
+eagerness--eagerness to be alone, to be quiet, to stare her situation in
+the face, and collect herself before she came out again among her kind.
+She had stood on the door-step, cowering among her bags, counting the
+instants till a step sounded and the door-knob turned, letting her in
+from the searching glare of the outer world.... And now she had sat for
+an hour in Violet’s drawing-room, in the very house where her honey-moon
+might have been spent; and no one had asked her where she had come from,
+or why she was alone, or what was the key to the tragedy written on her
+shrinking face....
+
+That was the way of the world they lived in. Nobody questioned, nobody
+wondered any more--because nobody had time to remember. The old risk of
+prying curiosity, of malicious gossip, was virtually over: one was left
+with one’s drama, one’s disaster, on one’s hands, because there was
+nobody to stop and notice the little shrouded object one was carrying.
+As Susy watched the two people before her, each so frankly unaffected
+by her presence, Violet Melrose so engrossed in her feverish pursuit of
+notoriety, Fulmer so plunged in the golden sea of his success, she felt
+like a ghost making inaudible and imperceptible appeals to the grosser
+senses of the living.
+
+“If I wanted to be alone,” she thought, “I’m alone enough, in all
+conscience.” There was a deathly chill in such security. She turned to
+Fulmer.
+
+“And Grace?”
+
+He beamed back without sign of embarrassment. “Oh, she’s here,
+naturally--we’re in Paris, kids and all. In a pension, where we can
+polish up the lingo. But I hardly ever lay eyes on her, because she’s
+as deep in music as I am in paint; it was as big a chance for her as for
+me, you see, and she’s making the most of it, fiddling and listening to
+the fiddlers. Well, it’s a considerable change from New Hampshire.” He
+looked at her dreamily, as if making an intense effort to detach himself
+from his dream, and situate her in the fading past. “Remember the
+bungalow? And Nick--ah, how’s Nick?” he brought out triumphantly.
+
+“Oh, yes--darling Nick?” Mrs. Melrose chimed in; and Susy, her head
+erect, her cheeks aflame, declared with resonance: “Most awfully
+well--splendidly!”
+
+“He’s not here, though?” from Fulmer.
+
+“No. He’s off travelling--cruising.”
+
+Mrs. Melrose’s attention was faintly roused. “With anybody interesting?”
+
+“No; you wouldn’t know them. People we met....” She did not have to
+continue, for her hostess’s gaze had again strayed.
+
+“And you’ve come for your clothes, I suppose, darling? Don’t listen
+to people who say that skirts are to be wider. I’ve discovered a new
+woman--a Genius--and she absolutely swathes you.... Her name’s my
+secret; but we’ll go to her together.”
+
+Susy rose from her engulphing armchair. “Do you mind if I go up to my
+room? I’m rather tired--coming straight through.”
+
+“Of course, dear. I think there are some people coming to dinner... Mrs.
+Match will tell you. She has such a memory.... Fulmer, where on earth
+are those cartoons of the music-room?”
+
+Their voices pursued Susy upstairs, as, in Mrs. Match’s perpendicular
+wake, she mounted to the white-panelled room with its gay linen hangings
+and the low bed heaped with more cushions.
+
+“If we’d come here,” she thought, “everything might have been
+different.” And she shuddered at the sumptuous memories of the Palazzo
+Vanderlyn, and the great painted bedroom where she had met her doom.
+
+Mrs. Match, hoping she would find everything, and mentioning that dinner
+was not till nine, shut her softly in among her terrors.
+
+“Find everything?” Susy echoed the phrase. Oh, yes, she would always
+find everything: every time the door shut on her now, and the sound of
+voices ceased, her memories would be there waiting for her, every one
+of them, waiting quietly, patiently, obstinately, like poor people in a
+doctor’s office, the people who are always last to be attended to,
+but whom nothing will discourage or drive away, people to whom time is
+nothing, fatigue nothing, hunger nothing, other engagements nothing: who
+just wait.... Thank heaven, after all, that she had not found the
+house empty, if, whenever she returned to her room, she was to meet her
+memories there!
+
+It was just a week since Nick had left her. During that week, crammed
+with people, questions, packing, explaining, evading, she had believed
+that in solitude lay her salvation. Now she understood that there was
+nothing she was so unprepared for, so unfitted for. When, in all her
+life, had she ever been alone? And how was she to bear it now, with all
+these ravening memories besetting her!
+
+Dinner not till nine? What on earth was she to do till nine o’clock? She
+knelt before her boxes, and feverishly began to unpack.
+
+Gradually, imperceptibly, the subtle influences of her old life were
+stealing into her. As she pulled out her tossed and crumpled dresses she
+remembered Violet’s emphatic warning: “Don’t believe the people who tell
+you that skirts are going to be wider.” Were hers, perhaps, too wide
+as it was? She looked at her limp raiment, piling itself up on bed and
+sofa, and understood that, according to Violet’s standards, and that
+of all her set, those dresses, which Nick had thought so original and
+exquisite, were already commonplace and dowdy, fit only to be passed on
+to poor relations or given to one’s maid. And Susy would have to go on
+wearing them till they fell to bits--or else.... Well, or else begin the
+old life again in some new form....
+
+She laughed aloud at the turn of her thoughts. Dresses? How little they
+had mattered a few short weeks ago! And now, perhaps, they would again
+be one of the foremost considerations in her life. How could it be
+otherwise, if she were to return again to her old dependence on Ellie
+Vanderlyn, Ursula Gillow, Violet Melrose? And beyond that, only the
+Bockheimers and their kind awaited her....
+
+A knock on the door--what a relief! It was Mrs. Match again, with a
+telegram. To whom had Susy given her new address? With a throbbing heart
+she tore open the envelope and read:
+
+“Shall be in Paris Friday for twenty-four hours where can I see you
+write Nouveau Luxe.”
+
+Ah, yes--she remembered now: she had written to Strefford! And this was
+his answer: he was coming. She dropped into a chair, and tried to think.
+What on earth had she said in her letter? It had been mainly, of course,
+one of condolence; but now she remembered having added, in a precipitate
+postscript: “I can’t give your message to Nick, for he’s gone off with
+the Hickses--I don’t know where, or for how long. It’s all right, of
+course: it was in our bargain.”
+
+She had not meant to put in that last phrase; but as she sealed her
+letter to Strefford her eye had fallen on Nick’s missive, which lay
+beside it. Nothing in her husband’s brief lines had embittered her as
+much as the allusion to Strefford. It seemed to imply that Nick’s own
+plans were made, that his own future was secure, and that he could
+therefore freely and handsomely take thought for hers, and give her a
+pointer in the right direction. Sudden rage had possessed her at the
+thought: where she had at first read jealousy she now saw only a cold
+providence, and in a blur of tears she had scrawled her postscript to
+Strefford. She remembered that she had not even asked him to keep her
+secret. Well--after all, what would it matter if people should already
+know that Nick had left her? Their parting could not long remain a
+mystery, and the fact that it was known might help her to keep up a
+presence of indifference.
+
+“It was in the bargain--in the bargain,” rang through her brain as she
+re-read Strefford’s telegram. She understood that he had snatched the
+time for this hasty trip solely in the hope of seeing her, and her eyes
+filled. The more bitterly she thought of Nick the more this proof of
+Strefford’s friendship moved her.
+
+The clock, to her relief, reminded her that it was time to dress for
+dinner. She would go down presently, chat with Violet and Fulmer, and
+with Violet’s other guests, who would probably be odd and amusing, and
+too much out of her world to embarrass her by awkward questions. She
+would sit at a softly-lit table, breathe delicate scents, eat exquisite
+food (trust Mrs. Match!), and be gradually drawn again under the spell
+of her old associations. Anything, anything but to be alone....
+
+She dressed with even more than her habitual care, reddened her lips
+attentively, brushed the faintest bloom of pink over her drawn cheeks,
+and went down--to meet Mrs. Match coming up with a tray.
+
+“Oh, Madam, I thought you were too tired.... I was bringing it up to you
+myself--just a little morsel of chicken.”
+
+Susy, glancing past her, saw, through the open door, that the lamps were
+not lit in the drawing-room.
+
+“Oh, no, I’m not tired, thank you. I thought Mrs. Melrose expected
+friends at dinner!”
+
+“Friends at dinner-to-night?” Mrs. Match heaved a despairing sigh.
+Sometimes, the sigh seemed to say, her mistress put too great a strain
+upon her. “Why, Mrs. Melrose and Mr. Fulmer were engaged to dine in
+Paris. They left an hour ago. Mrs. Melrose told me she’d told you,” the
+house-keeper wailed.
+
+Susy kept her little fixed smile. “I must have misunderstood. In that
+case... well, yes, if it’s no trouble, I believe I will have my tray
+upstairs.”
+
+Slowly she turned, and followed the housekeeper up into the dread
+solitude she had just left.
+
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+
+
+THE next day a lot of people turned up unannounced for luncheon. They
+were not of the far-fetched and the exotic, in whom Mrs. Melrose now
+specialized, but merely commonplace fashionable people belonging to
+Susy’s own group, people familiar with the amusing romance of her
+penniless marriage, and to whom she had to explain (though none of them
+really listened to the explanation) that Nick was not with her just
+now but had gone off cruising... cruising in the AEgean with friends...
+getting up material for his book (this detail had occurred to her in the
+night).
+
+It was the kind of encounter she had most dreaded; but it proved, after
+all, easy enough to go through compared with those endless hours of
+turning to and fro, the night before, in the cage of her lonely room.
+Anything, anything, but to be alone....
+
+Gradually, from the force of habit, she found herself actually in tune
+with the talk of the luncheon table, interested in the references to
+absent friends, the light allusions to last year’s loves and quarrels,
+scandals and absurdities. The women, in their pale summer dresses,
+were so graceful, indolent and sure of themselves, the men so easy and
+good-humoured! Perhaps, after all, Susy reflected, it was the world she
+was meant for, since the other, the brief Paradise of her dreams, had
+already shut its golden doors upon her. And then, as they sat on the
+terrace after luncheon, looking across at the yellow tree-tops of the
+park, one of the women said something--made just an allusion--that Susy
+would have let pass unnoticed in the old days, but that now filled her
+with a sudden deep disgust.... She stood up and wandered away, away from
+them all through the fading garden.
+
+Two days later Susy and Strefford sat on the terrace of the Tuileries
+above the Seine. She had asked him to meet her there, with the desire to
+avoid the crowded halls and drawing-room of the Nouveau Luxe where, even
+at that supposedly “dead” season, people one knew were always
+drifting to and fro; and they sat on a bench in the pale sunlight,
+the discoloured leaves heaped at their feet, and no one to share their
+solitude but a lame working-man and a haggard woman who were lunching
+together mournfully at the other end of the majestic vista.
+
+Strefford, in his new mourning, looked unnaturally prosperous and
+well-valeted; but his ugly untidy features remained as undisciplined,
+his smile as whimsical, as of old. He had been on cool though friendly
+terms with the pompous uncle and the poor sickly cousin whose joint
+disappearance had so abruptly transformed his future; and it was his
+way to understate his feelings rather than to pretend more than he
+felt. Nevertheless, beneath his habitual bantering tone Susy discerned
+a change. The disaster had shocked him profoundly; already, in his brief
+sojourn among his people and among the great possessions so tragically
+acquired, old instincts had awakened, forgotten associations had spoken
+in him. Susy listened to him wistfully, silenced by her imaginative
+perception of the distance that these things had put between them.
+
+“It was horrible... seeing them both there together, laid out in that
+hideous Pugin chapel at Altringham... the poor boy especially. I
+suppose that’s really what’s cutting me up now,” he murmured, almost
+apologetically.
+
+“Oh, it’s more than that--more than you know,” she insisted; but he
+jerked back: “Now, my dear, don’t be edifying, please,” and fumbled for
+a cigarette in the pocket which was already beginning to bulge with his
+miscellaneous properties.
+
+“And now about you--for that’s what I came for,” he continued, turning
+to her with one of his sudden movements. “I couldn’t make head or tail
+of your letter.”
+
+She paused a moment to steady her voice. “Couldn’t you? I suppose you’d
+forgotten my bargain with Nick. He hadn’t--and he’s asked me to fulfil
+it.”
+
+Strefford stared. “What--that nonsense about your setting each other
+free if either of you had the chance to make a good match?”
+
+She signed “Yes.”
+
+“And he’s actually asked you--?”
+
+“Well: practically. He’s gone off with the Hickses. Before going he
+wrote me that we’d better both consider ourselves free. And Coral sent
+me a postcard to say that she would take the best of care of him.”
+
+Strefford mused, his eyes upon his cigarette. “But what the deuce led up
+to all this? It can’t have happened like that, out of a clear sky.”
+
+Susy flushed, hesitated, looked away. She had meant to tell Strefford
+the whole story; it had been one of her chief reasons for wishing to see
+him again, and half-unconsciously, perhaps, she had hoped, in his laxer
+atmosphere, to recover something of her shattered self-esteem. But now
+she suddenly felt the impossibility of confessing to anyone the depths
+to which Nick’s wife had stooped. She fancied that her companion guessed
+the nature of her hesitation.
+
+“Don’t tell me anything you don’t want to, you know, my dear.”
+
+“No; I do want to; only it’s difficult. You see--we had so very little
+money....”
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“And Nick--who was thinking of his book, and of all sorts of big things,
+fine things--didn’t realise... left it all to me... to manage....”
+
+She stumbled over the word, remembering how Nick had always winced
+at it. But Strefford did not seem to notice her, and she hurried on,
+unfolding in short awkward sentences the avowal of their pecuniary
+difficulties, and of Nick’s inability to understand that, to keep
+on with the kind of life they were leading, one had to put up with
+things... accept favours....
+
+“Borrow money, you mean?”
+
+“Well--yes; and all the rest.” No--decidedly she could not reveal
+to Strefford the episode of Ellie’s letters. “Nick suddenly felt, I
+suppose, that he couldn’t stand it,” she continued; “and instead of
+asking me to try--to try to live differently, go off somewhere with him
+and live, like work-people, in two rooms, without a servant, as I was
+ready to do; well, instead he wrote me that it had all been a mistake
+from the beginning, that we couldn’t keep it up, and had better
+recognize the fact; and he went off on the Hickses’ yacht. The last
+evening that you were in Venice--the day he didn’t come back to
+dinner--he had gone off to Genoa to meet them. I suppose he intends to
+marry Coral.”
+
+Strefford received this in silence. “Well--it was your bargain, wasn’t
+it?” he said at length.
+
+“Yes; but--”
+
+“Exactly: I always told you so. You weren’t ready to have him go
+yet--that’s all.”
+
+She flushed to the forehead. “Oh, Streff--is it really all?”
+
+“A question of time? If you doubt it, I’d like to see you try, for a
+while, in those two rooms without a servant; and then let me hear from
+you. Why, my dear, it’s only a question of time in a palace, with
+a steam yacht lying off the door-step, and a flock of motors in the
+garage; look around you and see. And did you ever imagine that you and
+Nick, of all people, were going to escape the common doom, and survive
+like Mr. and Mrs. Tithonus, while all about you the eternal passions
+were crumbling to pieces, and your native Divorce-states piling up their
+revenues?”
+
+She sat with bent head, the weight of the long years to come pressing
+like a leaden load on her shoulders.
+
+“But I’m so young... life’s so long. What does last, then?”
+
+“Ah, you’re too young to believe me, if I were to tell you; though
+you’re intelligent enough to understand.”
+
+“What does, then?”
+
+“Why, the hold of the things we all think we could do without.
+Habits--they outstand the Pyramids. Comforts, luxuries, the atmosphere
+of ease... above all, the power to get away from dulness and monotony,
+from constraints and uglinesses. You chose that power, instinctively,
+before you were even grown up; and so did Nick. And the only difference
+between you is that he’s had the sense to see sooner than you that those
+are the things that last, the prime necessities.”
+
+“I don’t believe it!”
+
+“Of course you don’t: at your age one doesn’t reason one’s materialism.
+And besides you’re mortally hurt that Nick has found out sooner than
+you, and hasn’t disguised his discovery under any hypocritical phrases.”
+
+“But surely there are people--”
+
+“Yes--saints and geniuses and heroes: all the fanatics! To which of
+their categories do you suppose we soft people belong? And the heroes
+and the geniuses--haven’t they their enormous frailties and their giant
+appetites? And how should we escape being the victims of our little
+ones?”
+
+She sat for a while without speaking. “But, Streff, how can you say such
+things, when I know you care: care for me, for instance!”
+
+“Care?” He put his hand on hers. “But, my dear, it’s just the
+fugitiveness of mortal caring that makes it so exquisite! It’s because
+we know we can’t hold fast to it, or to each other, or to anything....”
+
+“Yes... yes... but hush, please! Oh, don’t say it!” She stood up, the
+tears in her throat, and he rose also.
+
+“Come along, then; where do we lunch?” he said with a smile, slipping
+his hand through her arm.
+
+“Oh, I don’t know. Nowhere. I think I’m going back to Versailles.”
+
+“Because I’ve disgusted you so deeply? Just my luck--when I came over to
+ask you to marry me!”
+
+She laughed, but he had become suddenly grave. “Upon my soul, I did.”
+
+“Dear Streff! As if--now--”
+
+“Oh, not now--I know. I’m aware that even with your accelerated divorce
+methods--”
+
+“It’s not that. I told you it was no use, Streff--I told you long ago,
+in Venice.”
+
+He shrugged ironically. “It’s not Streff who’s asking you now. Streff
+was not a marrying man: he was only trifling with you. The present offer
+comes from an elderly peer of independent means. Think it over, my dear:
+as many days out as you like, and five footmen kept. There’s not the
+least hurry, of course; but I rather think Nick himself would advise
+it.”
+
+She flushed to the temples, remembering that Nick had; and the
+remembrance made Strefford’s sneering philosophy seem less unbearable.
+Why should she not lunch with him, after all? In the first days of his
+mourning he had come to Paris expressly to see her, and to offer her
+one of the oldest names and one of the greatest fortunes in England.
+She thought of Ursula Gillow, Ellie Vanderlyn, Violet Melrose, of their
+condescending kindnesses, their last year’s dresses, their Christmas
+cheques, and all the careless bounties that were so easy to bestow and
+so hard to accept. “I should rather enjoy paying them back,” something
+in her maliciously murmured.
+
+She did not mean to marry Strefford--she had not even got as far as
+contemplating the possibility of a divorce but it was undeniable that
+this sudden prospect of wealth and freedom was like fresh air in her
+lungs. She laughed again, but now without bitterness.
+
+“Very good, then; we’ll lunch together. But it’s Streff I want to lunch
+with to-day.”
+
+“Ah, well,” her companion agreed, “I rather think that for a tête-à-tête
+he’s better company.”
+
+During their repast in a little restaurant over the Seine, where she
+insisted on the cheapest dishes because she was lunching with “Streff,”
+ he became again his old whimsical companionable self. Once or twice she
+tried to turn the talk to his altered future, and the obligations and
+interests that lay before him; but he shrugged away from the subject,
+questioning her instead about the motley company at Violet Melrose’s,
+and fitting a droll or malicious anecdote to each of the people she
+named.
+
+It was not till they had finished their coffee, and she was glancing at
+her watch with a vague notion of taking the next train, that he asked
+abruptly: “But what are you going to do? You can’t stay forever at
+Violet’s.”
+
+“Oh, no!” she cried with a shiver.
+
+“Well, then--you’ve got some plan, I suppose?”
+
+“Have I?” she wondered, jerked back into grim reality from the soothing
+interlude of their hour together.
+
+“You can’t drift indefinitely, can you? Unless you mean to go back to
+the old sort of life once for all.”
+
+She reddened and her eyes filled. “I can’t do that, Streff--I know I
+can’t!”
+
+“Then what--?”
+
+She hesitated, and brought out with lowered head: “Nick said he would
+write again--in a few days. I must wait--”
+
+“Oh, naturally. Don’t do anything in a hurry.” Strefford also glanced at
+his watch. “Garcon, l’addition! I’m taking the train back to-night, and
+I’ve a lot of things left to do. But look here, my dear--when you come
+to a decision one way or the other let me know, will you? Oh, I don’t
+mean in the matter I’ve most at heart; we’ll consider that closed for
+the present. But at least I can be of use in other ways--hang it, you
+know, I can even lend you money. There’s a new sensation for our jaded
+palates!”
+
+“Oh, Streff... Streff!” she could only falter; and he pressed on gaily:
+“Try it, now do try it--I assure you there’ll be no interest to pay, and
+no conditions attached. And promise to let me know when you’ve decided
+anything.”
+
+She looked into his humorously puckered eyes, answering. Their friendly
+smile with hers.
+
+“I promise!” she said.
+
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+
+
+THAT hour with Strefford had altered her whole perspective. Instead of
+possible dependence, an enforced return to the old life of connivances
+and concessions, she saw before her--whenever she chose to take
+them--freedom, power and dignity. Dignity! It was odd what weight that
+word had come to have for her. She had dimly felt its significance,
+felt the need of its presence in her inmost soul, even in the young
+thoughtless days when she had seemed to sacrifice so little to the
+austere divinities. And since she had been Nick Lansing’s wife she had
+consciously acknowledged it, had suffered and agonized when she fell
+beneath its standard. Yes: to marry Strefford would give her that
+sense of self-respect which, in such a world as theirs, only wealth and
+position could ensure. If she had not the mental or moral training to
+attain independence in any other way, was she to blame for seeking it on
+such terms?
+
+Of course there was always the chance that Nick would come back, would
+find life without her as intolerable as she was finding it without him.
+If that happened--ah, if that happened! Then she would cease to strain
+her eyes into the future, would seize upon the present moment and plunge
+into it to the very bottom of oblivion. Nothing on earth would matter
+then--money or freedom or pride, or her precious moral dignity, if only
+she were in Nick’s arms again!
+
+But there was Nick’s icy letter, there was Coral Hicks’s insolent
+post-card, to show how little chance there was of such a solution. Susy
+understood that, even before the discovery of her transaction with Ellie
+Vanderlyn, Nick had secretly wearied, if not of his wife, at least of
+the life that their marriage compelled him to lead. His passion was not
+strong enough--had never been strong enough--to outweigh his prejudices,
+scruples, principles, or whatever one chose to call them. Susy’s dignity
+might go up like tinder in the blaze of her love; but his was made of a
+less combustible substance. She had felt, in their last talk together,
+that she had forever destroyed the inner harmony between them.
+
+Well--there it was, and the fault was doubtless neither hers nor his,
+but that of the world they had grown up in, of their own moral contempt
+for it and physical dependence on it, of his half-talents and her
+half-principles, of the something in them both that was not stout enough
+to resist nor yet pliant enough to yield. She stared at the fact on the
+journey back to Versailles, and all that sleepless night in her room;
+and the next morning, when the housemaid came in with her breakfast
+tray, she felt the factitious energy that comes from having decided,
+however half-heartedly, on a definite course.
+
+She had said to herself: “If there’s no letter from Nick this time next
+week I’ll write to Streff--” and the week had passed, and there was no
+letter.
+
+It was now three weeks since he had left her, and she had had no
+word but his note from Genoa. She had concluded that, foreseeing the
+probability of her leaving Venice, he would write to her in care of
+their Paris bank. But though she had immediately notified the bank of
+her change of address no communication from Nick had reached her; and
+she smiled with a touch of bitterness at the difficulty he was doubtless
+finding in the composition of the promised letter. Her own scrap-basket,
+for the first days, had been heaped with the fragments of the letters
+she had begun; and she told herself that, since they both found it so
+hard to write, it was probably because they had nothing left to say to
+each other.
+
+Meanwhile the days at Mrs. Melrose’s drifted by as they had been wont
+to drift when, under the roofs of the rich, Susy Branch had marked
+time between one episode and the next of her precarious existence.
+Her experience of such sojourns was varied enough to make her acutely
+conscious of their effect on her temporary hosts; and in the present
+case she knew that Violet was hardly aware of her presence. But if no
+more than tolerated she was at least not felt to be an inconvenience;
+when your hostess forgot about you it proved that at least you were not
+in her way.
+
+Violet, as usual, was perpetually on the wing, for her profound
+indolence expressed itself in a disordered activity. Nat Fulmer had
+returned to Paris; but Susy guessed that his benefactress was still
+constantly in his company, and that when Mrs. Melrose was whirled away
+in her noiseless motor it was generally toward the scene of some new
+encounter between Fulmer and the arts. On these occasions she sometimes
+offered to carry Susy to Paris, and they devoted several long and
+hectic mornings to the dress-makers, where Susy felt herself gradually
+succumbing to the familiar spell of heaped-up finery. It seemed
+impossible, as furs and laces and brocades were tossed aside, brought
+back, and at last carelessly selected from, that anything but the whim
+of the moment need count in deciding whether one should take all or
+none, or that any woman could be worth looking at who did not possess
+the means to make her choice regardless of cost.
+
+Once alone, and in the street again, the evil fumes would evaporate,
+and daylight re-enter Susy’s soul; yet she felt that the old poison was
+slowly insinuating itself into her system. To dispel it she decided
+one day to look up Grace Fulmer. She was curious to know how the
+happy-go-lucky companion of Fulmer’s evil days was bearing the weight of
+his prosperity, and she vaguely felt that it would be refreshing to see
+some one who had never been afraid of poverty.
+
+The airless pension sitting-room, where she waited while a reluctant
+maid-servant screamed about the house for Mrs. Fulmer, did not have
+the hoped-for effect. It was one thing for Grace to put up with such
+quarters when she shared them with Fulmer; but to live there while he
+basked in the lingering radiance of Versailles, or rolled from chateau
+to picture gallery in Mrs. Melrose’s motor, showed a courage that Susy
+felt unable to emulate.
+
+“My dear! I knew you’d look me up,” Grace’s joyous voice ran down the
+stairway; and in another moment she was clasping Susy to her tumbled
+person.
+
+“Nat couldn’t remember if he’d given you our address, though he promised
+me he would, the last time he was here.” She held Susy at arms’
+length, beaming upon her with blinking short-sighted eyes: the same
+old dishevelled Grace, so careless of her neglected beauty and her
+squandered youth, so amused and absent-minded and improvident, that the
+boisterous air of the New Hampshire bungalow seemed to enter with her
+into the little air-tight salon.
+
+While she poured out the tale of Nat’s sudden celebrity, and its
+unexpected consequences, Susy marvelled and dreamed. Was the secret
+of his triumph perhaps due to those long hard unrewarded years, the
+steadfast scorn of popularity, the indifference to every kind of
+material ease in which his wife had so gaily abetted him? Had it been
+bought at the cost of her own freshness and her own talent, of the
+children’s “advantages,” of everything except the closeness of the tie
+between husband and wife? Well--it was worth the price, no doubt; but
+what if, now that honours and prosperity had come, the tie were snapped,
+and Grace were left alone among the ruins?
+
+There was nothing in her tone or words to suggest such a possibility.
+Susy noticed that her ill-assorted raiment was costlier in quality and
+more professional in cut than the home-made garments which had draped
+her growing bulk at the bungalow: it was clear that she was trying to
+dress up to Nat’s new situation. But, above all, she was rejoicing in
+it, filling her hungry lungs with the strong air of his success. It had
+evidently not occurred to her as yet that those who consent to share the
+bread of adversity may want the whole cake of prosperity for themselves.
+
+“My dear, it’s too wonderful! He’s told me to take as many concert and
+opera tickets as I like; he lets me take all the children with me. The
+big concerts don’t begin till later; but of course the Opera is always
+going. And there are little things--there’s music in Paris at all
+seasons. And later it’s just possible we may get to Munich for a
+week--oh, Susy!” Her hands clasped, her eyes brimming, she drank the new
+wine of life almost sacramentally.
+
+“Do you remember, Susy, when you and Nick came to stay at the bungalow?
+Nat said you’d be horrified by our primitiveness--but I knew better! And
+I was right, wasn’t I? Seeing us so happy made you and Nick decide to
+follow our example, didn’t it?” She glowed with the remembrance. “And
+now, what are your plans? Is Nick’s book nearly done? I suppose you’ll
+have to live very economically till he finds a publisher. And the baby,
+darling--when is that to be? If you’re coming home soon I could let you
+have a lot of the children’s little old things.”
+
+“You’re always so dear, Grace. But we haven’t any special plans
+as yet--not even for a baby. And I wish you’d tell me all of yours
+instead.”
+
+Mrs. Fulmer asked nothing better: Susy perceived that, so far, the
+greater part of her European experience had consisted in talking about
+what it was to be. “Well, you see, Nat is so taken up all day with
+sight-seeing and galleries and meeting important people that he hasn’t
+had time to go about with us; and as so few theatres are open, and
+there’s so little music, I’ve taken the opportunity to catch up with
+my mending. Junie helps me with it now--she’s our eldest, you remember?
+She’s grown into a big girl since you saw her. And later, perhaps,
+we’re to travel. And the most wonderful thing of all--next to Nat’s
+recognition, I mean--is not having to contrive and skimp, and give up
+something every single minute. Just think--Nat has even made special
+arrangements here in the pension, so that the children all have second
+helpings to everything. And when I go up to bed I can think of my music,
+instead of lying awake calculating and wondering how I can make things
+come out at the end of the month. Oh, Susy, that’s simply heaven!”
+
+Susy’s heart contracted. She had come to her friend to be taught again
+the lesson of indifference to material things, and instead she was
+hearing from Grace Fulmer’s lips the long-repressed avowal of their
+tyranny. After all, that battle with poverty on the New Hampshire
+hillside had not been the easy smiling business that Grace and Nat had
+made it appear. And yet ... and yet....
+
+Susy stood up abruptly, and straightened the expensive hat which hung
+irresponsibly over Grace’s left ear.
+
+“What’s wrong with it? Junie helped me choose it, and she generally
+knows,” Mrs. Fulmer wailed with helpless hands.
+
+“It’s the way you wear it, dearest--and the bow is rather top-heavy. Let
+me have it a minute, please.” Susy lifted the hat from her friend’s
+head and began to manipulate its trimming. “This is the way Maria Guy or
+Suzanne would do it.... And now go on about Nat....”
+
+She listened musingly while Grace poured forth the tale of her husband’s
+triumph, of the notices in the papers, the demand for his work, the
+fine ladies’ battles over their priority in discovering him, and the
+multiplied orders that had resulted from their rivalry.
+
+“Of course they’re simply furious with each other--Mrs. Melrose and Mrs.
+Gillow especially--because each one pretends to have been the first to
+notice his ‘Spring Snow-Storm,’ and in reality it wasn’t either of them,
+but only poor Bill Haslett, an art-critic we’ve known for years, who
+chanced on the picture, and rushed off to tell a dealer who was looking
+for a new painter to push.” Grace suddenly raised her soft myopic eyes
+to Susy’s face. “But, do you know, the funny thing is that I believe Nat
+is beginning to forget this, and to believe that it was Mrs. Melrose who
+stopped short in front of his picture on the opening day, and screamed
+out: ‘This is genius!’ It seems funny he should care so much, when I’ve
+always known he had genius--and he has known it too. But they’re all so
+kind to him; and Mrs. Melrose especially. And I suppose it makes a thing
+sound new to hear it said in a new voice.”
+
+Susy looked at her meditatively. “And how should you feel if Nat liked
+too much to hear Mrs. Melrose say it? Too much, I mean, to care any
+longer what you felt or thought?”
+
+Her friend’s worn face flushed quickly, and then paled: Susy almost
+repented the question. But Mrs. Fulmer met it with a tranquil dignity.
+“You haven’t been married long enough, dear, to understand... how people
+like Nat and me feel about such things... or how trifling they seem, in
+the balance... the balance of one’s memories.”
+
+Susy stood up again, and flung her arms about her friend. “Oh, Grace,”
+ she laughed with wet eyes, “how can you be as wise as that, and yet not
+have sense enough to buy a decent hat?” She gave Mrs. Fulmer a quick
+embrace and hurried away. She had learned her lesson after all; but it
+was not exactly the one she had come to seek.
+
+The week she had allowed herself had passed, and still there was no word
+from Nick. She allowed herself yet another day, and that too went by
+without a letter. She then decided on a step from which her pride
+had hitherto recoiled; she would call at the bank and ask for Nick’s
+address. She called, embarrassed and hesitating; and was told, after
+enquiries in the post-office department, that Mr. Nicholas Lansing
+had given no address since that of the Palazzo Vanderlyn, three months
+previously. She went back to Versailles that afternoon with the definite
+intention of writing to Strefford unless the next morning’s post brought
+a letter.
+
+The next morning brought nothing from Nick, but a scribbled message from
+Mrs. Melrose: would Susy, as soon as possible, come into her room for
+a word, Susy jumped up, hurried through her bath, and knocked at her
+hostess’s door. In the immense low bed that faced the rich umbrage
+of the park Mrs. Melrose lay smoking cigarettes and glancing over her
+letters. She looked up with her vague smile, and said dreamily: “Susy
+darling, have you any particular plans--for the next few months, I
+mean?”
+
+Susy coloured: she knew the intonation of old, and fancied she
+understood what it implied.
+
+“Plans, dearest? Any number... I’m tearing myself away the day after
+to-morrow... to the Gillows’ moor, very probably,” she hastened to
+announce.
+
+Instead of the relief she had expected to read on Mrs. Melrose’s
+dramatic countenance she discovered there the blankest disappointment.
+
+“Oh, really? That’s too bad. Is it absolutely settled--?”
+
+“As far as I’m concerned,” said Susy crisply.
+
+The other sighed. “I’m too sorry. You see, dear, I’d meant to ask you
+to stay on here quietly and look after the Fulmer children. Fulmer and
+I are going to Spain next week--I want to be with him when he makes his
+studies, receives his first impressions; such a marvellous experience,
+to be there when he and Velasquez meet!” She broke off, lost in
+prospective ecstasy. “And, you see, as Grace Fulmer insists on coming
+with us--”
+
+“Ah, I see.”
+
+“Well, there are the five children--such a problem,” sighed the
+benefactress. “If you were at a loose end, you know, dear, while Nick’s
+away with his friends, I could really make it worth your while....”
+
+“So awfully good of you, Violet; only I’m not, as it happens.”
+
+Oh the relief of being able to say that, gaily, firmly and even
+truthfully! Take charge of the Fulmer children, indeed! Susy remembered
+how Nick and she had fled from them that autumn afternoon in New
+Hampshire. The offer gave her a salutary glimpse of the way in which, as
+the years passed, and she lost her freshness and novelty, she would more
+and more be used as a convenience, a stop-gap, writer of notes, runner
+of errands, nursery governess or companion. She called to mind several
+elderly women of her acquaintance, pensioners of her own group, who
+still wore its livery, struck its attitudes and chattered its jargon,
+but had long since been ruthlessly relegated to these slave-ant offices.
+Never in the world would she join their numbers.
+
+Mrs. Melrose’s face fell, and she looked at Susy with the plaintive
+bewilderment of the wielder of millions to whom everything that cannot
+be bought is imperceptible.
+
+“But I can’t see why you can’t change your plans,” she murmured with a
+soft persistency.
+
+“Ah, well, you know”--Susy paused on a slow inward smile--“they’re not
+mine only, as it happens.”
+
+Mrs. Melrose’s brow clouded. The unforeseen complication of Mrs.
+Fulmer’s presence on the journey had evidently tried her nerves, and
+this new obstacle to her arrangements shook her faith in the divine
+order of things.
+
+“Your plans are not yours only? But surely you won’t let Ursula Gillow
+dictate to you?... There’s my jade pendant; the one you said you liked
+the other day.... The Fulmers won’t go with me, you understand, unless
+they’re satisfied about the children; the whole plan will fall
+through. Susy darling, you were always too unselfish; I hate to see you
+sacrificed to Ursula.”
+
+Susy’s smile lingered. Time was when she might have been glad to add
+the jade pendant to the collection already enriched by Ellie Vanderlyn’s
+sapphires; more recently, she would have resented the offer as an insult
+to her newly-found principles. But already the mere fact that she
+might henceforth, if she chose, be utterly out of reach of such bribes,
+enabled her to look down on them with tolerance. Oh, the blessed moral
+freedom that wealth conferred! She recalled Mrs. Fulmer’s uncontrollable
+cry: “The most wonderful thing of all is not having to contrive and
+skimp, and give up something every single minute!” Yes; it was only on
+such terms that one could call one’s soul one’s own. The sense of it
+gave Susy the grace to answer amicably: “If I could possibly help you
+out, Violet, I shouldn’t want a present to persuade me. And, as you say,
+there’s no reason why I should sacrifice myself to Ursula--or to anybody
+else. Only, as it happens”--she paused and took the plunge--“I’m going
+to England because I’ve promised to see a friend.” That night she wrote
+to Strefford.
+
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+
+
+STRETCHED out under an awning on the deck of the Ibis, Nick Lansing
+looked up for a moment at the vanishing cliffs of Malta and then plunged
+again into his book.
+
+He had had nearly three weeks of drug-taking on the Ibis. The drugs he
+had absorbed were of two kinds: visions of fleeing landscapes, looming
+up from the blue sea to vanish into it again, and visions of study
+absorbed from the volumes piled up day and night at his elbow. For the
+first time in months he was in reach of a real library, just the kind
+of scholarly yet miscellaneous library, that his restless and impatient
+spirit craved. He was aware that the books he read, like the fugitive
+scenes on which he gazed, were merely a form of anesthetic: he swallowed
+them with the careless greed of the sufferer who seeks only to still
+pain and deaden memory. But they were beginning to produce in him a
+moral languor that was not disagreeable, that, indeed, compared with the
+fierce pain of the first days, was almost pleasurable. It was exactly
+the kind of drug that he needed.
+
+There is probably no point on which the average man has more definite
+views than on the uselessness of writing a letter that is hard to write.
+In the line he had sent to Susy from Genoa Nick had told her that she
+would hear from him again in a few days; but when the few days had
+passed, and he began to consider setting himself to the task, he found
+fifty reasons for postponing it.
+
+Had there been any practical questions to write about it would have been
+different; he could not have borne for twenty-four hours the idea that
+she was in uncertainty as to money. But that had all been settled
+long ago. From the first she had had the administering of their modest
+fortune. On their marriage Nick’s own meagre income, paid in, none too
+regularly, by the agent who had managed for years the dwindling family
+properties, had been transferred to her: it was the only wedding present
+he could make. And the wedding cheques had of course all been
+deposited in her name. There were therefore no “business” reasons for
+communicating with her; and when it came to reasons of another order the
+mere thought of them benumbed him.
+
+For the first few days he reproached himself for his inertia; then he
+began to seek reasons for justifying it. After all, for both their sakes
+a waiting policy might be the wisest he could pursue. He had left Susy
+because he could not tolerate the conditions on which he had discovered
+their life together to be based; and he had told her so. What more was
+there to say?
+
+Nothing was changed in their respective situations; if they came
+together it could be only to resume the same life; and that, as the days
+went by, seemed to him more and more impossible. He had not yet reached
+the point of facing a definite separation; but whenever his thoughts
+travelled back over their past life he recoiled from any attempt to
+return to it. As long as this state of mind continued there seemed
+nothing to add to the letter he had already written, except indeed the
+statement that he was cruising with the Hickses. And he saw no pressing
+reason for communicating that.
+
+To the Hickses he had given no hint of his situation. When Coral Hicks,
+a fortnight earlier, had picked him up in the broiling streets of Genoa,
+and carried him off to the Ibis, he had thought only of a cool dinner
+and perhaps a moonlight sail. Then, in reply to their friendly urging,
+he had confessed that he had not been well--had indeed gone off
+hurriedly for a few days’ change of air--and that left him without
+defence against the immediate proposal that he should take his change
+of air on the Ibis. They were just off to Corsica and Sardinia, and from
+there to Sicily: he could rejoin the railway at Naples, and be back at
+Venice in ten days.
+
+Ten days of respite--the temptation was irresistible. And he really
+liked the kind uncomplicated Hickses. A wholesome honesty and simplicity
+breathed through all their opulence, as if the rich trappings of their
+present life still exhaled the fragrance of their native prairies. The
+mere fact of being with such people was like a purifying bath. When the
+yacht touched at Naples he agreed since they were so awfully kind--to go
+on to Sicily. And when the chief steward, going ashore at Naples for
+the last time before they got up steam, said: “Any letters for the post,
+sir?” he answered, as he had answered at each previous halt: “No, thank
+you: none.”
+
+Now they were heading for Rhodes and Crete--Crete, where he had never
+been, where he had so often longed to go. In spite of the lateness of
+the season the weather was still miraculously fine: the short waves
+danced ahead under a sky without a cloud, and the strong bows of the
+Ibis hardly swayed as she flew forward over the flying crests.
+
+Only his hosts and their daughter were on the yacht--of course with
+Eldorada Tooker and Mr. Beck in attendance. An eminent archaeologist,
+who was to have joined them at Naples, had telegraphed an excuse at the
+last moment; and Nick noticed that, while Mrs. Hicks was perpetually
+apologizing for the great man’s absence, Coral merely smiled and said
+nothing.
+
+As a matter of fact, Mr. and Mrs. Hicks were never as pleasant as
+when one had them to one’s self. In company, Mr. Hicks ran the risk of
+appearing over-hospitable, and Mrs. Hicks confused dates and names in
+the desire to embrace all culture in her conversation. But alone with
+Nick, their old travelling-companion, they shone out in their native
+simplicity, and Mr. Hicks talked soundly of investments, and Mrs. Hicks
+recalled her early married days in Apex City, when, on being brought
+home to her new house in Aeschylus Avenue, her first thought had been:
+“How on earth shall I get all those windows washed?”
+
+The loss of Mr. Buttles had been as serious to them as Nick had
+supposed: Mr. Beck could never hope to replace him. Apart from his
+mysterious gift of languages, and his almost superhuman faculty for
+knowing how to address letters to eminent people, and in what terms to
+conclude them, he had a smattering of archaeology and general culture on
+which Mrs. Hicks had learned to depend--her own memory being, alas, so
+inadequate to the range of her interests.
+
+Her daughter might perhaps have helped her; but it was not Miss Hicks’s
+way to mother her parents. She was exceedingly kind to them, but left
+them, as it were, to bring themselves up as best they could, while she
+pursued her own course of self-development. A sombre zeal for knowledge
+filled the mind of this strange girl: she appeared interested only
+in fresh opportunities of adding to her store of facts. They were
+illuminated by little imagination and less poetry; but, carefully
+catalogued and neatly sorted in her large cool brain, they were always
+as accessible as the volumes in an up-to-date public library.
+
+To Nick there was something reposeful in this lucid intellectual
+curiosity. He wanted above all things to get away from sentiment, from
+seduction, from the moods and impulses and flashing contradictions that
+were Susy. Susy was not a great reader: her store of facts was small,
+and she had grown up among people who dreaded ideas as much as if they
+had been a contagious disease. But, in the early days especially,
+when Nick had put a book in her hand, or read a poem to her, her
+swift intelligence had instantly shed a new light on the subject, and,
+penetrating to its depths, had extracted from them whatever belonged
+to her. What a pity that this exquisite insight, this intuitive
+discrimination, should for the most part have been spent upon reading
+the thoughts of vulgar people, and extracting a profit from them--should
+have been wasted, since her childhood, on all the hideous intricacies of
+“managing”!
+
+And visible beauty--how she cared for that too! He had not guessed it,
+or rather he had not been sure of it, till the day when, on their way
+through Paris, he had taken her to the Louvre, and they had stood before
+the little Crucifixion of Mantegna. He had not been looking at the
+picture, or watching to see what impression it produced on Susy. His
+own momentary mood was for Correggio and Fragonard, the laughter of the
+Music Lesson and the bold pagan joys of the Antiope; and then he
+had missed her from his side, and when he came to where she stood,
+forgetting him, forgetting everything, had seen the glare of that tragic
+sky in her face, her trembling lip, the tears on her lashes. That was
+Susy....
+
+Closing his book he stole a glance at Coral Hicks’s profile, thrown back
+against the cushions of the deck-chair at his side. There was something
+harsh and bracing in her blunt primitive build, in the projection of
+the black eyebrows that nearly met over her thick straight nose, and
+the faint barely visible black down on her upper lip. Some miracle of
+will-power, combined with all the artifices that wealth can buy, had
+turned the fat sallow girl he remembered into this commanding young
+woman, almost handsome at times indisputably handsome--in her big
+authoritative way. Watching the arrogant lines of her profile against
+the blue sea, he remembered, with a thrill that was sweet to his vanity,
+how twice--under the dome of the Scalzi and in the streets of Genoa--he
+had seen those same lines soften at his approach, turn womanly, pleading
+and almost humble. That was Coral....
+
+Suddenly she said, without turning toward him: “You’ve had no letters
+since you’ve been on board.”
+
+He looked at her, surprised. “No--thank the Lord!” he laughed.
+
+“And you haven’t written one either,” she continued in her hard
+statistical tone.
+
+“No,” he again agreed, with the same laugh.
+
+“That means that you really are free--”
+
+“Free?”
+
+He saw the cheek nearest him redden. “Really off on a holiday, I mean;
+not tied down.” After a pause he rejoined: “No, I’m not particularly
+tied down.”
+
+“And your book?”
+
+“Oh, my book--” He stopped and considered. He had thrust The Pageant of
+Alexander into his handbag on the night of his Bight from Venice; but
+since then he had never looked at it. Too many memories and illusions
+were pressed between its pages; and he knew just at what page he had
+felt Ellie Vanderlyn bending over him from behind, caught a whiff of her
+scent, and heard her breathless “I had to thank you!”
+
+“My book’s hung up,” he said impatiently, annoyed with Miss Hicks’s lack
+of tact. There was a girl who never put out feelers....
+
+“Yes; I thought it was,” she went on quietly, and he gave her a startled
+glance. What the devil else did she think, he wondered? He had never
+supposed her capable of getting far enough out of her own thick carapace
+of self-sufficiency to penetrate into any one else’s feelings.
+
+“The truth is,” he continued, embarrassed, “I suppose I dug away at
+it rather too continuously; that’s probably why I felt the need of a
+change. You see I’m only a beginner.”
+
+She still continued her relentless questioning. “But later--you’ll go on
+with it, of course?”
+
+“Oh, I don’t know.” He paused, glanced down the glittering deck, and
+then out across the glittering water. “I’ve been dreaming dreams, you
+see. I rather think I shall have to drop the book altogether, and try
+to look out for a job that will pay. To indulge in my kind of literature
+one must first have an assured income.”
+
+He was instantly annoyed with himself for having spoken. Hitherto in his
+relations with the Hickses he had carefully avoided the least allusion
+that might make him feel the heavy hand of their beneficence. But the
+idle procrastinating weeks had weakened him and he had yielded to the
+need of putting into words his vague intentions. To do so would perhaps
+help to make them more definite.
+
+To his relief Miss Hicks made no immediate reply; and when she spoke it
+was in a softer voice and with an unwonted hesitation.
+
+“It seems a shame that with gifts like yours you shouldn’t find some
+kind of employment that would leave you leisure enough to do your real
+work....”
+
+He shrugged ironically. “Yes--there are a goodish number of us hunting
+for that particular kind of employment.”
+
+Her tone became more business-like. “I know it’s hard to find--almost
+impossible. But would you take it, I wonder, if it were offered to
+you--?”
+
+She turned her head slightly, and their eyes met. For an instant blank
+terror loomed upon him; but before he had time to face it she continued,
+in the same untroubled voice: “Mr. Buttles’s place, I mean. My parents
+must absolutely have some one they can count on. You know what an easy
+place it is.... I think you would find the salary satisfactory.”
+
+Nick drew a deep breath of relief. For a moment her eyes had looked as
+they had in the Scalzi--and he liked the girl too much not to shrink
+from reawakening that look. But Mr. Buttles’s place: why not?
+
+“Poor Buttles!” he murmured, to gain time.
+
+“Oh,” she said, “you won’t find the same reasons as he did for throwing
+up the job. He was the martyr of his artistic convictions.”
+
+He glanced at her sideways, wondering. After all she did not know of
+his meeting with Mr. Buttles in Genoa, nor of the latter’s confidences;
+perhaps she did not even know of Mr. Buttles’s hopeless passion. At any
+rate her face remained calm.
+
+“Why not consider it--at least just for a few months? Till after our
+expedition to Mesopotamia?” she pressed on, a little breathlessly.
+
+“You’re awfully kind: but I don’t know--”
+
+She stood up with one of her abrupt movements. “You needn’t, all
+at once. Take time think it over. Father wanted me to ask you,” she
+appended.
+
+He felt the inadequacy of his response. “It tempts me awfully, of
+course. But I must wait, at any rate--wait for letters. The fact is
+I shall have to wire from Rhodes to have them sent. I had chucked
+everything, even letters, for a few weeks.”
+
+“Ah, you are tired,” she murmured, giving him a last downward glance as
+she turned away.
+
+From Rhodes Nick Lansing telegraphed to his Paris bank to send his
+letters to Candia; but when the Ibis reached Candia, and the mail was
+brought on board, the thick envelope handed to him contained no letter
+from Susy.
+
+Why should it, since he had not yet written to her?
+
+He had not written, no: but in sending his address to the bank he knew
+he had given her the opportunity of reaching him if she wished to. And
+she had made no sign.
+
+Late that afternoon, when they returned to the yacht from their first
+expedition, a packet of newspapers lay on the deck-house table. Nick
+picked up one of the London journals, and his eye ran absently down the
+list of social events.
+
+He read:
+
+“Among the visitors expected next week at Ruan Castle (let for the
+season to Mr. Frederick J. Gillow of New York) are Prince Altineri of
+Rome, the Earl of Altringham and Mrs. Nicholas Lansing, who arrived in
+London last week from Paris.” Nick threw down the paper. It was just a
+month since he had left the Palazzo Vanderlyn and flung himself into the
+night express for Milan. A whole month--and Susy had not written. Only a
+month--and Susy and Strefford were already together!
+
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+
+
+SUSY had decided to wait for Strefford in London.
+
+The new Lord Altringham was with his family in the north, and though she
+found a telegram on arriving, saying that he would join her in town the
+following week, she had still an interval of several days to fill.
+
+London was a desert; the rain fell without ceasing, and alone in the
+shabby family hotel which, even out of season, was the best she could
+afford, she sat at last face to face with herself.
+
+From the moment when Violet Melrose had failed to carry out her plan
+for the Fulmer children her interest in Susy had visibly waned. Often
+before, in the old days, Susy Branch had felt the same abrupt change of
+temperature in the manner of the hostess of the moment; and often--how
+often--had yielded, and performed the required service, rather than risk
+the consequences of estrangement. To that, at least, thank heaven, she
+need never stoop again.
+
+But as she hurriedly packed her trunks at Versailles, scraped together
+an adequate tip for Mrs. Match, and bade good-bye to Violet (grown
+suddenly fond and demonstrative as she saw her visitor safely headed
+for the station)--as Susy went through the old familiar mummery of the
+enforced leave-taking, there rose in her so deep a disgust for the
+life of makeshifts and accommodations, that if at that moment Nick had
+reappeared and held out his arms to her, she was not sure she would have
+had the courage to return to them.
+
+In her London solitude the thirst for independence grew fiercer.
+Independence with ease, of course. Oh, her hateful useless love of
+beauty... the curse it had always been to her, the blessing it might
+have been if only she had had the material means to gratify and to
+express it! And instead, it only gave her a morbid loathing of that
+hideous hotel bedroom drowned in yellow rain-light, of the smell of soot
+and cabbage through the window, the blistered wall-paper, the dusty wax
+bouquets under glass globes, and the electric lighting so contrived that
+as you turned on the feeble globe hanging from the middle of the ceiling
+the feebler one beside the bed went out!
+
+What a sham world she and Nick had lived in during their few months
+together! What right had either of them to those exquisite settings
+of the life of leisure: the long white house hidden in camellias and
+cypresses above the lake, or the great rooms on the Giudecca with the
+shimmer of the canal always playing over their frescoed ceilings! Yet
+she had come to imagine that these places really belonged to them, that
+they would always go on living, fondly and irreproachably, in the frame
+of other people’s wealth.... That, again, was the curse of her love of
+beauty, the way she always took to it as if it belonged to her!
+
+Well, the awakening was bound to come, and it was perhaps better that
+it should have come so soon. At any rate there was no use in letting her
+thoughts wander back to that shattered fool’s paradise of theirs. Only,
+as she sat there and reckoned up the days till Strefford arrived, what
+else in the world was there to think of?
+
+Her future and his?
+
+But she knew that future by heart already! She had not spent her life
+among the rich and fashionable without having learned every detail of
+the trappings of a rich and fashionable marriage. She had calculated
+long ago just how many dinner-dresses, how many tea-gowns and how much
+lacy lingerie would go to make up the outfit of the future Countess of
+Altringham. She had even decided to which dressmaker she would go for
+her chinchilla cloak--for she meant to have one, and down to her feet,
+and softer and more voluminous and more extravagantly sumptuous than
+Violet’s or Ursula’s... not to speak of silver foxes and sables... nor
+yet of the Altringham jewels.
+
+She knew all this by heart; had always known it. It all belonged to the
+make-up of the life of elegance: there was nothing new about it. What
+had been new to her was just that short interval with Nick--a life
+unreal indeed in its setting, but so real in its essentials: the one
+reality she had ever known. As she looked back on it she saw how much
+it had given her besides the golden flush of her happiness, the sudden
+flowering of sensuous joy in heart and body. Yes--there had been the
+flowering too, in pain like birth-pangs, of something graver, stronger,
+fuller of future power, something she had hardly heeded in her first
+light rapture, but that always came back and possessed her stilled soul
+when the rapture sank: the deep disquieting sense of something that
+Nick and love had taught her, but that reached out even beyond love and
+beyond Nick.
+
+Her nerves were racked by the ceaseless swish, swish of the rain on the
+dirty panes and the smell of cabbage and coal that came in under the
+door when she shut the window. This nauseating foretaste of the luncheon
+she must presently go down to was more than she could bear. It brought
+with it a vision of the dank coffee-room below, the sooty Smyrna rug,
+the rain on the sky-light, the listless waitresses handing about food
+that tasted as if it had been rained on too. There was really no reason
+why she should let such material miseries add to her depression....
+
+She sprang up, put on her hat and jacket, and calling for a taxi drove
+to the London branch of the Nouveau Luxe hotel. It was just one o’clock
+and she was sure to pick up a luncheon, for though London was empty
+that great establishment was not. It never was. Along those sultry
+velvet-carpeted halls, in that great flowered and scented dining-room,
+there was always a come-and-go of rich aimless people, the busy people
+who, having nothing to do, perpetually pursue their inexorable task from
+one end of the earth to the other.
+
+Oh, the monotony of those faces--the faces one always knew, whether one
+knew the people they belonged to or not! A fresh disgust seized her at
+the sight of them: she wavered, and then turned and fled. But on the
+threshold a still more familiar figure met her: that of a lady in
+exaggerated pearls and sables, descending from an exaggerated motor,
+like the motors in magazine advertisements, the huge arks in which
+jewelled beauties and slender youths pause to gaze at snowpeaks from an
+Alpine summit.
+
+It was Ursula Gillow--dear old Ursula, on her way to Scotland--and she
+and Susy fell on each other’s necks. It appeared that Ursula, detained
+till the next evening by a dress-maker’s delay, was also out of a job
+and killing time, and the two were soon smiling at each other over
+the exquisite preliminaries of a luncheon which the head-waiter had
+authoritatively asked Mrs. Gillow to “leave to him, as usual.”
+
+Ursula was in a good humour. It did not often happen; but when it did
+her benevolence knew no bounds.
+
+Like Mrs. Melrose, like all her tribe in fact, she was too much absorbed
+in her own affairs to give more than a passing thought to any one
+else’s; but she was delighted at the meeting with Susy, as her wandering
+kind always were when they ran across fellow-wanderers, unless the
+meeting happened to interfere with choicer pleasures. Not to be alone
+was the urgent thing; and Ursula, who had been forty-eight hours alone
+in London, at once exacted from her friend a promise that they should
+spend the rest of the day together. But once the bargain struck her mind
+turned again to her own affairs, and she poured out her confidences
+to Susy over a succession of dishes that manifested the head-waiter’s
+understanding of the case.
+
+Ursula’s confidences were always the same, though they were usually
+about a different person. She demolished and rebuilt her sentimental
+life with the same frequency and impetuosity as that with which she
+changed her dress-makers, did over her drawing-rooms, ordered new
+motors, altered the mounting of her jewels, and generally renewed the
+setting of her life. Susy knew in advance what the tale would be; but
+to listen to it over perfect coffee, an amber-scented cigarette at
+her lips, was pleasanter than consuming cold mutton alone in a mouldy
+coffee-room. The contrast was so soothing that she even began to take a
+languid interest in her friend’s narrative.
+
+After luncheon they got into the motor together and began a systematic
+round of the West End shops: furriers, jewellers and dealers in old
+furniture. Nothing could be more unlike Violet Melrose’s long hesitating
+sessions before the things she thought she wanted till the moment came
+to decide. Ursula pounced on silver foxes and old lacquer as promptly
+and decisively as on the objects of her surplus sentimentality: she knew
+at once what she wanted, and valued it more after it was hers.
+
+“And now--I wonder if you couldn’t help me choose a grand piano?” she
+suggested, as the last antiquarian bowed them out.
+
+“A piano?”
+
+“Yes: for Ruan. I’m sending one down for Grace Fulmer. She’s coming to
+stay... did I tell you? I want people to hear her. I want her to get
+engagements in London. My dear, she’s a Genius.”
+
+“A Genius--Grace!” Susy gasped. “I thought it was Nat....”
+
+“Nat--Nat Fulmer?” Ursula laughed derisively. “Ah, of course--you’ve been
+staying with that silly Violet! The poor thing is off her head about
+Nat--it’s really pitiful. Of course he has talent: I saw that long
+before Violet had ever heard of him. Why, on the opening day of the
+American Artists’ exhibition, last winter, I stopped short before his
+‘Spring Snow-Storm’ (which nobody else had noticed till that moment),
+and said to the Prince, who was with me: ‘The man has talent.’ But
+genius--why, it’s his wife who has genius! Have you never heard Grace
+play the violin? Poor Violet, as usual, is off on the wrong tack. I’ve
+given Fulmer my garden-house to do--no doubt Violet told you--because
+I wanted to help him. But Grace is my discovery, and I’m determined to
+make her known, and to have every one understand that she is the genius
+of the two. I’ve told her she simply must come to Ruan, and bring the
+best accompanyist she can find. You know poor Nerone is dreadfully bored
+by sport, though of course he goes out with the guns. And if one didn’t
+have a little art in the evening.... Oh, Susy, do you mean to tell me
+you don’t know how to choose a piano? I thought you were so fond of
+music!”
+
+“I am fond of it; but without knowing anything about it--in the way
+we’re all of us fond of the worthwhile things in our stupid set,”
+ she added to herself--since it was obviously useless to impart such
+reflections to Ursula.
+
+“But are you sure Grace is coming?” she questioned aloud.
+
+“Quite sure. Why shouldn’t she? I wired to her yesterday. I’m giving her
+a thousand dollars and all her expenses.”
+
+It was not till they were having tea in a Piccadilly tea-room that Mrs.
+Gillow began to manifest some interest in her companion’s plans. The
+thought of losing Susy became suddenly intolerable to her. The Prince,
+who did not see why he should be expected to linger in London out of
+season, was already at Ruan, and Ursula could not face the evening and
+the whole of the next day by herself.
+
+“But what are you doing in town, darling, I don’t remember if I’ve asked
+you,” she said, resting her firm elbows on the tea-table while she took
+a light from Susy’s cigarette.
+
+Susy hesitated. She had foreseen that the time must soon come when she
+should have to give some account of herself; and why should she not
+begin by telling Ursula?
+
+But telling her what?
+
+Her silence appeared to strike Mrs. Gillow as a reproach, and she
+continued with compunction: “And Nick? Nick’s with you? How is he, I
+thought you and he still were in Venice with Ellie Vanderlyn.”
+
+“We were, for a few weeks.” She steadied her voice. “It was delightful.
+But now we’re both on our own again--for a while.”
+
+Mrs. Gillow scrutinized her more searchingly. “Oh, you’re alone here,
+then; quite alone?”
+
+“Yes: Nick’s cruising with some friends in the Mediterranean.”
+
+Ursula’s shallow gaze deepened singularly. “But, Susy darling, then if
+you’re alone--and out of a job, just for the moment?”
+
+Susy smiled. “Well, I’m not sure.”
+
+“Oh, but if you are, darling, and you would come to Ruan! I know Fred
+asked you didn’t he? And he told me that both you and Nick had refused.
+He was awfully huffed at your not coming; but I suppose that was because
+Nick had other plans. We couldn’t have him now, because there’s no room
+for another gun; but since he’s not here, and you’re free, why you
+know, dearest, don’t you, how we’d love to have you? Fred would be too
+glad--too outrageously glad--but you don’t much mind Fred’s love-making,
+do you? And you’d be such a help to me--if that’s any argument! With
+that big house full of men, and people flocking over every night to
+dine, and Fred caring only for sport, and Nerone simply loathing it and
+ridiculing it, and not a minute to myself to try to keep him in a good
+humour.... Oh, Susy darling, don’t say no, but let me telephone at once
+for a place in the train to-morrow night!”
+
+Susy leaned back, letting the ash lengthen on her cigarette. How
+familiar, how hatefully familiar, was that old appeal! Ursula felt the
+pressing need of someone to flirt with Fred for a few weeks... and here
+was the very person she needed. Susy shivered at the thought. She had
+never really meant to go to Ruan. She had simply used the moor as a
+pretext when Violet Melrose had gently put her out of doors. Rather than
+do what Ursula asked she would borrow a few hundred pounds of Strefford,
+as he had suggested, and then look about for some temporary occupation
+until--
+
+Until she became Lady Altringham? Well, perhaps. At any rate, she was
+not going back to slave for Ursula.
+
+She shook her head with a faint smile. “I’m so sorry, Ursula: of course
+I want awfully to oblige you--”
+
+Mrs. Gillow’s gaze grew reproachful. “I should have supposed you would,”
+ she murmured. Susy, meeting her eyes, looked into them down a long vista
+of favours bestowed, and perceived that Ursula was not the woman to
+forget on which side the obligation lay between them.
+
+Susy hesitated: she remembered the weeks of ecstasy she had owed to the
+Gillows’ wedding cheque, and it hurt her to appear ungrateful.
+
+“If I could, Ursula... but really... I’m not free at the moment.” She
+paused, and then took an abrupt decision. “The fact is, I’m waiting here
+to see Strefford.”
+
+“Strefford’ Lord Altringham?” Ursula stared. “Ah, yes—I remember. You
+and he used to be great friends, didn’t you?” Her roving attention
+deepened.... But if Susy were waiting to see Lord Altringham--one of the
+richest men in England! Suddenly Ursula opened her gold-meshed bag and
+snatched a miniature diary from it.
+
+“But wait a moment--yes, it is next week! I knew it was next week he’s
+coming to Ruan! But, you darling, that makes everything all right.
+You’ll send him a wire at once, and come with me to-morrow, and meet him
+there instead of in this nasty sloppy desert.... Oh, Susy, if you knew
+how hard life is for me in Scotland between the Prince and Fred you
+couldn’t possibly say no!”
+
+Susy still wavered; but, after all, if Strefford were really bound
+for Ruan, why not see him there, agreeably and at leisure, instead of
+spending a dreary day with him in roaming the wet London streets, or
+screaming at him through the rattle of a restaurant orchestra? She knew
+he would not be likely to postpone his visit to Ruan in order to linger
+in London with her: such concessions had never been his way, and were
+less than ever likely to be, now that he could do so thoroughly and
+completely as he pleased.
+
+For the first time she fully understood how different his destiny had
+become. Now of course all his days and hours were mapped out in advance:
+invitations assailed him, opportunities pressed on him, he had only to
+choose.... And the women! She had never before thought of the women. All
+the girls in England would be wanting to marry him, not to mention her
+own enterprising compatriots. And there were the married women, who were
+even more to be feared. Streff might, for the time, escape marriage;
+though she could guess the power of persuasion, family pressure, all the
+converging traditional influences he had so often ridiculed, yet, as
+she knew, had never completely thrown off.... Yes, those quiet invisible
+women at Altringham--his uncle’s widow, his mother, the spinster
+sisters--it was not impossible that, with tact and patience--and the
+stupidest women could be tactful and patient on such occasions--they
+might eventually persuade him that it was his duty, they might put just
+the right young loveliness in his way.... But meanwhile, now, at
+once, there were the married women. Ah, they wouldn’t wait, they were
+doubtless laying their traps already! Susy shivered at the thought. She
+knew too much about the way the trick was done, had followed, too often,
+all the sinuosities of such approaches. Not that they were very sinuous
+nowadays: more often there was just a swoop and a pounce when the time
+came; but she knew all the arts and the wiles that led up to it. She
+knew them, oh, how she knew them--though with Streff, thank heaven, she
+had never been called upon to exercise them! His love was there for the
+asking: would she not be a fool to refuse it?
+
+Perhaps; though on that point her mind still wavered. But at any
+rate she saw that, decidedly, it would be better to yield to Ursula’s
+pressure; better to meet him at Ruan, in a congenial setting, where she
+would have time to get her bearings, observe what dangers threatened
+him, and make up her mind whether, after all, it was to be her mission
+to save him from the other women.
+
+“Well, if you like, then, Ursula....”
+
+“Oh, you angel, you! I’m so glad! We’ll go to the nearest post office,
+and send off the wire ourselves.”
+
+As they got into the motor Mrs. Gillow seized Susy’s arm with a pleading
+pressure. “And you will let Fred make love to you a little, won’t you,
+darling?”
+
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+
+
+“BUT I can’t think,” said Ellie Vanderlyn earnestly, “why you don’t
+announce your engagement before waiting for your divorce. People are
+beginning to do it, I assure you--it’s so much safer!”
+
+Mrs. Vanderlyn, on the way back from St. Moritz to England, had paused
+in Paris to renew the depleted wardrobe which, only two months earlier,
+had filled so many trunks to bursting. Other ladies, flocking there
+from all points of the globe for the same purpose, disputed with her
+the Louis XVI suites of the Nouveau Luxe, the pink-candled tables in
+the restaurant, the hours for trying-on at the dressmakers’; and just
+because they were so many, and all feverishly fighting to get the same
+things at the same time, they were all excited, happy and at ease. It
+was the most momentous period of the year: the height of the “dress
+makers’ season.”
+
+Mrs. Vanderlyn had run across Susy Lansing at one of the Rue de la Paix
+openings, where rows of ladies wan with heat and emotion sat for hours
+in rapt attention while spectral apparitions in incredible raiment
+tottered endlessly past them on aching feet.
+
+Distracted from the regal splendours of a chinchilla cloak by the
+sense that another lady was also examining it, Mrs. Vanderlyn turned in
+surprise at sight of Susy, whose head was critically bent above the fur.
+
+“Susy! I’d no idea you were here! I saw in the papers that you were with
+the Gillows.” The customary embraces followed; then Mrs. Vanderlyn,
+her eyes pursuing the matchless cloak as it disappeared down a vista of
+receding mannequins, interrogated sharply: “Are you shopping for Ursula?
+If you mean to order that cloak for her I’d rather know.”
+
+Susy smiled, and paused a moment before answering. During the pause
+she took in all the exquisite details of Ellie Vanderlyn’s perpetually
+youthful person, from the plumed crown of her head to the perfect arch
+of her patent-leather shoes. At last she said quietly: “No--to-day I’m
+shopping for myself.”
+
+“Yourself? Yourself?” Mrs. Vanderlyn echoed with a stare of incredulity.
+
+“Yes; just for a change,” Susy serenely acknowledged.
+
+“But the cloak--I meant the chinchilla cloak... the one with the ermine
+lining....”
+
+“Yes; it is awfully good, isn’t it? But I mean to look elsewhere before
+I decide.”
+
+Ah, how often she had heard her friends use that phrase; and how amusing
+it was, now, to see Ellie’s amazement as she heard it tossed off in
+her own tone of contemptuous satiety! Susy was becoming more and more
+dependent on such diversions; without them her days, crowded as they
+were, would nevertheless have dragged by heavily. But it still amused
+her to go to the big dressmakers’, watch the mannequins sweep by, and
+be seen by her friends superciliously examining all the most expensive
+dresses in the procession. She knew the rumour was abroad that she and
+Nick were to be divorced, and that Lord Altringham was “devoted” to her.
+She neither confirmed nor denied the report: she just let herself be
+luxuriously carried forward on its easy tide. But although it was now
+three months since Nick had left the Palazzo Vanderlyn she had not yet
+written to him--nor he to her.
+
+Meanwhile, in spite of all that she packed into them, the days passed
+more and more slowly, and the excitements she had counted on no longer
+excited her. Strefford was hers: she knew that he would marry her as
+soon as she was free. They had been together at Ruan for ten days, and
+after that she had motored south with him, stopping on the way to see
+Altringham, from which, at the moment, his mourning relatives were
+absent.
+
+At Altringham they had parted; and after one or two more visits in
+England she had come back to Paris, where he was now about to join her.
+After her few hours at Altringham she had understood that he would wait
+for her as long as was necessary: the fear of the “other women” had
+ceased to trouble her. But, perhaps for that very reason, the future
+seemed less exciting than she had expected. Sometimes she thought it
+was the sight of that great house which had overwhelmed her: it was
+too vast, too venerable, too like a huge monument built of ancient
+territorial traditions and obligations. Perhaps it had been lived in for
+too long by too many serious-minded and conscientious women: somehow she
+could not picture it invaded by bridge and debts and adultery. And yet
+that was what would have to be, of course... she could hardly picture
+either Strefford or herself continuing there the life of heavy county
+responsibilities, dull parties, laborious duties, weekly church-going,
+and presiding over local committees.... What a pity they couldn’t sell
+it and have a little house on the Thames!
+
+Nevertheless she was not sorry to let it be known that Altringham was
+hers when she chose to take it. At times she wondered whether Nick
+knew... whether rumours had reached him. If they had, he had only his
+own letter to thank for it. He had told her what course to pursue; and
+she was pursuing it.
+
+For a moment the meeting with Ellie Vanderlyn had been a shock to her;
+she had hoped never to see Ellie again. But now that they were actually
+face to face Susy perceived how dulled her sensibilities were. In a
+few moments she had grown used to Ellie, as she was growing used to
+everybody and to everything in the old life she had returned to. What
+was the use of making such a fuss about things? She and Mrs. Vanderlyn
+left the dress-maker’s together, and after an absorbing session at a new
+milliner’s were now taking tea in Ellie’s drawing-room at the Nouveau
+Luxe.
+
+Ellie, with her spoiled child’s persistency, had come back to the
+question of the chinchilla cloak. It was the only one she had seen that
+she fancied in the very least, and as she hadn’t a decent fur garment
+left to her name she was naturally in somewhat of a hurry... but, of
+course, if Susy had been choosing that model for a friend....
+
+Susy, leaning back against her cushions, examined through half-closed
+lids Mrs. Vanderlyn’s small delicately-restored countenance, which wore
+the same expression of childish eagerness as when she discoursed of the
+young Davenant of the moment. Once again Susy remarked that, in Ellie’s
+agitated existence, every interest appeared to be on exactly the same
+plane.
+
+“The poor shivering dear,” she answered laughing, “of course it shall
+have its nice warm winter cloak, and I’ll choose another one instead.”
+
+“Oh, you darling, you! If you would! Of course, whoever you were
+ordering it for need never know....”
+
+“Ah, you can’t comfort yourself with that, I’m afraid. I’ve already told
+you that I was ordering it for myself.” Susy paused to savour to the
+full Ellie’s look of blank bewilderment; then her amusement was checked
+by an indefinable change in her friend’s expression.
+
+“Oh, dearest--seriously? I didn’t know there was someone....”
+
+Susy flushed to the forehead. A horror of humiliation overwhelmed her.
+That Ellie should dare to think that of her--that anyone should dare to!
+
+“Someone buying chinchilla cloaks for me? Thanks!” she flared out. “I
+suppose I ought to be glad that the idea didn’t immediately occur to
+you. At least there was a decent interval of doubt....” She stood up,
+laughing again, and began to wander about the room. In the mirror above
+the mantel she caught sight of her flushed angry face, and of Mrs.
+Vanderlyn’s disconcerted stare. She turned toward her friend.
+
+“I suppose everybody else will think it if you do; so perhaps I’d better
+explain.” She paused, and drew a quick breath. “Nick and I mean to
+part--have parted, in fact. He’s decided that the whole thing was a
+mistake. He will probably; marry again soon--and so shall I.”
+
+She flung the avowal out breathlessly, in her nervous dread of letting
+Ellie Vanderlyn think for an instant longer that any other explanation
+was conceivable. She had not meant to be so explicit; but once the words
+were spoken she was not altogether sorry. Of course people would soon
+begin to wonder why she was again straying about the world alone; and
+since it was by Nick’s choice, why should she not say so? Remembering
+the burning anguish of those last hours in Venice she asked herself what
+possible consideration she owed to the man who had so humbled her.
+
+Ellie Vanderlyn glanced at her in astonishment. “You? You and Nick--are
+going to part?” A light appeared to dawn on her. “Ah--then that’s why he
+sent me back my pin, I suppose?”
+
+“Your pin?” Susy wondered, not at once remembering.
+
+“The poor little scarf-pin I gave him before I left Venice. He sent it
+back almost at once, with the oddest note--just: ‘I haven’t earned it,
+really.’ I couldn’t think why he didn’t care for the pin. But, now I
+suppose it was because you and he had quarrelled; though really, even
+so, I can’t see why he should bear me a grudge....”
+
+Susy’s quick blood surged up. Nick had sent back the pin--the fatal pin!
+And she, Susy, had kept the bracelet--locked it up out of sight, shrunk
+away from the little packet whenever her hand touched it in packing or
+unpacking--but never thought of returning it, no, not once! Which of the
+two, she wondered, had been right? Was it not an indirect slight to her
+that Nick should fling back the gift to poor uncomprehending Ellie? Or
+was it not rather another proof of his finer moral sensitiveness!...
+And how could one tell, in their bewildering world, “It was not because
+we’ve quarrelled; we haven’t quarrelled,” she said slowly, moved by the
+sudden desire to defend her privacy and Nick’s, to screen from every
+eye their last bitter hour together. “We’ve simply decided that our
+experiment was impossible--for two paupers.”
+
+“Ah, well--of course we all felt that at the time. And now somebody else
+wants to marry you! And it’s your trousseau you were choosing that cloak
+for?” Ellie cried in incredulous rapture; then she flung her arms about
+Susy’s shrinking shoulders. “You lucky lucky girl! You clever clever
+darling! But who on earth can he be?”
+
+And it was then that Susy, for the first time, had pronounced the name
+of Lord Altringham.
+
+“Streff--Streff? Our dear old Streff, You mean to say he wants to marry
+you?” As the news took possession of her mind Ellie became dithyrambic.
+“But, my dearest, what a miracle of luck! Of course I always knew he
+was awfully gone on you: Fred Davenant used to say so, I remember... and
+even Nelson, who’s so stupid about such things, noticed it in Venice....
+But then it was so different. No one could possibly have thought of
+marrying him then; whereas now of course every woman is trying for him.
+Oh, Susy, whatever you do, don’t miss your chance! You can’t conceive
+of the wicked plotting and intriguing there will be to get him--on all
+sides, and even where one least suspects it. You don’t know what horrors
+women will do--and even girls!” A shudder ran through her at the thought,
+and she caught Susy’s wrists in vehement fingers. “But I can’t think,
+my dear, why you don’t announce your engagement at once. People are
+beginning to do it, I assure you--it’s so much safer!”
+
+Susy looked at her, wondering. Not a word of sympathy for the ruin of
+her brief bliss, not even a gleam of curiosity as to its cause! No
+doubt Ellie Vanderlyn, like all Susy’s other friends, had long since
+“discounted” the brevity of her dream, and perhaps planned a sequel to
+it before she herself had seen the glory fading. She and Nick had spent
+the greater part of their few weeks together under Ellie Vanderlyn’s
+roof; but to Ellie, obviously, the fact meant no more than her own
+escapade, at the same moment, with young Davenant’s supplanter--the
+“bounder” whom Strefford had never named. Her one thought for her friend
+was that Susy should at last secure her prize--her incredible prize. And
+therein at any rate Ellie showed the kind of cold disinterestedness that
+raised her above the smiling perfidy of the majority of her kind. At
+least her advice was sincere; and perhaps it was wise. Why should Susy
+not let every one know that she meant to marry Strefford as soon as the
+“formalities” were fulfilled?
+
+She did not immediately answer Mrs. Vanderlyn’s question; and the
+latter, repeating it, added impatiently: “I don’t understand you; if
+Nick agrees--”
+
+“Oh, he agrees,” said Susy.
+
+“Then what more do you want! Oh, Susy, if you’d only follow my example!”
+
+“Your example?” Susy paused, weighed the word, was struck by something
+embarrassed, arch yet half-apologetic in her friend’s expression. “Your
+example?” she repeated. “Why, Ellie, what on earth do you mean? Not that
+you’re going to part from poor Nelson?”
+
+Mrs. Vanderlyn met her reproachful gaze with a crystalline glance. “I
+don’t want to, heaven knows--poor dear Nelson! I assure you I simply
+hate it. He’s always such an angel to Clarissa... and then we’re used
+to each other. But what in the world am I to do? Algie’s so rich, so
+appallingly rich, that I have to be perpetually on the watch to keep
+other women away from him--and it’s too exhausting....”
+
+“Algie?”
+
+Mrs. Vanderlyn’s lovely eyebrows rose. “Algie: Algie Bockheimer. Didn’t
+you know, I think he said you’ve dined with his parents. Nobody else in
+the world is as rich as the Bockheimers; and Algie’s their only
+child. Yes, it was with him... with him I was so dreadfully happy last
+spring... and now I’m in mortal terror of losing him. And I do assure
+you there’s no other way of keeping them, when they’re as hideously rich
+as that!”
+
+Susy rose to her feet. A little shudder ran over her. She remembered,
+now, having seen Algie Bockheimer at one of his parents’ first
+entertainments, in their newly-inaugurated marble halls in Fifth Avenue.
+She recalled his too faultless clothes and his small glossy furtive
+countenance. She looked at Ellie Vanderlyn with sudden scorn.
+
+“I think you’re abominable,” she exclaimed.
+
+The other’s perfect little face collapsed. “A-bo-minable? A-bo-mi-nable?
+Susy!”
+
+“Yes... with Nelson... and Clarissa... and your past together... and all
+the money you can possibly want... and that man! Abominable.”
+
+Ellie stood up trembling: she was not used to scenes, and they
+disarranged her thoughts as much as her complexion.
+
+“You’re very cruel, Susy--so cruel and dreadful that I hardly know how
+to answer you,” she stammered. “But you simply don’t know what you’re
+talking about. As if anybody ever had all the money they wanted!” She
+wiped her dark-rimmed eyes with a cautious handkerchief, glanced at
+herself in the mirror, and added magnanimously: “But I shall try to
+forget what you’ve said.”
+
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+
+
+JUST such a revolt as she had felt as a girl, such a disgusted recoil
+from the standards and ideals of everybody about her as had flung her
+into her mad marriage with Nick, now flamed in Susy Lansing’s bosom.
+
+How could she ever go back into that world again? How echo its
+appraisals of life and bow down to its judgments? Alas, it was only
+by marrying according to its standards that she could escape such
+subjection. Perhaps the same thought had actuated Nick: perhaps he had
+understood sooner than she that to attain moral freedom they must both
+be above material cares. Perhaps...
+
+Her talk with Ellie Vanderlyn had left Susy so oppressed and humiliated
+that she almost shrank from her meeting with Altringham the next day.
+She knew that he was coming to Paris for his final answer; he would wait
+as long as was necessary if only she would consent to take immediate
+steps for a divorce. She was staying at a modest hotel in the Faubourg
+St. Germain, and had once more refused his suggestion that they should
+lunch at the Nouveau Luxe, or at some fashionable restaurant of the
+Boulevards. As before, she insisted on going to an out-of-the-way place
+near the Luxembourg, where the prices were moderate enough for her own
+purse.
+
+“I can’t understand,” Strefford objected, as they turned from her hotel
+door toward this obscure retreat, “why you insist on giving me bad food,
+and depriving me of the satisfaction of being seen with you. Why must we
+be so dreadfully clandestine? Don’t people know by this time that we’re
+to be married?”
+
+Susy winced a little: she wondered if the word would always sound so
+unnatural on his lips.
+
+“No,” she said, with a laugh, “they simply think, for the present, that
+you’re giving me pearls and chinchilla cloaks.”
+
+He wrinkled his brows good-humouredly. “Well, so I would, with joy--at
+this particular minute. Don’t you think perhaps you’d better take
+advantage of it? I don’t wish to insist--but I foresee that I’m much too
+rich not to become stingy.”
+
+She gave a slight shrug. “At present there’s nothing I loathe more than
+pearls and chinchilla, or anything else in the world that’s expensive
+and enviable....”
+
+Suddenly she broke off, colouring with the consciousness that she had
+said exactly the kind of thing that all the women who were trying for
+him (except the very cleverest) would be sure to say; and that he
+would certainly suspect her of attempting the conventional comedy of
+disinterestedness, than which nothing was less likely to deceive or to
+flatter him.
+
+His twinkling eyes played curiously over her face, and she went on,
+meeting them with a smile: “But don’t imagine, all the same, that if I
+should... decide... it would be altogether for your beaux yeux....”
+
+He laughed, she thought, rather drily. “No,” he said, “I don’t suppose
+that’s ever likely to happen to me again.”
+
+“Oh, Streff--” she faltered with compunction. It was odd--once upon a
+time she had known exactly what to say to the man of the moment, whoever
+he was, and whatever kind of talk he required; she had even, in the
+difficult days before her marriage, reeled off glibly enough the sort
+of lime-light sentimentality that plunged poor Fred Gillow into such
+speechless beatitude. But since then she had spoken the language of real
+love, looked with its eyes, embraced with its hands; and now the other
+trumpery art had failed her, and she was conscious of bungling and
+groping like a beginner under Strefford’s ironic scrutiny.
+
+They had reached their obscure destination and he opened the door and
+glanced in.
+
+“It’s jammed--not a table. And stifling! Where shall we go? Perhaps they
+could give us a room to ourselves--” he suggested.
+
+She assented, and they were led up a cork-screw staircase to a
+squat-ceilinged closet lit by the arched top of a high window, the lower
+panes of which served for the floor below. Strefford opened the window,
+and Susy, throwing her cloak on the divan, leaned on the balcony while
+he ordered luncheon.
+
+On the whole she was glad they were to be alone. Just because she
+felt so sure of Strefford it seemed ungenerous to keep him longer in
+suspense. The moment had come when they must have a decisive talk, and
+in the crowded rooms below it would have been impossible.
+
+Strefford, when the waiter had brought the first course and left them
+to themselves, made no effort to revert to personal matters. He turned
+instead to the topic always most congenial to him: the humours and
+ironies of the human comedy, as presented by his own particular group.
+His malicious commentary on life had always amused Susy because of the
+shrewd flashes of philosophy he shed on the social antics they had
+so often watched together. He was in fact the one person she knew
+(excepting Nick) who was in the show and yet outside of it; and she was
+surprised, as the talk proceeded, to find herself so little interested
+in his scraps of gossip, and so little amused by his comments on them.
+
+With an inward shrug of discouragement she said to herself that probably
+nothing would ever really amuse her again; then, as she listened, she
+began to understand that her disappointment arose from the fact that
+Strefford, in reality, could not live without these people whom he
+saw through and satirized, and that the rather commonplace scandals he
+narrated interested him as much as his own racy considerations on them;
+and she was filled with terror at the thought that the inmost core of
+the richly-decorated life of the Countess of Altringham would be just
+as poor and low-ceilinged a place as the little room in which he and she
+now sat, elbow to elbow yet so unapproachably apart.
+
+If Strefford could not live without these people, neither could she and
+Nick; but for reasons how different! And if his opportunities had
+been theirs, what a world they would have created for themselves! Such
+imaginings were vain, and she shrank back from them into the present.
+After all, as Lady Altringham she would have the power to create that
+world which she and Nick had dreamed... only she must create it alone.
+Well, that was probably the law of things. All human happiness was thus
+conditioned and circumscribed, and hers, no doubt, must always be of the
+lonely kind, since material things did not suffice for it, even though
+it depended on them as Grace Fulmer’s, for instance, never had. Yet even
+Grace Fulmer had succumbed to Ursula’s offer, and had arrived at Ruan
+the day before Susy left, instead of going to Spain with her husband
+and Violet Melrose. But then Grace was making the sacrifice for her
+children, and somehow one had the feeling that in giving up her liberty
+she was not surrendering a tittle of herself. All the difference was
+there....
+
+“How I do bore you!” Susy heard Strefford exclaim. She became aware
+that she had not been listening: stray echoes of names of places and
+people--Violet Melrose, Ursula, Prince Altineri, others of their group
+and persuasion--had vainly knocked at her barricaded brain; what had he
+been telling her about them? She turned to him and their eyes met; his
+were full of a melancholy irony.
+
+“Susy, old girl, what’s wrong?”
+
+She pulled herself together. “I was thinking, Streff, just now--when I
+said I hated the very sound of pearls and chinchilla--how impossible
+it was that you should believe me; in fact, what a blunder I’d made in
+saying it.”
+
+He smiled. “Because it was what so many other women might be likely to
+say so awfully unoriginal, in fact?”
+
+She laughed for sheer joy at his insight. “It’s going to be easier than
+I imagined,” she thought. Aloud she rejoined: “Oh, Streff--how you’re
+always going to find me out! Where on earth shall I ever hide from you?”
+
+“Where?” He echoed her laugh, laying his hand lightly on hers. “In my
+heart, I’m afraid.”
+
+In spite of the laugh his accent shook her: something about it took
+all the mockery from his retort, checked on her lips the: “What? A
+valentine!” and made her suddenly feel that, if he were afraid, so was
+she. Yet she was touched also, and wondered half exultingly if any
+other woman had ever caught that particular deep inflexion of his shrill
+voice. She had never liked him as much as at that moment; and she said
+to herself, with an odd sense of detachment, as if she had been rather
+breathlessly observing the vacillations of someone whom she longed to
+persuade but dared not: “Now--NOW, if he speaks, I shall say yes!”
+
+He did not speak; but abruptly, and as startlingly to her as if she
+had just dropped from a sphere whose inhabitants had other methods of
+expressing their sympathy, he slipped his arm around her and bent his
+keen ugly melting face to hers....
+
+It was the lightest touch--in an instant she was free again. But
+something within her gasped and resisted long after his arm and his lips
+were gone, and he was proceeding, with a too-studied ease, to light a
+cigarette and sweeten his coffee.
+
+He had kissed her.... Well, naturally: why not? It was not the first
+time she had been kissed. It was true that one didn’t habitually
+associate Streff with such demonstrations; but she had not that excuse
+for surprise, for even in Venice she had begun to notice that he looked
+at her differently, and avoided her hand when he used to seek it.
+
+No--she ought not to have been surprised; nor ought a kiss to have been
+so disturbing. Such incidents had punctuated the career of Susy Branch:
+there had been, in particular, in far-off discarded times, Fred Gillow’s
+large but artless embraces. Well--nothing of that kind had seemed of
+any more account than the click of a leaf in a woodland walk. It had
+all been merely epidermal, ephemeral, part of the trivial accepted
+“business” of the social comedy. But this kiss of Strefford’s was what
+Nick’s had been, under the New Hampshire pines, on the day that had
+decided their fate. It was a kiss with a future in it: like a
+ring slipped upon her soul. And now, in the dreadful pause that
+followed--while Strefford fidgeted with his cigarette-case and rattled
+the spoon in his cup, Susy remembered what she had seen through the
+circle of Nick’s kiss: that blue illimitable distance which was at once
+the landscape at their feet and the future in their souls....
+
+Perhaps that was what Strefford’s sharply narrowed eyes were seeing now,
+that same illimitable distance that she had lost forever--perhaps he was
+saying to himself, as she had said to herself when her lips left Nick’s:
+“Each time we kiss we shall see it all again....” Whereas all she
+herself had felt was the gasping recoil from Strefford’s touch, and an
+intenser vision of the sordid room in which he and she sat, and of their
+two selves, more distant from each other than if their embrace had been
+a sudden thrusting apart....
+
+The moment prolonged itself, and they sat numb. How long had it lasted?
+How long ago was it that she had thought: “It’s going to be easier than
+I imagined”? Suddenly she felt Strefford’s queer smile upon her, and saw
+in his eyes a look, not of reproach or disappointment, but of deep and
+anxious comprehension. Instead of being angry or hurt, he had seen, he
+had understood, he was sorry for her!
+
+Impulsively she slipped her hand into his, and they sat silent for
+another moment. Then he stood up and took her cloak from the divan.
+“Shall we go now! I’ve got cards for the private view of the Reynolds
+exhibition at the Petit Palais. There are some portraits from
+Altringham. It might amuse you.”
+
+In the taxi she had time, through their light rattle of talk, to
+readjust herself and drop back into her usual feeling of friendly ease
+with him. He had been extraordinarily considerate, for anyone who always
+so undisguisedly sought his own satisfaction above all things; and
+if his considerateness were just an indirect way of seeking that
+satisfaction now, well, that proved how much he cared for her, how
+necessary to his happiness she had become. The sense of power was
+undeniably pleasant; pleasanter still was the feeling that someone
+really needed her, that the happiness of the man at her side depended
+on her yes or no. She abandoned herself to the feeling, forgetting the
+abysmal interval of his caress, or at least saying to herself that in
+time she would forget it, that really there was nothing to make a fuss
+about in being kissed by anyone she liked as much as Streff....
+
+She had guessed at once why he was taking her to see the Reynoldses.
+Fashionable and artistic Paris had recently discovered English
+eighteenth century art. The principal collections of England had yielded
+up their best examples of the great portrait painter’s work, and the
+private view at the Petit Palais was to be the social event of the
+afternoon. Everybody--Strefford’s everybody and Susy’s--was sure to
+be there; and these, as she knew, were the occasions that revived
+Strefford’s intermittent interest in art. He really liked picture shows
+as much as the races, if one could be sure of seeing as many people
+there. With Nick how different it would have been! Nick hated openings
+and varnishing days, and worldly aesthetics in general; he would have
+waited till the tide of fashion had ebbed, and slipped off with Susy to
+see the pictures some morning when they were sure to have the place to
+themselves.
+
+But Susy divined that there was another reason for Strefford’s
+suggestion. She had never yet shown herself with him publicly, among
+their own group of people: now he had determined that she should do
+so, and she knew why. She had humbled his pride; he had understood, and
+forgiven her. But she still continued to treat him as she had always
+treated the Strefford of old, Charlie Strefford, dear old negligible
+impecunious Streff; and he wanted to show her, ever so casually and
+adroitly, that the man who had asked her to marry him was no longer
+Strefford, but Lord Altringham.
+
+At the very threshold, his Ambassador’s greeting marked the difference:
+it was followed, wherever they turned, by ejaculations of welcome from
+the rulers of the world they moved in. Everybody rich enough or titled
+enough, or clever enough or stupid enough, to have forced a way into the
+social citadel, was there, waving and flag-flying from the battlements;
+and to all of them Lord Altringham had become a marked figure. During
+their slow progress through the dense mass of important people who made
+the approach to the pictures so well worth fighting for, he never left
+Susy’s side, or failed to make her feel herself a part of his triumphal
+advance. She heard her name mentioned: “Lansing--a Mrs. Lansing--an
+American... Susy Lansing? Yes, of course.... You remember her? At
+Newport, At St. Moritz? Exactly.... Divorced already? They say so...
+Susy darling! I’d no idea you were here... and Lord Altringham! You’ve
+forgotten me, I know, Lord Altringham.... Yes, last year, in Cairo... or
+at Newport... or in Scotland ... Susy, dearest, when will you bring Lord
+Altringham to dine? Any night that you and he are free I’ll arrange to
+be....”
+
+“You and he”: they were “you and he” already!
+
+“Ah, there’s one of them--of my great-grandmothers,” Strefford
+explained, giving a last push that drew him and Susy to the front rank,
+before a tall isolated portrait which, by sheer majesty of presentment,
+sat in its great carved golden frame as on a throne above the other
+pictures.
+
+Susy read on the scroll beneath it: “The Hon’ble Diana Lefanu, fifteenth
+Countess of Altringham”--and heard Strefford say: “Do you remember? It
+hangs where you noticed the empty space above the mantel-piece, in the
+Vandyke room. They say Reynolds stipulated that it should be put with
+the Vandykes.”
+
+She had never before heard him speak of his possessions, whether
+ancestral or merely material, in just that full and satisfied tone of
+voice: the rich man’s voice. She saw that he was already feeling the
+influence of his surroundings, that he was glad the portrait of a
+Countess of Altringham should occupy the central place in the principal
+room of the exhibition, that the crowd about it should be denser there
+than before any of the other pictures, and that he should be standing
+there with Susy, letting her feel, and letting all the people about
+them guess, that the day she chose she could wear the same name as his
+pictured ancestress.
+
+On the way back to her hotel, Strefford made no farther allusion to
+their future; they chatted like old comrades in their respective corners
+of the taxi. But as the carriage stopped at her door he said: “I must go
+back to England the day after to-morrow, worse luck! Why not dine with
+me to-night at the Nouveau Luxe? I’ve got to have the Ambassador and
+Lady Ascot, with their youngest girl and my old Dunes aunt, the Dowager
+Duchess, who’s over here hiding from her creditors; but I’ll try to get
+two or three amusing men to leaven the lump. We might go on to a boite
+afterward, if you’re bored. Unless the dancing amuses you more....”
+
+She understood that he had decided to hasten his departure rather than
+linger on in uncertainty; she also remembered having heard the Ascots’
+youngest daughter, Lady Joan Senechal, spoken of as one of the prettiest
+girls of the season; and she recalled the almost exaggerated warmth of
+the Ambassador’s greeting at the private view.
+
+“Of course I’ll come, Streff dear!” she cried, with an effort at gaiety
+that sounded successful to her own strained ears, and reflected itself
+in the sudden lighting up of his face.
+
+She waved a good-bye from the step, saying to herself, as she looked
+after him: “He’ll drive me home to-night, and I shall say ‘yes’; and
+then he’ll kiss me again. But the next time it won’t be nearly as
+disagreeable.”
+
+She turned into the hotel, glanced automatically at the empty
+pigeon-hole for letters under her key-hook, and mounted the stairs
+following the same train of images. “Yes, I shall say ‘yes’ to-night,”
+ she repeated firmly, her hand on the door of her room. “That is, unless,
+they’ve brought up a letter....” She never re-entered the hotel without
+imagining that the letter she had not found below had already been
+brought up.
+
+Opening the door, she turned on the light and sprang to the table on
+which her correspondence sometimes awaited her.
+
+There was no letter; but the morning papers, still unread, lay at hand,
+and glancing listlessly down the column which chronicles the doings of
+society, she read:
+
+“After an extended cruise in the AEgean and the Black Sea on their
+steam-yacht Ibis, Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer Hicks and their daughter are
+established at the Nouveau Luxe in Rome. They have lately had the honour
+of entertaining at dinner the Reigning Prince of Teutoburger-Waldhain
+and his mother the Princess Dowager, with their suite. Among those
+invited to meet their Serene Highnesses were the French and Spanish
+Ambassadors, the Duchesse de Vichy, Prince and Princess Bagnidilucca,
+Lady Penelope Pantiles--” Susy’s eye flew impatiently on over the long
+list of titles--“and Mr. Nicholas Lansing of New York, who has been
+cruising with Mr. and Mrs. Hicks on the Ibis for the last few months.”
+
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+
+
+THE Mortimer Hickses were in Rome; not, as they would in former times
+have been, in one of the antiquated hostelries of the Piazza di Spagna
+or the Porta del Popolo, where of old they had so gaily defied fever
+and nourished themselves on local colour; but spread out, with all the
+ostentation of philistine millionaires, under the piano nobile ceilings
+of one of the high-perched “Palaces,” where, as Mrs. Hicks shamelessly
+declared, they could “rely on the plumbing,” and “have the privilege of
+over-looking the Queen Mother’s Gardens.”
+
+It was that speech, uttered with beaming aplomb at a dinner-table
+surrounded by the cosmopolitan nobility of the Eternal City, that had
+suddenly revealed to Lansing the profound change in the Hicks point of
+view.
+
+As he looked back over the four months since he had so unexpectedly
+joined the Ibis at Genoa, he saw that the change, at first insidious
+and unperceived, dated from the ill-fated day when the Hickses had run
+across a Reigning Prince on his travels.
+
+Hitherto they had been proof against such perils: both Mr. and Mrs.
+Hicks had often declared that the aristocracy of the intellect was the
+only one which attracted them. But in this case the Prince possessed an
+intellect, in addition to his few square miles of territory, and to one
+of the most beautiful Field Marshal’s uniforms that had ever encased a
+royal warrior. The Prince was not a warrior, however; he was stooping,
+pacific and spectacled, and his possession of the uniform had been
+revealed to Mrs. Hicks only by the gift of a full-length photograph in
+a Bond Street frame, with Anastasius written slantingly across its
+legs. The Prince--and herein lay the Hickses’ undoing--the Prince was
+an archaeologist: an earnest anxious enquiring and scrupulous
+archaeologist. Delicate health (so his suite hinted) banished him for
+a part of each year from his cold and foggy principality; and in the
+company of his mother, the active and enthusiastic Dowager Princess, he
+wandered from one Mediterranean shore to another, now assisting at
+the exhumation of Ptolemaic mummies, now at the excavation of Delphic
+temples or of North African basilicas. The beginning of winter usually
+brought the Prince and his mother to Rome or Nice, unless indeed they
+were summoned by family duties to Berlin, Vienna or Madrid; for an
+extended connection with the principal royal houses of Europe compelled
+them, as the Princess Mother said, to be always burying or marrying a
+cousin. At other moments they were seldom seen in the glacial atmosphere
+of courts, preferring to royal palaces those of the other, and more
+modern type, in one of which the Hickses were now lodged.
+
+Yes: the Prince and his mother (they gaily avowed it) revelled in Palace
+Hotels; and, being unable to afford the luxury of inhabiting them,
+they liked, as often as possible, to be invited to dine there by their
+friends--“or even to tea, my dear,” the Princess laughingly avowed,
+“for I’m so awfully fond of buttered scones; and Anastasius gives me so
+little to eat in the desert.”
+
+The encounter with these ambulant Highnesses had been fatal--Lansing
+now perceived it--to Mrs. Hicks’s principles. She had known a great many
+archaeologists, but never one as agreeable as the Prince, and above
+all never one who had left a throne to camp in the desert and delve in
+Libyan tombs. And it seemed to her infinitely pathetic that these two
+gifted beings, who grumbled when they had to go to “marry a cousin” at
+the Palace of St. James or of Madrid, and hastened back breathlessly to
+the far-off point where, metaphorically speaking, pick-axe and spade had
+dropped from their royal hands--that these heirs of the ages should be
+unable to offer themselves the comforts of up-to-date hotel life, and
+should enjoy themselves “like babies” when they were invited to the
+other kind of “Palace,” to feast on buttered scones and watch the tango.
+
+She simply could not bear the thought of their privations; and neither,
+after a time, could Mr. Hicks, who found the Prince more democratic than
+anyone he had ever known at Apex City, and was immensely interested by
+the fact that their spectacles came from the same optician.
+
+But it was, above all, the artistic tendencies of the Prince and his
+mother which had conquered the Hickses. There was fascination in the
+thought that, among the rabble of vulgar uneducated royalties who
+overran Europe from Biarritz to the Engadine, gambling, tangoing,
+and sponging on no less vulgar plebeians, they, the unobtrusive
+and self-respecting Hickses, should have had the luck to meet this
+cultivated pair, who joined them in gentle ridicule of their own
+frivolous kinsfolk, and whose tastes were exactly those of the
+eccentric, unreliable and sometimes money-borrowing persons who had
+hitherto represented the higher life to the Hickses.
+
+Now at last Mrs. Hicks saw the possibility of being at once artistic and
+luxurious, of surrendering herself to the joys of modern plumbing and
+yet keeping the talk on the highest level. “If the poor dear Princess
+wants to dine at the Nouveau Luxe why shouldn’t we give her that
+pleasure?” Mrs. Hicks smilingly enquired; “and as for enjoying her
+buttered scones like a baby, as she says, I think it’s the sweetest
+thing about her.”
+
+Coral Hicks did not join in this chorus; but she accepted, with her
+curious air of impartiality, the change in her parents’ manner of life,
+and for the first time (as Nick observed) occupied herself with her
+mother’s toilet, with the result that Mrs. Hicks’s outline became
+firmer, her garments soberer in hue and finer in material; so that,
+should anyone chance to detect the daughter’s likeness to her mother,
+the result was less likely to be disturbing.
+
+Such precautions were the more needful--Lansing could not but note
+because of the different standards of the society in which the Hickses
+now moved. For it was a curious fact that admission to the intimacy of
+the Prince and his mother--who continually declared themselves to be
+the pariahs, the outlaws, the Bohemians among crowned heads nevertheless
+involved not only living in Palace Hotels but mixing with those who
+frequented them. The Prince’s aide-de-camp--an agreeable young man of
+easy manners--had smilingly hinted that their Serene Highnesses, though
+so thoroughly democratic and unceremonious, were yet accustomed to
+inspecting in advance the names of the persons whom their hosts wished
+to invite with them; and Lansing noticed that Mrs. Hicks’s lists,
+having been “submitted,” usually came back lengthened by the addition of
+numerous wealthy and titled guests. Their Highnesses never struck out
+a name; they welcomed with enthusiasm and curiosity the Hickses’ oddest
+and most inexplicable friends, at most putting off some of them to a
+later day on the plea that it would be “cosier” to meet them on a more
+private occasion; but they invariably added to the list any friends of
+their own, with the gracious hint that they wished these latter (though
+socially so well-provided for) to have the “immense privilege” of
+knowing the Hickses. And thus it happened that when October gales
+necessitated laying up the Ibis, the Hickses, finding again in Rome
+the august travellers from whom they had parted the previous month in
+Athens, also found their visiting-list enlarged by all that the capital
+contained of fashion.
+
+It was true enough, as Lansing had not failed to note, that the Princess
+Mother adored prehistoric art, and Russian music, and the paintings of
+Gauguin and Matisse; but she also, and with a beaming unconsciousness
+of perspective, adored large pearls and powerful motors, caravan tea and
+modern plumbing, perfumed cigarettes and society scandals; and her son,
+while apparently less sensible to these forms of luxury, adored his
+mother, and was charmed to gratify her inclinations without cost to
+himself--“Since poor Mamma,” as he observed, “is so courageous when we
+are roughing it in the desert.”
+
+The smiling aide-de-camp, who explained these things to Lansing,
+added with an intenser smile that the Prince and his mother were under
+obligations, either social or cousinly, to most of the titled persons
+whom they begged Mrs. Hicks to invite; “and it seems to their Serene
+Highnesses,” he added, “the most flattering return they can make for
+the hospitality of their friends to give them such an intellectual
+opportunity.”
+
+The dinner-table at which their Highnesses’ friends were seated on
+the evening in question represented, numerically, one of the greatest
+intellectual opportunities yet afforded them. Thirty guests were grouped
+about the flower-wreathed board, from which Eldorada and Mr. Beck had
+been excluded on the plea that the Princess Mother liked cosy parties
+and begged her hosts that there should never be more than thirty
+at table. Such, at least, was the reason given by Mrs. Hicks to her
+faithful followers; but Lansing had observed that, of late, the same
+skilled hand which had refashioned the Hickses’ social circle usually
+managed to exclude from it the timid presences of the two secretaries.
+Their banishment was the more displeasing to Lansing from the fact that,
+for the last three months, he had filled Mr. Buttles’s place, and was
+himself their salaried companion. But since he had accepted the post,
+his obvious duty was to fill it in accordance with his employers’
+requirements; and it was clear even to Eldorada and Mr. Beck that
+he had, as Eldorada ungrudgingly said, “Something of Mr. Buttles’s
+marvellous social gifts.”
+
+During the cruise his task had not been distasteful to him. He was glad
+of any definite duties, however trivial, he felt more independent as the
+Hickses’ secretary than as their pampered guest, and the large cheque
+which Mr. Hicks handed over to him on the first of each month refreshed
+his languishing sense of self-respect.
+
+He considered himself absurdly over-paid, but that was the Hickses’
+affair; and he saw nothing humiliating in being in the employ of people
+he liked and respected. But from the moment of the ill-fated encounter
+with the wandering Princes, his position had changed as much as that
+of his employers. He was no longer, to Mr. and Mrs. Hicks, a useful and
+estimable assistant, on the same level as Eldorada and Mr. Beck; he had
+become a social asset of unsuspected value, equalling Mr. Buttles in
+his capacity for dealing with the mysteries of foreign etiquette, and
+surpassing him in the art of personal attraction. Nick Lansing, the
+Hickses found, already knew most of the Princess Mother’s rich and
+aristocratic friends. Many of them hailed him with enthusiastic “Old
+Nicks”, and he was almost as familiar as His Highness’s own aide-de-camp
+with all those secret ramifications of love and hate that made
+dinner-giving so much more of a science in Rome than at Apex City.
+
+Mrs. Hicks, at first, had hopelessly lost her way in this labyrinth of
+subterranean scandals, rivalries and jealousies; and finding Lansing’s
+hand within reach she clung to it with pathetic tenacity. But if
+the young man’s value had risen in the eyes of his employers it had
+deteriorated in his own. He was condemned to play a part he had
+not bargained for, and it seemed to him more degrading when paid in
+bank-notes than if his retribution had consisted merely in good dinners
+and luxurious lodgings. The first time the smiling aide-de-camp had
+caught his eye over a verbal slip of Mrs. Hicks’s, Nick had flushed to
+the forehead and gone to bed swearing that he would chuck his job the
+next day.
+
+Two months had passed since then, and he was still the paid secretary.
+He had contrived to let the aide-de-camp feel that he was too deficient
+in humour to be worth exchanging glances with; but even this had not
+restored his self-respect, and on the evening in question, as he looked
+about the long table, he said to himself for the hundredth time that he
+would give up his position on the morrow.
+
+Only--what was the alternative? The alternative, apparently, was Coral
+Hicks. He glanced down the line of diners, beginning with the tall lean
+countenance of the Princess Mother, with its small inquisitive eyes
+perched as high as attic windows under a frizzled thatch of hair and a
+pediment of uncleaned diamonds; passed on to the vacuous and overfed
+or fashionably haggard masks of the ladies next in rank; and finally
+caught, between branching orchids, a distant glimpse of Miss Hicks.
+
+In contrast with the others, he thought, she looked surprisingly noble.
+Her large grave features made her appear like an old monument in a
+street of Palace Hotels; and he marvelled at the mysterious law which
+had brought this archaic face out of Apex City, and given to the oldest
+society of Europe a look of such mixed modernity.
+
+Lansing perceived that the aide-de-camp, who was his neighbour, was also
+looking at Miss Hicks. His expression was serious, and even thoughtful;
+but as his eyes met Lansing’s he readjusted his official smile.
+
+“I was admiring our hostess’s daughter. Her absence of jewels is--er--an
+inspiration,” he remarked in the confidential tone which Lansing had
+come to dread.
+
+“Oh, Miss Hicks is full of inspirations,” he returned curtly, and the
+aide-de-camp bowed with an admiring air, as if inspirations were rarer
+than pearls, as in his milieu they undoubtedly were. “She is the equal
+of any situation, I am sure,” he replied; and then abandoned the subject
+with one of his automatic transitions.
+
+After dinner, in the embrasure of a drawing-room window, he surprised
+Nick by returning to the same topic, and this time without thinking it
+needful to readjust his smile. His face remained serious, though his
+manner was studiously informal.
+
+“I was admiring, at dinner, Miss Hicks’s invariable sense of
+appropriateness. It must permit her friends to foresee for her almost
+any future, however exalted.”
+
+Lansing hesitated, and controlled his annoyance. Decidedly he wanted to
+know what was in his companion’s mind.
+
+“What do you mean by exalted?” he asked, with a smile of faint
+amusement.
+
+“Well--equal to her marvellous capacity for shining in the public eye.”
+
+Lansing still smiled. “The question is, I suppose, whether her desire to
+shine equals her capacity.”
+
+The aide-de-camp stared. “You mean, she’s not ambitious?”
+
+“On the contrary; I believe her to be immeasurably ambitious.”
+
+“Immeasurably?” The aide-de-camp seemed to try to measure it. “But not,
+surely, beyond--beyond what we can offer,” his eyes completed the
+sentence; and it was Lansing’s turn to stare. The aide-de-camp faced the
+stare. “Yes,” his eyes concluded in a flash, while his lips let fall:
+“The Princess Mother admires her immensely.” But at that moment a wave
+of Mrs. Hicks’s fan drew them hurriedly from their embrasure.
+
+“Professor Darchivio had promised to explain to us the difference
+between the Sassanian and Byzantine motives in Carolingian art; but the
+Manager has sent up word that the two new Creole dancers from Paris have
+arrived, and her Serene Highness wants to pop down to the ball-room and
+take a peep at them.... She’s sure the Professor will understand....”
+
+“And accompany us, of course,” the Princess irresistibly added.
+
+Lansing’s brief colloquy in the Nouveau Luxe window had lifted the
+scales from his eyes. Innumerable dim corners of memory had been flooded
+with light by that one quick glance of the aide-de-camp’s: things he
+had heard, hints he had let pass, smiles, insinuations, cordialities,
+rumours of the improbability of the Prince’s founding a family,
+suggestions as to the urgent need of replenishing the Teutoburger
+treasury....
+
+Miss Hicks, perforce, had accompanied her parents and their princely
+guests to the ballroom; but as she did not dance, and took little
+interest in the sight of others so engaged, she remained aloof from the
+party, absorbed in an archaeological discussion with the baffled but
+smiling savant who was to have enlightened the party on the difference
+between Sassanian and Byzantine ornament.
+
+Lansing, also aloof, had picked out a post from which he could observe
+the girl: she wore a new look to him since he had seen her as the centre
+of all these scattered threads of intrigue. Yes; decidedly she was
+growing handsomer; or else she had learned how to set off her massive
+lines instead of trying to disguise them. As she held up her long
+eye-glass to glance absently at the dancers he was struck by the large
+beauty of her arm and the careless assurance of the gesture. There was
+nothing nervous or fussy about Coral Hicks; and he was not surprised
+that, plastically at least, the Princess Mother had discerned her
+possibilities.
+
+Nick Lansing, all that night, sat up and stared at his future. He knew
+enough of the society into which the Hickses had drifted to guess that,
+within a very short time, the hint of the Prince’s aide-de-camp would
+reappear in the form of a direct proposal. Lansing himself would
+probably--as the one person in the Hicks entourage with whom one
+could intelligibly commune--be entrusted with the next step in the
+negotiations: he would be asked, as the aide-de-camp would have said,
+“to feel the ground.” It was clearly part of the state policy of
+Teutoburg to offer Miss Hicks, with the hand of its sovereign, an
+opportunity to replenish its treasury.
+
+What would the girl do? Lansing could not guess; yet he dimly felt that
+her attitude would depend in a great degree upon his own. And he knew
+no more what his own was going to be than on the night, four months
+earlier, when he had flung out of his wife’s room in Venice to take the
+midnight express for Genoa.
+
+The whole of his past, and above all the tendency, on which he had once
+prided himself, to live in the present and take whatever chances it
+offered, now made it harder for him to act. He began to see that he
+had never, even in the closest relations of life, looked ahead of his
+immediate satisfaction. He had thought it rather fine to be able to give
+himself so intensely to the fullness of each moment instead of hurrying
+past it in pursuit of something more, or something else, in the manner
+of the over-scrupulous or the under-imaginative, whom he had always
+grouped together and equally pitied. It was not till he had linked his
+life with Susy’s that he had begun to feel it reaching forward into a
+future he longed to make sure of, to fasten upon and shape to his own
+wants and purposes, till, by an imperceptible substitution, that future
+had become his real present, his all-absorbing moment of time.
+
+Now the moment was shattered, and the power to rebuild it failed him.
+He had never before thought about putting together broken bits: he felt
+like a man whose house has been wrecked by an earthquake, and who, for
+lack of skilled labour, is called upon for the first time to wield a
+trowel and carry bricks. He simply did not know how.
+
+Will-power, he saw, was not a thing one could suddenly decree oneself
+to possess. It must be built up imperceptibly and laboriously out of a
+succession of small efforts to meet definite objects, out of the facing
+of daily difficulties instead of cleverly eluding them, or shifting
+their burden on others. The making of the substance called character was
+a process about as slow and arduous as the building of the Pyramids; and
+the thing itself, like those awful edifices, was mainly useful to lodge
+one’s descendants in, after they too were dust. Yet the Pyramid-instinct
+was the one which had made the world, made man, and caused his fugitive
+joys to linger like fading frescoes on imperishable walls....
+
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+
+
+ON the drive back from her dinner at the Nouveau Luxe, events had
+followed the course foreseen by Susy.
+
+She had promised Strefford to seek legal advice about her divorce, and
+he had kissed her; and the promise had been easier to make than she had
+expected, the kiss less difficult to receive.
+
+She had gone to the dinner a-quiver with the mortification of learning
+that her husband was still with the Hickses. Morally sure of it though
+she had been, the discovery was a shock, and she measured for the
+first time the abyss between fearing and knowing. No wonder he had not
+written--the modern husband did not have to: he had only to leave it to
+time and the newspapers to make known his intentions. Susy could imagine
+Nick’s saying to himself, as he sometimes used to say when she reminded
+him of an unanswered letter: “But there are lots of ways of answering a
+letter--and writing doesn’t happen to be mine.”
+
+Well--he had done it in his way, and she was answered. For a minute, as
+she laid aside the paper, darkness submerged her, and she felt herself
+dropping down into the bottomless anguish of her dreadful vigil in the
+Palazzo Vanderlyn. But she was weary of anguish: her healthy body and
+nerves instinctively rejected it. The wave was spent, and she felt
+herself irresistibly struggling back to light and life and youth. He
+didn’t want her! Well, she would try not to want him! There lay all the
+old expedients at her hand--the rouge for her white lips, the atropine
+for her blurred eyes, the new dress on her bed, the thought of Strefford
+and his guests awaiting her, and of the conclusions that the diners of
+the Nouveau Luxe would draw from seeing them together. Thank heaven no
+one would say: “Poor old Susy--did you know Nick had chucked her?” They
+would all say: “Poor old Nick! Yes, I daresay she was sorry to chuck
+him; but Altringham’s mad to marry her, and what could she do?”
+
+And once again events had followed the course she had foreseen. Seeing
+her at Lord Altringham’s table, with the Ascots and the old Duchess
+of Dunes, the interested spectators could not but regard the dinner as
+confirming the rumour of her marriage. As Ellie said, people didn’t
+wait nowadays to announce their “engagements” till the tiresome divorce
+proceedings were over. Ellie herself, prodigally pearled and ermined,
+had floated in late with Algie Bockheimer in her wake, and sat, in
+conspicuous tête-à-tête, nodding and signalling her sympathy to Susy.
+Approval beamed from every eye: it was awfully exciting, they all seemed
+to say, seeing Susy Lansing pull it off! As the party, after dinner,
+drifted from the restaurant back into the hall, she caught, in the
+smiles and hand-pressures crowding about her, the scarcely-repressed
+hint of official congratulations; and Violet Melrose, seated in a corner
+with Fulmer, drew her down with a wan jade-circled arm, to whisper
+tenderly: “It’s most awfully clever of you, darling, not to be wearing
+any jewels.”
+
+In all the women’s eyes she read the reflected lustre of the jewels she
+could wear when she chose: it was as though their glitter reached
+her from the far-off bank where they lay sealed up in the Altringham
+strong-box. What a fool she had been to think that Strefford would ever
+believe she didn’t care for them!
+
+The Ambassadress, a blank perpendicular person, had been a shade less
+affable than Susy could have wished; but then there was Lady Joan--and
+the girl was handsome, alarmingly handsome to account for that: probably
+every one in the room had guessed it. And the old Duchess of Dunes was
+delightful. She looked rather like Strefford in a wig and false pearls
+(Susy was sure they were as false as her teeth); and her cordiality
+was so demonstrative that the future bride found it more difficult to
+account for than Lady Ascot’s coldness, till she heard the old lady, as
+they passed into the hall, breathe in a hissing whisper to her nephew:
+“Streff, dearest, when you have a minute’s time, and can drop in at
+my wretched little pension, I know you can explain in two words what
+I ought to do to pacify those awful money-lenders.... And you’ll bring
+your exquisite American to see me, won’t you!... No, Joan Senechal’s too
+fair for my taste.... Insipid....”
+
+Yes: the taste of it all was again sweet on her lips. A few days later
+she began to wonder how the thought of Strefford’s endearments could
+have been so alarming. To be sure he was not lavish of them; but when he
+did touch her, even when he kissed her, it no longer seemed to matter.
+An almost complete absence of sensation had mercifully succeeded to the
+first wild flurry of her nerves.
+
+And so it would be, no doubt, with everything else in her new life. If
+it failed to provoke any acute reactions, whether of pain or pleasure,
+the very absence of sensation would make for peace. And in the meanwhile
+she was tasting what, she had begun to suspect, was the maximum of
+bliss to most of the women she knew: days packed with engagements, the
+exhilaration of fashionable crowds, the thrill of snapping up a jewel
+or a bibelot or a new “model” that one’s best friend wanted, or of being
+invited to some private show, or some exclusive entertainment, that
+one’s best friend couldn’t get to. There was nothing, now, that she
+couldn’t buy, nowhere that she couldn’t go: she had only to choose and
+to triumph. And for a while the surface-excitement of her life gave her
+the illusion of enjoyment.
+
+Strefford, as she had expected, had postponed his return to England,
+and they had now been for nearly three weeks together in their new, and
+virtually avowed, relation. She had fancied that, after all, the easiest
+part of it would be just the being with Strefford--the falling back
+on their old tried friendship to efface the sense of strangeness. But,
+though she had so soon grown used to his caresses, he himself remained
+curiously unfamiliar: she was hardly sure, at times, that it was the
+old Strefford she was talking to. It was not that his point of view had
+changed, but that new things occupied and absorbed him. In all the small
+sides of his great situation he took an almost childish satisfaction;
+and though he still laughed at both its privileges and its obligations,
+it was now with a jealous laughter.
+
+It amused him inexhaustibly, for instance, to be made up to by all the
+people who had always disapproved of him, and to unite at the same table
+persons who had to dissemble their annoyance at being invited together
+lest they should not be invited at all. Equally exhilarating was
+the capricious favouring of the dull and dowdy on occasions when the
+brilliant and disreputable expected his notice. It enchanted him, for
+example, to ask the old Duchess of Dunes and Violet Melrose to dine
+with the Vicar of Altringham, on his way to Switzerland for a month’s
+holiday, and to watch the face of the Vicar’s wife while the Duchess
+narrated her last difficulties with book-makers and money-lenders, and
+Violet proclaimed the rights of Love and Genius to all that had once
+been supposed to belong exclusively to Respectability and Dulness.
+
+Susy had to confess that her own amusements were hardly of a higher
+order; but then she put up with them for lack of better, whereas
+Strefford, who might have had what he pleased, was completely satisfied
+with such triumphs.
+
+Somehow, in spite of his honours and his opportunities, he seemed to
+have shrunk. The old Strefford had certainly been a larger person,
+and she wondered if material prosperity were always a beginning of
+ossification. Strefford had been much more fun when he lived by his
+wits. Sometimes, now, when he tried to talk of politics, or assert
+himself on some question of public interest, she was startled by his
+limitations. Formerly, when he was not sure of his ground, it had been
+his way to turn the difficulty by glib nonsense or easy irony; now he
+was actually dull, at times almost pompous. She noticed too, for the
+first time, that he did not always hear clearly when several people were
+talking at once, or when he was at the theatre; and he developed a habit
+of saying over and over again: “Does so-and-so speak indistinctly? Or am
+I getting deaf, I wonder?” which wore on her nerves by its suggestion of
+a corresponding mental infirmity.
+
+These thoughts did not always trouble her. The current of idle activity
+on which they were both gliding was her native element as well as his;
+and never had its tide been as swift, its waves as buoyant. In his
+relation to her, too, he was full of tact and consideration. She saw
+that he still remembered their frightened exchange of glances after
+their first kiss; and the sense of this little hidden spring of
+imagination in him was sometimes enough for her thirst.
+
+She had always had a rather masculine punctuality in keeping her word,
+and after she had promised Strefford to take steps toward a divorce
+she had promptly set about doing it. A sudden reluctance prevented her
+asking the advice of friends like Ellie Vanderlyn, whom she knew to be
+in the thick of the same negotiations, and all she could think of was to
+consult a young American lawyer practicing in Paris, with whom she felt
+she could talk the more easily because he was not from New York, and
+probably unacquainted with her history.
+
+She was so ignorant of the procedure in such matters that she was
+surprised and relieved at his asking few personal questions; but it was
+a shock to learn that a divorce could not be obtained, either in New
+York or Paris, merely on the ground of desertion or incompatibility.
+
+“I thought nowadays... if people preferred to live apart... it could
+always be managed,” she stammered, wondering at her own ignorance, after
+the many conjugal ruptures she had assisted at.
+
+The young lawyer smiled, and coloured slightly. His lovely client
+evidently intimidated him by her grace, and still more by her
+inexperience.
+
+“It can be--generally,” he admitted; “and especially so if... as I
+gather is the case... your husband is equally anxious....”
+
+“Oh, quite!” she exclaimed, suddenly humiliated by having to admit it.
+
+“Well, then--may I suggest that, to bring matters to a point, the best
+way would be for you to write to him?”
+
+She recoiled slightly. It had never occurred to her that the lawyers
+would not “manage it” without her intervention.
+
+“Write to him... but what about?”
+
+“Well, expressing your wish... to recover your freedom.... The rest, I
+assume,” said the young lawyer, “may be left to Mr. Lansing.”
+
+She did not know exactly what he meant, and was too much perturbed by
+the idea of having to communicate with Nick to follow any other train
+of thought. How could she write such a letter? And yet how could she
+confess to the lawyer that she had not the courage to do so? He
+would, of course, tell her to go home and be reconciled. She hesitated
+perplexedly.
+
+“Wouldn’t it be better,” she suggested, “if the letter were to come
+from--from your office?”
+
+He considered this politely. “On the whole: no. If, as I take it, an
+amicable arrangement is necessary--to secure the requisite evidence then
+a line from you, suggesting an interview, seems to me more advisable.”
+
+“An interview? Is an interview necessary?” She was ashamed to show her
+agitation to this cautiously smiling young man, who must wonder at
+her childish lack of understanding; but the break in her voice was
+uncontrollable.
+
+“Oh, please write to him--I can’t! And I can’t see him! Oh, can’t you
+arrange it for me?” she pleaded.
+
+She saw now that her idea of a divorce had been that it was something
+one went out--or sent out--to buy in a shop: something concrete and
+portable, that Strefford’s money could pay for, and that it required no
+personal participation to obtain. What a fool the lawyer must think her!
+Stiffening herself, she rose from her seat.
+
+“My husband and I don’t wish to see each other again.... I’m sure it
+would be useless... and very painful.”
+
+“You are the best judge, of course. But in any case, a letter from
+you, a friendly letter, seems wiser... considering the apparent lack of
+evidence....”
+
+“Very well, then; I’ll write,” she agreed, and hurried away, scarcely
+hearing his parting injunction that she should take a copy of her
+letter.
+
+That night she wrote. At the last moment it might have been impossible,
+if at the theatre little Breckenridge had not bobbed into her box. He
+was just back from Rome, where he had dined with the Hickses (“a bang-up
+show--they’re really lances--you wouldn’t know them!”), and had met there
+Lansing, whom he reported as intending to marry Coral “as soon as things
+were settled”. “You were dead right, weren’t you, Susy,” he snickered,
+“that night in Venice last summer, when we all thought you were joking
+about their engagement? Pity now you chucked our surprise visit to the
+Hickses, and sent Streff up to drag us back just as we were breaking in!
+You remember?”
+
+He flung off the “Streff” airily, in the old way, but with a tentative
+side-glance at his host; and Lord Altringham, leaning toward Susy, said
+coldly: “Was Breckenridge speaking about me? I didn’t catch what he
+said. Does he speak indistinctly--or am I getting deaf, I wonder?”
+
+After that it seemed comparatively easy, when Strefford had dropped her
+at her hotel, to go upstairs and write. She dashed off the date and her
+address, and then stopped; but suddenly she remembered Breckenridge’s
+snicker, and the words rushed from her. “Nick dear, it was July when you
+left Venice, and I have had no word from you since the note in which you
+said you had gone for a few days, and that I should hear soon again.
+
+“You haven’t written yet, and it is five months since you left me. That
+means, I suppose, that you want to take back your freedom and give me
+mine. Wouldn’t it be kinder, in that case, to tell me so? It is worse
+than anything to go on as we are now. I don’t know how to put these
+things but since you seem unwilling to write to me perhaps you would
+prefer to send your answer to Mr. Frederic Spearman, the American lawyer
+here. His address is 100, Boulevard Haussmann. I hope--”
+
+She broke off on the last word. Hope? What did she hope, either for him
+or for herself? Wishes for his welfare would sound like a mockery--and
+she would rather her letter should seem bitter than unfeeling. Above
+all, she wanted to get it done. To have to re-write even those few
+lines would be torture. So she left “I hope,” and simply added: “to hear
+before long what you have decided.”
+
+She read it over, and shivered. Not one word of the past--not one
+allusion to that mysterious interweaving of their lives which had
+enclosed them one in the other like the flower in its sheath! What place
+had such memories in such a letter? She had the feeling that she wanted
+to hide that other Nick away in her own bosom, and with him the other
+Susy, the Susy he had once imagined her to be.... Neither of them seemed
+concerned with the present business.
+
+The letter done, she stared at the sealed envelope till its presence
+in the room became intolerable, and she understood that she must either
+tear it up or post it immediately. She went down to the hall of the
+sleeping hotel, and bribed the night-porter to carry the letter to the
+nearest post office, though he objected that, at that hour, no time
+would be gained. “I want it out of the house,” she insisted: and waited
+sternly by the desk, in her dressing-gown, till he had performed the
+errand.
+
+As she re-entered her room, the disordered writing-table struck her; and
+she remembered the lawyer’s injunction to take a copy of her letter. A
+copy to be filed away with the documents in “Lansing versus Lansing!”
+ She burst out laughing at the idea. What were lawyers made of, she
+wondered? Didn’t the man guess, by the mere look in her eyes and the
+sound of her voice, that she would never, as long as she lived, forget
+a word of that letter--that night after night she would lie down, as she
+was lying down to-night, to stare wide-eyed for hours into the darkness,
+while a voice in her brain monotonously hammered out: “Nick dear, it was
+July when you left me...” and so on, word after word, down to the last
+fatal syllable?
+
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+
+
+STREFFORD was leaving for England.
+
+Once assured that Susy had taken the first step toward freeing herself,
+he frankly regarded her as his affianced wife, and could see no reason
+for further mystery. She understood his impatience to have their
+plans settled; it would protect him from the formidable menace of the
+marriageable, and cause people, as he said, to stop meddling. Now that
+the novelty of his situation was wearing off, his natural indolence
+reasserted itself, and there was nothing he dreaded more than having to
+be on his guard against the innumerable plans that his well-wishers were
+perpetually making for him. Sometimes Susy fancied he was marrying her
+because to do so was to follow the line of least resistance.
+
+“To marry me is the easiest way of not marrying all the others,” she
+laughed, as he stood before her one day in a quiet alley of the Bois
+de Boulogne, insisting on the settlement of various preliminaries. “I
+believe I’m only a protection to you.”
+
+An odd gleam passed behind his eyes, and she instantly guessed that he
+was thinking: “And what else am I to you?”
+
+She changed colour, and he rejoined, laughing also: “Well, you’re that
+at any rate, thank the Lord!”
+
+She pondered, and then questioned: “But in the interval--how are you
+going to defend yourself for another year?”
+
+“Ah, you’ve got to see to that; you’ve got to take a little house in
+London. You’ve got to look after me, you know.”
+
+It was on the tip of her tongue to flash back: “Oh, if that’s all
+you care--!” But caring was exactly the factor she wanted, as much as
+possible, to keep out of their talk and their thoughts. She could
+not ask him how much he cared without laying herself open to the same
+question; and that way terror lay. As a matter of fact, though Strefford
+was not an ardent wooer--perhaps from tact, perhaps from temperament,
+perhaps merely from the long habit of belittling and disintegrating
+every sentiment and every conviction--yet she knew he did care for her
+as much as he was capable of caring for anyone. If the element of habit
+entered largely into the feeling--if he liked her, above all, because he
+was used to her, knew her views, her indulgences, her allowances, knew
+he was never likely to be bored, and almost certain to be amused, by
+her; why, such ingredients though not of the fieriest, were perhaps
+those most likely to keep his feeling for her at a pleasant temperature.
+She had had a taste of the tropics, and wanted more equable weather; but
+the idea of having to fan his flame gently for a year was unspeakably
+depressing to her. Yet all this was precisely what she could not say.
+The long period of probation, during which, as she knew, she would
+have to amuse him, to guard him, to hold him, and to keep off the other
+women, was a necessary part of their situation. She was sure that, as
+little Breckenridge would have said, she could “pull it off”; but she
+did not want to think about it. What she would have preferred would have
+been to go away--no matter where and not see Strefford again till they
+were married. But she dared not tell him that either.
+
+“A little house in London--?” She wondered.
+
+“Well, I suppose you’ve got to have some sort of a roof over your head.”
+
+“I suppose so.”
+
+He sat down beside her. “If you like me well enough to live at
+Altringham some day, won’t you, in the meantime, let me provide you with
+a smaller and more convenient establishment?”
+
+Still she hesitated. The alternative, she knew, would be to live on
+Ursula Gillow, Violet Melrose, or some other of her rich friends, any
+one of whom would be ready to lavish the largest hospitality on the
+prospective Lady Altringham. Such an arrangement, in the long run,
+would be no less humiliating to her pride, no less destructive to
+her independence, than Altringham’s little establishment. But she
+temporized. “I shall go over to London in December, and stay for a while
+with various people--then we can look about.”
+
+“All right; as you like.” He obviously considered her hesitation
+ridiculous, but was too full of satisfaction at her having started
+divorce proceedings to be chilled by her reply.
+
+“And now, look here, my dear; couldn’t I give you some sort of a ring?”
+
+“A ring?” She flushed at the suggestion. “What’s the use, Streff, dear?
+With all those jewels locked away in London--”
+
+“Oh, I daresay you’ll think them old-fashioned. And, hang it, why
+shouldn’t I give you something new, I ran across Ellie and Bockheimer
+yesterday, in the rue de la Paix, picking out sapphires. Do you like
+sapphires, or emeralds? Or just a diamond? I’ve seen a thumping one....
+I’d like you to have it.”
+
+Ellie and Bockheimer! How she hated the conjunction of the names! Their
+case always seemed to her like a caricature of her own, and she felt an
+unreasoning resentment against Ellie for having selected the same season
+for her unmating and re-mating.
+
+“I wish you wouldn’t speak of them, Streff... as if they were like us! I
+can hardly bear to sit in the same room with Ellie Vanderlyn.”
+
+“Hullo? What’s wrong? You mean because of her giving up Clarissa?”
+
+“Not that only.... You don’t know.... I can’t tell you....” She shivered
+at the memory, and rose restlessly from the bench where they had been
+sitting.
+
+Strefford gave his careless shrug. “Well, my dear, you can hardly expect
+me to agree, for after all it was to Ellie I owed the luck of being so
+long alone with you in Venice. If she and Algie hadn’t prolonged their
+honeymoon at the villa--”
+
+He stopped abruptly, and looked at Susy. She was conscious that every
+drop of blood had left her face. She felt it ebbing away from her heart,
+flowing out of her as if from all her severed arteries, till it seemed
+as though nothing were left of life in her but one point of irreducible
+pain.
+
+“Ellie--at your villa? What do you mean? Was it Ellie and Bockheimer
+who--?”
+
+Strefford still stared. “You mean to say you didn’t know?”
+
+“Who came after Nick and me...?” she insisted.
+
+“Why, do you suppose I’d have turned you out otherwise? That beastly
+Bockheimer simply smothered me with gold. Ah, well, there’s one good
+thing: I shall never have to let the villa again! I rather like the
+little place myself, and I daresay once in a while we might go there for
+a day or two.... Susy, what’s the matter?” he exclaimed.
+
+She returned his stare, but without seeing him. Everything swam and
+danced before her eyes.
+
+“Then she was there while I was posting all those letters for her--?”
+
+“Letters--what letters? What makes you look so frightfully upset?”
+
+She pursued her thought as if he had not spoken. “She and Algie
+Bockheimer arrived there the very day that Nick and I left?”
+
+“I suppose so. I thought she’d told you. Ellie always tells everybody
+everything.”
+
+“She would have told me, I daresay--but I wouldn’t let her.”
+
+“Well, my dear, that was hardly my fault, was it? Though I really don’t
+see--”
+
+But Susy, still blind to everything but the dance of dizzy sparks before
+her eyes, pressed on as if she had not heard him. “It was their motor,
+then, that took us to Milan! It was Algie Bockheimer’s motor!” She did
+not know why, but this seemed to her the most humiliating incident in
+the whole hateful business. She remembered Nick’s reluctance to use the
+motor--she remembered his look when she had boasted of her “managing.”
+ The nausea mounted to her throat.
+
+Strefford burst out laughing. “I say--you borrowed their motor? And you
+didn’t know whose it was?”
+
+“How could I know? I persuaded the chauffeur... for a little tip....
+It was to save our railway fares to Milan... extra luggage costs so
+frightfully in Italy....”
+
+“Good old Susy! Well done! I can see you doing it--”
+
+“Oh, how horrible--how horrible!” she groaned.
+
+“Horrible? What’s horrible?”
+
+“Why, your not seeing... not feeling...” she began impetuously; and then
+stopped. How could she explain to him that what revolted her was not so
+much the fact of his having given the little house, as soon as she and
+Nick had left it, to those two people of all others--though the vision
+of them in the sweet secret house, and under the plane-trees of the
+terrace, drew such a trail of slime across her golden hours? No, it was
+not that from which she most recoiled, but from the fact that Strefford,
+living in luxury in Nelson Vanderlyn’s house, should at the same time
+have secretly abetted Ellie Vanderlyn’s love-affairs, and allowed
+her--for a handsome price--to shelter them under his own roof. The
+reproach trembled on her lip--but she remembered her own part in the
+wretched business, and the impossibility of avowing it to Strefford, and
+of revealing to him that Nick had left her for that very reason. She was
+not afraid that the discovery would diminish her in Strefford’s eyes: he
+was untroubled by moral problems, and would laugh away her avowal, with
+a sneer at Nick in his new part of moralist. But that was just what she
+could not bear: that anyone should cast a doubt on the genuineness of
+Nick’s standards, or should know how far below them she had fallen.
+
+She remained silent, and Strefford, after a moment, drew her gently down
+to the seat beside him. “Susy, upon my soul I don’t know what you’re
+driving at. Is it me you’re angry with--or yourself? And what’s it all
+about! Are you disgusted because I let the villa to a couple who weren’t
+married! But, hang it, they’re the kind that pay the highest price and
+I had to earn my living somehow! One doesn’t run across a bridal pair
+every day....”
+
+She lifted her eyes to his puzzled incredulous face. Poor Streff! No,
+it was not with him that she was angry. Why should she be? Even that
+ill-advised disclosure had told her nothing she had not already known
+about him. It had simply revealed to her once more the real point of
+view of the people he and she lived among had shown her that, in spite
+of the superficial difference, he felt as they felt, judged as they
+judged, was blind as they were--and as she would be expected to be,
+should she once again become one of them. What was the use of being
+placed by fortune above such shifts and compromises, if in one’s heart
+one still condoned them? And she would have to--she would catch the
+general note, grow blunted as those other people were blunted, and
+gradually come to wonder at her own revolt, as Strefford now honestly
+wondered at it. She felt as though she were on the point of losing some
+new-found treasure, a treasure precious only to herself, but beside
+which all he offered her was nothing, the triumph of her wounded pride
+nothing, the security of her future nothing.
+
+“What is it, Susy?” he asked, with the same puzzled gentleness.
+
+Ah, the loneliness of never being able to make him understand! She had
+felt lonely enough when the flaming sword of Nick’s indignation had shut
+her out from their Paradise; but there had been a cruel bliss in the
+pain. Nick had not opened her eyes to new truths, but had waked in her
+again something which had lain unconscious under years of accumulated
+indifference. And that re-awakened sense had never left her since,
+and had somehow kept her from utter loneliness because it was a secret
+shared with Nick, a gift she owed to Nick, and which, in leaving her, he
+could not take from her. It was almost, she suddenly felt, as if he had
+left her with a child.
+
+“My dear girl,” Strefford said, with a resigned glance at his watch,
+“you know we’re dining at the Embassy....”
+
+At the Embassy? She looked at him vaguely: then she remembered. Yes,
+they were dining that night at the Ascots’, with Strefford’s cousin, the
+Duke of Dunes, and his wife, the handsome irreproachable young Duchess;
+with the old gambling Dowager Duchess, whom her son and daughter-in-law
+had come over from England to see; and with other English and French
+guests of a rank and standing worthy of the Duneses. Susy knew that her
+inclusion in such a dinner could mean but one thing: it was her definite
+recognition as Altringham’s future wife. She was “the little American”
+ whom one had to ask when one invited him, even on ceremonial occasions.
+The family had accepted her; the Embassy could but follow suit.
+
+“It’s late, dear; and I’ve got to see someone on business first,”
+ Strefford reminded her patiently.
+
+“Oh, Streff--I can’t, I can’t!” The words broke from her without her
+knowing what she was saying. “I can’t go with you--I can’t go to the
+Embassy. I can’t go on any longer like this....” She lifted her eyes
+to his in desperate appeal. “Oh, understand--do please understand!” she
+wailed, knowing, while she spoke, the utter impossibility of what she
+asked.
+
+Strefford’s face had gradually paled and hardened. From sallow it turned
+to a dusky white, and lines of obstinacy deepened between the ironic
+eyebrows and about the weak amused mouth.
+
+“Understand? What do you want me to understand,” He laughed. “That
+you’re trying to chuck me already?”
+
+She shrank at the sneer of the “already,” but instantly remembered that
+it was the only thing he could be expected to say, since it was just
+because he couldn’t understand that she was flying from him.
+
+“Oh, Streff--if I knew how to tell you!”
+
+“It doesn’t so much matter about the how. Is that what you’re trying to
+say?”
+
+Her head drooped, and she saw the dead leaves whirling across the path
+at her feet, lifted on a sudden wintry gust.
+
+“The reason,” he continued, clearing his throat with a stiff smile, “is
+not quite as important to me as the fact.”
+
+She stood speechless, agonized by his pain. But still, she thought, he
+had remembered the dinner at the Embassy. The thought gave her courage
+to go on.
+
+“It wouldn’t do, Streff. I’m not a bit the kind of person to make you
+happy.”
+
+“Oh, leave that to me, please, won’t you?”
+
+“No, I can’t. Because I should be unhappy too.”
+
+He clicked at the leaves as they whirled past. “You’ve taken a rather
+long time to find it out.” She saw that his new-born sense of his own
+consequence was making him suffer even more than his wounded affection;
+and that again gave her courage.
+
+“If I’ve taken long it’s all the more reason why I shouldn’t take
+longer. If I’ve made a mistake it’s you who would have suffered from
+it....”
+
+“Thanks,” he said, “for your extreme solicitude.”
+
+She looked at him helplessly, penetrated by the despairing sense of
+their inaccessibility to each other. Then she remembered that Nick,
+during their last talk together, had seemed as inaccessible, and
+wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do
+not inevitably become mere blurs to each other’s vision. She would have
+liked to say this to Streff--but he would not have understood it either.
+The sense of loneliness once more enveloped her, and she groped in vain
+for a word that should reach him.
+
+“Let me go home alone, won’t you?” she appealed to him.
+
+“Alone?”
+
+She nodded. “To-morrow--to-morrow....”
+
+He tried, rather valiantly, to smile. “Hang to-morrow! Whatever is wrong,
+it needn’t prevent my seeing you home.” He glanced toward the taxi that
+awaited them at the end of the deserted drive.
+
+“No, please. You’re in a hurry; take the taxi. I want immensely a long
+long walk by myself... through the streets, with the lights coming
+out....”
+
+He laid his hand on her arm. “I say, my dear, you’re not ill?”
+
+“No; I’m not ill. But you may say I am, to-night at the Embassy.”
+
+He released her and drew back. “Oh, very well,” he answered coldly;
+and she understood by his tone that the knot was cut, and that at that
+moment he almost hated her. She turned away, hastening down the deserted
+alley, flying from him, and knowing, as she fled, that he was still
+standing there motionless, staring after her, wounded, humiliated,
+uncomprehending. It was neither her fault nor his....
+
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+
+
+AS she fled on toward the lights of the streets a breath of freedom
+seemed to blow into her face.
+
+Like a weary load the accumulated hypocrisies of the last months had
+dropped from her: she was herself again, Nick’s Susy, and no one else’s.
+She sped on, staring with bright bewildered eyes at the stately facades
+of the La Muette quarter, the perspectives of bare trees, the awakening
+glitter of shop-windows holding out to her all the things she would
+never again be able to buy....
+
+In an avenue of shops she paused before a milliner’s window, and said
+to herself: “Why shouldn’t I earn my living by trimming hats?” She met
+work-girls streaming out under a doorway, and scattering to catch trams
+and omnibuses; and she looked with newly-wakened interest at their tired
+independent faces. “Why shouldn’t I earn my living as well as they do?”
+ she thought. A little farther on she passed a Sister of Charity with
+softly trotting feet, a calm anonymous glance, and hands hidden in her
+capacious sleeves. Susy looked at her and thought: “Why shouldn’t I be
+a Sister, and have no money to worry about, and trot about under a white
+coif helping poor people?”
+
+All these strangers on whom she smiled in passing, and glanced back at
+enviously, were free from the necessities that enslaved her, and would
+not have known what she meant if she had told them that she must have
+so much money for her dresses, so much for her cigarettes, so much for
+bridge and cabs and tips, and all kinds of extras, and that at that
+moment she ought to be hurrying back to a dinner at the British Embassy,
+where her permanent right to such luxuries was to be solemnly recognized
+and ratified.
+
+The artificiality and unreality of her life overcame her as with
+stifling fumes. She stopped at a street-corner, drawing long panting
+breaths as if she had been running a race. Then, slowly and aimlessly,
+she began to saunter along a street of small private houses in damp
+gardens that led to the Avenue du Bois. She sat down on a bench. Not far
+off, the Arc de Triomphe raised its august bulk, and beyond it a
+river of lights streamed down toward Paris, and the stir of the city’s
+heart-beats troubled the quiet in her bosom. But not for long. She
+seemed to be looking at it all from the other side of the grave; and
+as she got up and wandered down the Champs Elysees, half empty in the
+evening lull between dusk and dinner, she felt as if the glittering
+avenue were really changed into the Field of Shadows from which it takes
+its name, and as if she were a ghost among ghosts.
+
+Halfway home, a weakness of loneliness overcame her, and she seated
+herself under the trees near the Rond Point. Lines of motors and
+carriages were beginning to animate the converging thoroughfares,
+streaming abreast, crossing, winding in and out of each other in a
+tangle of hurried pleasure-seeking. She caught the light on jewels and
+shirt-fronts and hard bored eyes emerging from dim billows of fur and
+velvet. She seemed to hear what the couples were saying to each other,
+she pictured the drawing-rooms, restaurants, dance-halls they were
+hastening to, the breathless routine that was hurrying them along, as
+Time, the old vacuum-cleaner, swept them away with the dust of their
+carriage-wheels. And again the loneliness vanished in a sense of
+release....
+
+At the corner of the Place de la Concorde she stopped, recognizing a
+man in evening dress who was hailing a taxi. Their eyes met, and Nelson
+Vanderlyn came forward. He was the last person she cared to run across,
+and she shrank back involuntarily. What did he know, what had he
+guessed, of her complicity in his wife’s affairs? No doubt Ellie had
+blabbed it all out by this time; she was just as likely to confide her
+love-affairs to Nelson as to anyone else, now that the Bockheimer prize
+was landed.
+
+“Well--well--well--so I’ve caught you at it! Glad to see you, Susy,
+my dear.” She found her hand cordially clasped in Vanderlyn’s, and
+his round pink face bent on her with all its old urbanity. Did nothing
+matter, then, in this world she was fleeing from, did no one love or
+hate or remember?
+
+“No idea you were in Paris--just got here myself,” Vanderlyn continued,
+visibly delighted at the meeting. “Look here, don’t suppose you’re out
+of a job this evening by any chance, and would come and cheer up a lone
+bachelor, eh? No? You are? Well, that’s luck for once! I say, where
+shall we go? One of the places where they dance, I suppose? Yes, I twirl
+the light fantastic once in a while myself. Got to keep up with the
+times! Hold on, taxi! Here--I’ll drive you home first, and wait while
+you jump into your toggery. Lots of time.” As he steered her toward the
+carriage she noticed that he had a gouty limp, and pulled himself in
+after her with difficulty.
+
+“Mayn’t I come as I am, Nelson, I don’t feel like dancing. Let’s go and
+dine in one of those nice smoky little restaurants by the Place de la
+Bourse.”
+
+He seemed surprised but relieved at the suggestion, and they rolled off
+together. In a corner at Bauge’s they found a quiet table, screened from
+the other diners, and while Vanderlyn adjusted his eyeglasses to study
+the carte Susy stole a long look at him. He was dressed with even more
+than his usual formal trimness, and she detected, in an ultra-flat
+wrist-watch and discreetly expensive waistcoat buttons, an attempt at
+smartness altogether new. His face had undergone the same change: its
+familiar look of worn optimism had been, as it were, done up to match
+his clothes, as though a sort of moral cosmetic had made him pinker,
+shinier and sprightlier without really rejuvenating him. A thin veil of
+high spirits had merely been drawn over his face, as the shining strands
+of hair were skilfully brushed over his baldness.
+
+“Here! Carte des vins, waiter! What champagne, Susy?” He chose,
+fastidiously, the best the cellar could produce, grumbling a little at
+the bourgeois character of the dishes. “Capital food of its kind, no
+doubt, but coarsish, don’t you think? Well, I don’t mind... it’s rather
+a jolly change from the Luxe cooking. A new sensation--I’m all for new
+sensations, ain’t you, my dear?” He re-filled their champagne glasses,
+flung an arm sideways over his chair, and smiled at her with a foggy
+benevolence.
+
+As the champagne flowed his confidences flowed with it.
+
+“Suppose you know what I’m here for--this divorce business? We wanted to
+settle it quietly without a fuss, and of course Paris is the best place
+for that sort of job. Live and let live; no questions asked. None
+of your dirty newspapers. Great country, this. No hypocrisy... they
+understand Life over here!”
+
+Susy gazed and listened. She remembered that people had thought Nelson
+would make a row when he found out. He had always been addicted to
+truculent anecdotes about unfaithful wives, and the very formula of
+his perpetual ejaculation--“Caught you at it, eh?”--seemed to hint at a
+constant preoccupation with such ideas. But now it was evident that,
+as the saying was, he had “swallowed his dose” like all the others. No
+strong blast of indignation had momentarily lifted him above his normal
+stature: he remained a little man among little men, and his eagerness to
+rebuild his life with all the old smiling optimism reminded Susy of the
+patient industry of an ant remaking its ruined ant-heap.
+
+“Tell you what, great thing, this liberty! Everything’s changed
+nowadays; why shouldn’t marriage be too? A man can get out of a business
+partnership when he wants to; but the parsons want to keep us noosed up
+to each other for life because we’ve blundered into a church one day and
+said ‘Yes’ before one of ’em. No, no--that’s too easy. We’ve got
+beyond that. Science, and all these new discoveries.... I say the Ten
+Commandments were made for man, and not man for the Commandments; and
+there ain’t a word against divorce in ’em, anyhow! That’s what I tell my
+poor old mother, who builds everything on her Bible. Find me the place
+where it says: ‘Thou shalt not sue for divorce.’ It makes her wild, poor
+old lady, because she can’t; and she doesn’t know how they happen to
+have left it out.... I rather think Moses left it out because he knew
+more about human nature than these snivelling modern parsons do. Not
+that they’ll always bear investigating either; but I don’t care about
+that. Live and let live, eh, Susy? Haven’t we all got a right to our
+Affinities? I hear you’re following our example yourself. First-rate
+idea: I don’t mind telling you I saw it coming on last summer at Venice.
+Caught you at it, so to speak! Old Nelson ain’t as blind as people
+think. Here, let’s open another bottle to the health of Streff and Mrs.
+Streff!”
+
+She caught the hand with which he was signalling to the sommelier.
+This flushed and garrulous Nelson moved her more poignantly than a
+more heroic figure. “No more champagne, please, Nelson. Besides,” she
+suddenly added, “it’s not true.”
+
+He stared. “Not true that you’re going to marry Altringham?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“By George then what on earth did you chuck Nick for? Ain’t you got an
+Affinity, my dear?”
+
+She laughed and shook her head.
+
+“Do you mean to tell me it’s all Nick’s doing, then?”
+
+“I don’t know. Let’s talk of you instead, Nelson. I’m glad you’re in
+such good spirits. I rather thought--”
+
+He interrupted her quickly. “Thought I’d cut up a rumpus--do some
+shooting? I know--people did.” He twisted his moustache, evidently proud
+of his reputation. “Well, maybe I did see red for a day or two--but I’m
+a philosopher, first and last. Before I went into banking I’d made and
+lost two fortunes out West. Well, how did I build ’em up again? Not by
+shooting anybody even myself. By just buckling to, and beginning all
+over again. That’s how... and that’s what I am doing now. Beginning all
+over again.” His voice dropped from boastfulness to a note of wistful
+melancholy, the look of strained jauntiness fell from his face like a
+mask, and for an instant she saw the real man, old, ruined, lonely. Yes,
+that was it: he was lonely, desperately lonely, foundering in such deep
+seas of solitude that any presence out of the past was like a spar to
+which he clung. Whatever he knew or guessed of the part she had played
+in his disaster, it was not callousness that had made him greet her with
+such forgiving warmth, but the same sense of smallness, insignificance
+and isolation which perpetually hung like a cold fog on her own horizon.
+Suddenly she too felt old--old and unspeakably tired.
+
+“It’s been nice seeing you, Nelson. But now I must be getting home.”
+
+He offered no objection, but asked for the bill, resumed his jaunty air
+while he scattered largesse among the waiters, and sauntered out behind
+her after calling for a taxi.
+
+They drove off in silence. Susy was thinking: “And Clarissa?” but dared
+not ask. Vanderlyn lit a cigarette, hummed a dance-tune, and stared out
+of the window. Suddenly she felt his hand on hers.
+
+“Susy--do you ever see her?”
+
+“See--Ellie?”
+
+He nodded, without turning toward her.
+
+“Not often... sometimes....”
+
+“If you do, for God’s sake tell her I’m happy... happy as a king...
+tell her you could see for yourself that I was....” His voice broke in
+a little gasp. “I... I’ll be damned if... if she shall ever be unhappy
+about me... if I can help it....” The cigarette dropped from his
+fingers, and with a sob he covered his face.
+
+“Oh, poor Nelson--poor Nelson,” Susy breathed. While their cab rattled
+across the Place du Carrousel, and over the bridge, he continued to
+sit beside her with hidden face. At last he pulled out a scented
+handkerchief, rubbed his eyes with it, and groped for another cigarette.
+
+“I’m all right! Tell her that, will you, Susy? There are some of our old
+times I don’t suppose I shall ever forget; but they make me feel kindly
+to her, and not angry. I didn’t know it would be so, beforehand--but it
+is.... And now the thing’s settled I’m as right as a trivet, and you can
+tell her so.... Look here, Susy...” he caught her by the arm as the taxi
+drew up at her hotel.... “Tell her I understand, will you? I’d rather
+like her to know that....”
+
+“I’ll tell her, Nelson,” she promised; and climbed the stairs alone to
+her dreary room.
+
+Susy’s one fear was that Strefford, when he returned the next day,
+should treat their talk of the previous evening as a fit of “nerves”
+ to be jested away. He might, indeed, resent her behaviour too deeply
+to seek to see her at once; but his easygoing modern attitude toward
+conduct and convictions made that improbable. She had an idea that
+what he had most minded was her dropping so unceremoniously out of the
+Embassy Dinner.
+
+But, after all, why should she see him again? She had had enough of
+explanations during the last months to have learned how seldom they
+explain anything. If the other person did not understand at the first
+word, at the first glance even, subsequent elucidations served only to
+deepen the obscurity. And she wanted above all--and especially since her
+hour with Nelson Vanderlyn--to keep herself free, aloof, to retain
+her hold on her precariously recovered self. She sat down and wrote to
+Strefford--and the letter was only a little less painful to write than
+the one she had despatched to Nick. It was not that her own feelings
+were in any like measure engaged; but because, as the decision to give
+up Strefford affirmed itself, she remembered only his kindness, his
+forbearance, his good humour, and all the other qualities she had always
+liked in him; and because she felt ashamed of the hesitations which must
+cause him so much pain and humiliation. Yes: humiliation chiefly. She
+knew that what she had to say would hurt his pride, in whatever way she
+framed her renunciation; and her pen wavered, hating its task. Then she
+remembered Vanderlyn’s words about his wife: “There are some of our
+old times I don’t suppose I shall ever forget--” and a phrase of Grace
+Fulmer’s that she had but half grasped at the time: “You haven’t been
+married long enough to understand how trifling such things seem in the
+balance of one’s memories.”
+
+Here were two people who had penetrated farther than she into the
+labyrinth of the wedded state, and struggled through some of
+its thorniest passages; and yet both, one consciously, the other
+half-unaware, testified to the mysterious fact which was already dawning
+on her: that the influence of a marriage begun in mutual understanding
+is too deep not to reassert itself even in the moment of flight and
+denial.
+
+“The real reason is that you’re not Nick” was what she would have said
+to Strefford if she had dared to set down the bare truth; and she knew
+that, whatever she wrote, he was too acute not to read that into it.
+
+“He’ll think it’s because I’m still in love with Nick... and perhaps I
+am. But even if I were, the difference doesn’t seem to lie there, after
+all, but deeper, in things we’ve shared that seem to be meant to outlast
+love, or to change it into something different.” If she could have
+hoped to make Strefford understand that, the letter would have been easy
+enough to write--but she knew just at what point his imagination would
+fail, in what obvious and superficial inferences it would rest.
+
+
+“Poor Streff--poor me!” she thought as she sealed the letter.
+
+After she had despatched it a sense of blankness descended on her. She
+had succeeded in driving from her mind all vain hesitations, doubts,
+returns upon herself: her healthy system naturally rejected them. But
+they left a queer emptiness in which her thoughts rattled about as
+thoughts might, she supposed, in the first moments after death--before
+one got used to it. To get used to being dead: that seemed to be her
+immediate business. And she felt such a novice at it--felt so horribly
+alive! How had those others learned to do without living? Nelson--well,
+he was still in the throes; and probably never would understand, or
+be able to communicate, the lesson when he had mastered it. But Grace
+Fulmer--she suddenly remembered that Grace was in Paris, and set forth
+to find her.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXIV.
+
+
+
+NICK LANSING had walked out a long way into the Campagna. His hours were
+seldom his own, for both Mr. and Mrs. Hicks were becoming more and more
+addicted to sudden and somewhat imperious demands upon his time; but on
+this occasion he had simply slipped away after luncheon, and taking the
+tram to the Porta Salaria, had wandered on thence in the direction of
+the Ponte Nomentano.
+
+He wanted to get away and think; but now that he had done it the
+business proved as unfruitful as everything he had put his hand to since
+he had left Venice. Think--think about what? His future seemed to him
+a negligible matter since he had received, two months earlier, the few
+lines in which Susy had asked him for her freedom.
+
+The letter had been a shock--though he had fancied himself so prepared
+for it--yet it had also, in another sense, been a relief, since, now
+that at last circumstances compelled him to write to her, they also told
+him what to say. And he had said it as briefly and simply as possible,
+telling her that he would put no obstacle in the way of her release,
+that he held himself at her lawyer’s disposal to answer any further
+communication--and that he would never forget their days together, or
+cease to bless her for them.
+
+That was all. He gave his Roman banker’s address, and waited for another
+letter; but none came. Probably the “formalities,” whatever they were,
+took longer than he had supposed; and being in no haste to recover his
+own liberty, he did not try to learn the cause of the delay. From that
+moment, however, he considered himself virtually free, and ceased, by
+the same token, to take any interest in his own future. His life seemed
+as flat as a convalescent’s first days after the fever has dropped.
+
+The only thing he was sure of was that he was not going to remain in
+the Hickses’ employ: when they left Rome for Central Asia he had no
+intention of accompanying them. The part of Mr. Buttles’ successor was
+becoming daily more intolerable to him, for the very reasons that had
+probably made it most gratifying to Mr. Buttles. To be treated by Mr.
+and Mrs. Hicks as a paid oracle, a paraded and petted piece of property,
+was a good deal more distasteful than he could have imagined any
+relation with these kindly people could be. And since their aspirations
+had become frankly social he found his task, if easier, yet far less
+congenial than during his first months with them. He preferred patiently
+explaining to Mrs. Hicks, for the hundredth time, that Sassanian and
+Saracenic were not interchangeable terms, to unravelling for her the
+genealogies of her titled guests, and reminding her, when she “seated”
+ her dinner-parties, that Dukes ranked higher than Princes. No--the job
+was decidedly intolerable; and he would have to look out for another
+means of earning his living. But that was not what he had really got
+away to think about. He knew he should never starve; he had even begun
+to believe again in his book. What he wanted to think of was Susy--or
+rather, it was Susy that he could not help thinking of, on whatever
+train of thought he set out.
+
+Again and again he fancied he had established a truce with the past: had
+come to terms--the terms of defeat and failure with that bright enemy
+called happiness. And, in truth, he had reached the point of definitely
+knowing that he could never return to the kind of life that he and Susy
+had embarked on. It had been the tragedy, of their relation that loving
+her roused in him ideals she could never satisfy. He had fallen in
+love with her because she was, like himself, amused, unprejudiced and
+disenchanted; and he could not go on loving her unless she ceased to
+be all these things. From that circle there was no issue, and in it he
+desperately revolved.
+
+If he had not heard such persistent rumours of her re-marriage to Lord
+Altringham he might have tried to see her again; but, aware of the
+danger and the hopelessness of a meeting, he was, on the whole, glad to
+have a reason for avoiding it. Such, at least, he honestly supposed to
+be his state of mind until he found himself, as on this occasion, free
+to follow out his thought to its end. That end, invariably, was Susy;
+not the bundle of qualities and defects into which his critical
+spirit had tried to sort her out, but the soft blur of identity, of
+personality, of eyes, hair, mouth, laugh, tricks of speech and gesture,
+that were all so solely and profoundly her own, and yet so mysteriously
+independent of what she might do, say, think, in crucial circumstances.
+He remembered her once saying to him: “After all, you were right
+when you wanted me to be your mistress,” and the indignant stare of
+incredulity with which he had answered her. Yet in these hours it
+was the palpable image of her that clung closest, till, as invariably
+happened, his vision came full circle, and feeling her on his breast he
+wanted her also in his soul.
+
+Well--such all-encompassing loves were the rarest of human experiences;
+he smiled at his presumption in wanting no other. Wearily he turned, and
+tramped homeward through the winter twilight....
+
+At the door of the hotel he ran across the Prince of Teutoburg’s
+aide-de-camp. They had not met for some days, and Nick had a vague
+feeling that if the Prince’s matrimonial designs took definite shape he
+himself was not likely, after all, to be their chosen exponent. He
+had surprised, now and then, a certain distrustful coldness under the
+Princess Mother’s cordial glance, and had concluded that she perhaps
+suspected him of being an obstacle to her son’s aspirations. He had no
+idea of playing that part, but was not sorry to appear to; for he was
+sincerely attached to Coral Hicks, and hoped for her a more human fate
+than that of becoming Prince Anastasius’s consort.
+
+This evening, however, he was struck by the beaming alacrity of the
+aide-de-camp’s greeting. Whatever cloud had hung between them had
+lifted: the Teutoburg clan, for one reason or another, no longer feared
+or distrusted him. The change was conveyed in a mere hand-pressure,
+a brief exchange of words, for the aide-de-camp was hastening after a
+well-known dowager of the old Roman world, whom he helped into a large
+coronetted brougham which looked as if it had been extracted, for
+some ceremonial purpose, from a museum of historic vehicles. And in an
+instant it flashed on Lansing that this lady had been the person chosen
+to lay the Prince’s offer at Miss Hicks’s feet.
+
+The discovery piqued him; and instead of making straight for his own
+room he went up to Mrs. Hicks’s drawing-room.
+
+The room was empty, but traces of elaborate tea pervaded it, and an
+immense bouquet of stiff roses lay on the centre table. As he turned
+away, Eldorada Tooker, flushed and tear-stained, abruptly entered.
+
+“Oh, Mr. Lansing--we were looking everywhere for you.”
+
+“Looking for me?”
+
+“Yes. Coral especially... she wants to see you. She wants you to come to
+her own sitting-room.”
+
+She led him across the ante-chamber and down the passage to the separate
+suite which Miss Hicks inhabited. On the threshold Eldorada gasped out
+emotionally: “You’ll find her looking lovely--” and jerked away with a
+sob as he entered.
+
+Coral Hicks was never lovely: but she certainly looked unusually
+handsome. Perhaps it was the long dress of black velvet which, outlined
+against a shaded lamp, made her strong build seem slenderer, or perhaps
+the slight flush on her dusky cheek: a bloom of womanhood hung upon
+her which she made no effort to dissemble. Indeed, it was one of her
+originalities that she always gravely and courageously revealed the
+utmost of whatever mood possessed her.
+
+“How splendid you look!” he said, smiling at her.
+
+She threw her head back and gazed him straight in the eyes. “That’s
+going to be my future job.”
+
+“To look splendid?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“And wear a crown?”
+
+“And wear a crown....”
+
+They continued to consider each other without speaking. Nick’s heart
+contracted with pity and perplexity.
+
+“Oh, Coral--it’s not decided?”
+
+She scrutinized him for a last penetrating moment; then she looked away.
+“I’m never long deciding.”
+
+He hesitated, choking with contradictory impulses, and afraid to
+formulate any, lest they should either mislead or pain her.
+
+“Why didn’t you tell me?” he questioned lamely; and instantly perceived
+his blunder.
+
+She sat down, and looked up at him under brooding lashes--had he ever
+noticed the thickness of her lashes before?
+
+“Would it have made any difference if I had told you?”
+
+“Any difference--?”
+
+“Sit down by me,” she commanded. “I want to talk to you. You can say
+now whatever you might have said sooner. I’m not married yet: I’m still
+free.”
+
+“You haven’t given your answer?”
+
+“It doesn’t matter if I have.”
+
+The retort frightened him with the glimpse of what she still expected of
+him, and what he was still so unable to give.
+
+“That means you’ve said yes?” he pursued, to gain time.
+
+“Yes or no--it doesn’t matter. I had to say something. What I want is
+your advice.”
+
+“At the eleventh hour?”
+
+“Or the twelfth.” She paused. “What shall I do?” she questioned, with a
+sudden accent of helplessness.
+
+He looked at her as helplessly. He could not say: “Ask yourself--ask
+your parents.” Her next word would sweep away such frail hypocrisies.
+Her “What shall I do?” meant “What are you going to do?” and he knew it,
+and knew that she knew it.
+
+“I’m a bad person to give any one matrimonial advice,” he began, with a
+strained smile; “but I had such a different vision for you.”
+
+“What kind of a vision?” She was merciless.
+
+“Merely what people call happiness, dear.”
+
+“‘People call’--you see you don’t believe in it yourself! Well, neither
+do I--in that form, at any rate.”
+
+He considered. “I believe in trying for it--even if the trying’s the
+best of it.”
+
+“Well, I’ve tried, and failed. And I’m twenty-two, and I never was
+young. I suppose I haven’t enough imagination.” She drew a deep breath.
+“Now I want something different.” She appeared to search for the word.
+“I want to be--prominent,” she declared.
+
+“Prominent?”
+
+She reddened swarthily. “Oh, you smile--you think it’s ridiculous: it
+doesn’t seem worth while to you. That’s because you’ve always had all
+those things. But I haven’t. I know what father pushed up from, and
+I want to push up as high again--higher. No, I haven’t got much
+imagination. I’ve always liked Facts. And I find I shall like the fact
+of being a Princess--choosing the people I associate with, and being up
+above all these European grandees that father and mother bow down to,
+though they think they despise them. You can be up above these people by
+just being yourself; you know how. But I need a platform--a sky-scraper.
+Father and mother slaved to give me my education. They thought education
+was the important thing; but, since we’ve all three of us got mediocre
+minds, it has just landed us among mediocre people. Don’t you suppose I
+see through all the sham science and sham art and sham everything we’re
+surrounded with? That’s why I want to buy a place at the very top, where
+I shall be powerful enough to get about me the people I want, the big
+people, the right people, and to help them I want to promote culture,
+like those Renaissance women you’re always talking about. I want to do
+it for Apex City; do you understand? And for father and mother too. I
+want all those titles carved on my tombstone. They’re facts, anyhow!
+Don’t laugh at me....” She broke off with one of her clumsy smiles, and
+moved away from him to the other end of the room.
+
+He sat looking at her with a curious feeling of admiration. Her harsh
+positivism was like a tonic to his disenchanted mood, and he thought:
+“What a pity!”
+
+Aloud he said: “I don’t feel like laughing at you. You’re a great
+woman.”
+
+“Then I shall be a great Princess.”
+
+“Oh--but you might have been something so much greater!”
+
+Her face flamed again. “Don’t say that!”
+
+He stood up involuntarily, and drew near her.
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“Because you’re the only man with whom I can imagine the other kind of
+greatness.”
+
+It moved him--moved him unexpectedly. He got as far as saying to
+himself: “Good God, if she were not so hideously rich--” and then of
+yielding for a moment to the persuasive vision of all that he and she
+might do with those very riches which he dreaded. After all, there was
+nothing mean in her ideals they were hard and material, in keeping with
+her primitive and massive person; but they had a certain grim nobility.
+And when she spoke of “the other kind of greatness” he knew that she
+understood what she was talking of, and was not merely saying something
+to draw him on, to get him to commit himself. There was not a drop of
+guile in her, except that which her very honesty distilled.
+
+“The other kind of greatness?” he repeated.
+
+“Well, isn’t that what you said happiness was? I wanted to be happy...
+but one can’t choose.”
+
+He went up to her. “No, one can’t choose. And how can anyone give you
+happiness who hasn’t got it himself?” He took her hands, feeling how
+large, muscular and voluntary they were, even as they melted in his
+palms.
+
+“My poor Coral, of what use can I ever be to you? What you need is to be
+loved.”
+
+She drew back and gave him one of her straight strong glances: “No,” she
+said gallantly, “but just to love.”
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+XXV
+
+IN the persistent drizzle of a Paris winter morning Susy Lansing walked
+back alone from the school at which she had just deposited the four
+eldest Fulmers to the little house in Passy where, for the last two
+months, she had been living with them.
+
+She had on ready-made boots, an old waterproof and a last year’s hat;
+but none of these facts disturbed her, though she took no particular
+pride in them. The truth was that she was too busy to think much about
+them. Since she had assumed the charge of the Fulmer children, in the
+absence of both their parents in Italy, she had had to pass through such
+an arduous apprenticeship of motherhood that every moment of her waking
+hours was packed with things to do at once, and other things to remember
+to do later. There were only five Fulmers; but at times they were
+like an army with banners, and their power of self-multiplication was
+equalled only by the manner in which they could dwindle, vanish, grow
+mute, and become as it were a single tumbled brown head bent over a book
+in some corner of the house in which nobody would ever have thought of
+hunting for them--and which, of course, were it the bonne’s room in the
+attic, or the subterranean closet where the trunks were kept, had been
+singled out by them for that very reason.
+
+These changes from ubiquity to invisibility would have seemed to Susy,
+a few months earlier, one of the most maddening of many characteristics
+not calculated to promote repose. But now she felt differently. She
+had grown interested in her charges, and the search for a clue to their
+methods, whether tribal or individual, was as exciting to her as the
+development of a detective story.
+
+What interested her most in the whole stirring business was the
+discovery that they had a method. These little creatures, pitched upward
+into experience on the tossing waves of their parents’ agitated lives,
+had managed to establish a rough-and-ready system of self-government.
+Junie, the eldest (the one who already chose her mother’s hats, and
+tried to put order in her wardrobe) was the recognized head of the
+state. At twelve she knew lots of things which her mother had never
+thoroughly learned, and Susy, her temporary mother, had never even
+guessed at: she spoke with authority on all vital subjects, from
+castor-oil to flannel under-clothes, from the fair sharing of stamps
+or marbles to the number of helpings of rice-pudding or jam which each
+child was entitled to.
+
+There was hardly any appeal from her verdict; yet each of her subjects
+revolved in his or her own orbit of independence, according to laws
+which Junie acknowledged and respected; and the interpreting of this
+mysterious charter of rights and privileges had not been without
+difficulty for Susy.
+
+Besides this, there were material difficulties to deal with. The six of
+them, and the breathless bonne who cooked and slaved for them all, had
+but a slim budget to live on; and, as Junie remarked, you’d have thought
+the boys ate their shoes, the way they vanished. They ate, certainly, a
+great deal else, and mostly of a nourishing and expensive kind. They
+had definite views about the amount and quality of their food, and were
+capable of concerted rebellion when Susy’s catering fell beneath their
+standard. All this made her life a hurried and harassing business, but
+never--what she had most feared it would be a dull or depressing one.
+
+It was not, she owned to herself, that the society of the Fulmer
+children had roused in her any abstract passion for the human young. She
+knew--had known since Nick’s first kiss--how she would love any child of
+his and hers; and she had cherished poor little Clarissa Vanderlyn with
+a shrinking and wistful solicitude. But in these rough young Fulmers she
+took a positive delight, and for reasons that were increasingly clear to
+her. It was because, in the first place, they were all intelligent; and
+because their intelligence had been fed only on things worth caring for.
+However inadequate Grace Fulmer’s bringing-up of her increasing tribe
+had been, they had heard in her company nothing trivial or dull: good
+music, good books and good talk had been their daily food, and if at
+times they stamped and roared and crashed about like children unblessed
+by such privileges, at others they shone with the light of poetry and
+spoke with the voice of wisdom.
+
+That had been Susy’s discovery: for the first time she was among
+awakening minds which had been wakened only to beauty. From their
+cramped and uncomfortable household Grace and Nat Fulmer had managed to
+keep out mean envies, vulgar admirations, shabby discontents; above all
+the din and confusion the great images of beauty had brooded, like those
+ancestral figures that stood apart on their shelf in the poorest Roman
+households.
+
+No, the task she had undertaken for want of a better gave Susy no sense
+of a missed vocation: “mothering” on a large scale would never, she
+perceived, be her job. Rather it gave her, in odd ways, the sense
+of being herself mothered, of taking her first steps in the life of
+immaterial values which had begun to seem so much more substantial than
+any she had known.
+
+On the day when she had gone to Grace Fulmer for counsel and comfort
+she had little guessed that they would come to her in this form. She had
+found her friend, more than ever distracted and yet buoyant, riding the
+large untidy waves of her life with the splashed ease of an amphibian.
+Grace was probably the only person among Susy’s friends who could have
+understood why she could not make up her mind to marry Altringham; but
+at the moment Grace was too much absorbed in her own problems to
+pay much attention to her friend’s, and, according to her wont, she
+immediately “unpacked” her difficulties.
+
+Nat was not getting what she had hoped out of his European opportunity.
+Oh, she was enough of an artist herself to know that there must be
+fallow periods--that the impact of new impressions seldom produced
+immediate results. She had allowed for all that. But her past experience
+of Nat’s moods had taught her to know just when he was assimilating,
+when impressions were fructifying in him. And now they were not, and he
+knew it as well as she did. There had been too much rushing about, too
+much excitement and sterile flattery... Mrs. Melrose? Well, yes, for
+a while... the trip to Spain had been a love-journey, no doubt. Grace
+spoke calmly, but the lines of her face sharpened: she had suffered, oh
+horribly, at his going to Spain without her. Yet she couldn’t, for the
+children’s sake, afford to miss the big sum that Ursula Gillow had given
+her for her fortnight at Ruan. And her playing had struck people, and
+led, on the way back, to two or three profitable engagements in private
+houses in London. Fashionable society had made “a little fuss”
+ about her, and it had surprised and pleased Nat, and given her a new
+importance in his eyes. “He was beginning to forget that I wasn’t only
+a nursery-maid, and it’s been a good thing for him to be reminded...
+but the great thing is that with what I’ve earned he and I can go off
+to southern Italy and Sicily for three months. You know I know how
+to manage... and, alone with me, Nat will settle down to work: to
+observing, feeling, soaking things in. It’s the only way. Mrs. Melrose
+wants to take him, to pay all the expenses again--well she shan’t. I’ll
+pay them.” Her worn cheek flushed with triumph. “And you’ll see what
+wonders will come of it.... Only there’s the problem of the children.
+Junie quite agrees that we can’t take them....”
+
+Thereupon she had unfolded her idea. If Susy was at a loose end, and
+hard up, why shouldn’t she take charge of the children while their
+parents were in Italy? For three months at most--Grace could promise it
+shouldn’t be longer. They couldn’t pay her much, of course, but at least
+she would be lodged and fed. “And, you know, it will end by interesting
+you--I’m sure it will,” the mother concluded, her irrepressible
+hopefulness rising even to this height, while Susy stood before her with
+a hesitating smile.
+
+Take care of five Fulmers for three months! The prospect cowed her. If
+there had been only Junie and Geordie, the oldest and youngest of the
+band, she might have felt less hesitation. But there was Nat, the second
+in age, whose motor-horn had driven her and Nick out to the hill-side
+on their fatal day at the Fulmers’ and there were the twins, Jack and
+Peggy, of whom she had kept memories almost equally disquieting. To rule
+this uproarious tribe would be a sterner business than trying to beguile
+Clarissa Vanderlyn’s ladylike leisure; and she would have refused on the
+spot, as she had refused once before, if the only possible alternatives
+had not come to seem so much less bearable, and if Junie, called in for
+advice, and standing there, small, plain and competent, had not said
+in her quiet grown-up voice: “Oh, yes, I’m sure Mrs. Lansing and I can
+manage while you’re away--especially if she reads aloud well.”
+
+Reads aloud well! The stipulation had enchanted Susy. She had never
+before known children who cared to be read aloud to; she remembered with
+a shiver her attempts to interest Clarissa in anything but gossip
+and the fashions, and the tone in which the child had said, showing
+Strefford’s trinket to her father: “Because I said I’d rather have it
+than a book.”
+
+And here were children who consented to be left for three months by
+their parents, but on condition that a good reader was provided for
+them!
+
+“Very well--I will! But what shall I be expected to read to you?” she
+had gaily questioned; and Junie had answered, after one of her sober
+pauses of reflection: “The little ones like nearly everything; but Nat
+and I want poetry particularly, because if we read it to ourselves we so
+often pronounce the puzzling words wrong, and then it sounds so horrid.”
+
+“Oh, I hope I shall pronounce them right,” Susy murmured, stricken with
+self-distrust and humility.
+
+Apparently she did; for her reading was a success, and even the twins
+and Geordie, once they had grown used to her, seemed to prefer a ringing
+page of Henry V, or the fairy scenes from the Midsummer Night’s Dream,
+to their own more specialized literature, though that had also at times
+to be provided.
+
+There were, in fact, no lulls in her life with the Fulmers; but
+its commotions seemed to Susy less meaningless, and therefore less
+fatiguing, than those that punctuated the existence of people like
+Altringham, Ursula Gillow, Ellie Vanderlyn and their train; and the
+noisy uncomfortable little house at Passy was beginning to greet her
+with the eyes of home when she returned there after her tramps to and
+from the children’s classes. At any rate she had the sense of doing
+something useful and even necessary, and of earning her own keep, though
+on so modest a scale; and when the children were in their quiet
+mood, and demanded books or music (or, even, on one occasion, at the
+surprising Junie’s instigation, a collective visit to the Louvre, where
+they recognized the most unlikely pictures, and the two elders emitted
+startling technical judgments, and called their companion’s attention to
+details she had not observed); on these occasions, Susy had a surprised
+sense of being drawn back into her brief life with Nick, or even still
+farther and deeper, into those visions of Nick’s own childhood on which
+the trivial later years had heaped their dust.
+
+It was curious to think that if he and she had remained together, and
+she had had a child--the vision used to come to her, in her sleepless
+hours, when she looked at little Geordie, in his cot by her bed--their
+life together might have been very much like the life she was now
+leading, a small obscure business to the outer world, but to themselves
+how wide and deep and crowded!
+
+She could not bear, at that moment, the thought of giving up this mystic
+relation to the life she had missed. In spite of the hurry and fatigue
+of her days, the shabbiness and discomfort of everything, and the hours
+when the children were as “horrid” as any other children, and turned a
+conspiracy of hostile faces to all her appeals; in spite of all this
+she did not want to give them up, and had decided, when their parents
+returned, to ask to go back to America with them. Perhaps, if Nat’s
+success continued, and Grace was able to work at her music, they would
+need a kind of governess-companion. At any rate, she could picture no
+future less distasteful.
+
+She had not sent to Mr. Spearman Nick’s answer to her letter. In the
+interval between writing to him and receiving his reply she had broken
+with Strefford; she had therefore no object in seeking her freedom. If
+Nick wanted his, he knew he had only to ask for it; and his silence, as
+the weeks passed, woke a faint hope in her. The hope flamed high when
+she read one day in the newspapers a vague but evidently “inspired”
+ allusion to the possibility of an alliance between his Serene Highness
+the reigning Prince of Teutoburg-Waldhain and Miss Coral Hicks of
+Apex City; it sank to ashes when, a few days later, her eye lit on a
+paragraph wherein Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer Hicks “requested to state” that
+there was no truth in the report.
+
+On the foundation of these two statements Susy raised one watch-tower
+of hope after another, feverish edifices demolished or rebuilt by every
+chance hint from the outer world wherein Nick’s name figured with the
+Hickses’. And still, as the days passed and she heard nothing, either
+from him or from her lawyer, her flag continued to fly from the quaking
+structures.
+
+Apart from the custody of the children there was indeed little to
+distract her mind from these persistent broodings. She winced sometimes
+at the thought of the ease with which her fashionable friends had let
+her drop out of sight. In the perpetual purposeless rush of their days,
+the feverish making of winter plans, hurrying off to the Riviera or St.
+Moritz, Egypt or New York, there was no time to hunt up the vanished
+or to wait for the laggard. Had they learned that she had broken her
+“engagement” (how she hated the word!) to Strefford, and had the fact
+gone about that she was once more only a poor hanger-on, to be taken up
+when it was convenient, and ignored in the intervals? She did not know;
+though she fancied Strefford’s newly-developed pride would prevent his
+revealing to any one what had passed between them. For several days
+after her abrupt flight he had made no sign; and though she longed to
+write and ask his forgiveness she could not find the words. Finally it
+was he who wrote: a short note, from Altringham, typical of all that was
+best in the old Strefford. He had gone down to Altringham, he told her,
+to think quietly over their last talk, and try to understand what
+she had been driving at. He had to own that he couldn’t; but that, he
+supposed, was the very head and front of his offending. Whatever he had
+done to displease her, he was sorry for; but he asked, in view of his
+invincible ignorance, to be allowed not to regard his offence as a cause
+for a final break. The possibility of that, he found, would make him
+even more unhappy than he had foreseen; as she knew, his own happiness
+had always been his first object in life, and he therefore begged her to
+suspend her decision a little longer. He expected to be in Paris within
+another two months, and before arriving he would write again, and ask
+her to see him.
+
+The letter moved her but did not make her waver. She simply wrote that
+she was touched by his kindness, and would willingly see him if he came
+to Paris later; though she was bound to tell him that she had not yet
+changed her mind, and did not believe it would promote his happiness to
+have her try to do so.
+
+He did not reply to this, and there was nothing further to keep her
+thoughts from revolving endlessly about her inmost hopes and fears.
+
+On the rainy afternoon in question, tramping home from the “cours” (to
+which she was to return at six), she had said to herself that it was
+two months that very day since Nick had known she was ready to release
+him--and that after such a delay he was not likely to take any further
+steps. The thought filled her with a vague ecstasy. She had had to fix
+an arbitrary date as the term of her anguish, and she had fixed that
+one; and behold she was justified. For what could his silence mean but
+that he too....
+
+On the hall-table lay a typed envelope with the Paris postage-mark. She
+opened it carelessly, and saw that the letter-head bore Mr. Spearman’s
+office address. The words beneath spun round before her eyes.... “Has
+notified us that he is at your disposal... carry out your wishes...
+arriving in Paris... fix an appointment with his lawyers....”
+
+Nick--it was Nick the words were talking of! It was the fact of Nick’s
+return to Paris that was being described in those preposterous terms!
+She sank down on the bench beside the dripping umbrella-stand and stared
+vacantly before her. It had fallen at last--this blow in which she now
+saw that she had never really believed! And yet she had imagined she was
+prepared for it, had expected it, was already planning her future life
+in view of it--an effaced impersonal life in the service of somebody
+else’s children--when, in reality, under that thin surface of abnegation
+and acceptance, all the old hopes had been smouldering red-hot in their
+ashes! What was the use of any self-discipline, any philosophy, any
+experience, if the lawless self underneath could in an instant consume
+them like tinder?
+
+She tried to collect herself--to understand what had happened. Nick was
+coming to Paris--coming not to see her but to consult his lawyer! It
+meant, of course, that he had definitely resolved to claim his freedom;
+and that, if he had made up his mind to this final step, after more
+than six months of inaction and seeming indifference, it could be
+only because something unforeseen and decisive had happened to him.
+Feverishly, she put together again the stray scraps of gossip and the
+newspaper paragraphs that had reached her in the last months. It
+was evident that Miss Hicks’s projected marriage with the Prince of
+Teutoburg-Waldhain had been broken off at the last moment; and broken
+off because she intended to marry Nick. The announcement of his arrival
+in Paris and the publication of Mr. and Mrs. Hicks’s formal denial of
+their daughter’s betrothal coincided too closely to admit of any other
+inference. Susy tried to grasp the reality of these assembled facts, to
+picture to herself their actual tangible results. She thought of Coral
+Hicks bearing the name of Mrs. Nick Lansing--her name, Susy’s own!--and
+entering drawing-rooms with Nick in her wake, gaily welcomed by the very
+people who, a few months before, had welcomed Susy with the same warmth.
+In spite of Nick’s growing dislike of society, and Coral’s attitude of
+intellectual superiority, their wealth would fatally draw them back into
+the world to which Nick was attached by all his habits and associations.
+And no doubt it would amuse him to re-enter that world as a dispenser of
+hospitality, to play the part of host where he had so long been a guest;
+just as Susy had once fancied it would amuse her to re-enter it as Lady
+Altringham.... But, try as she would, now that the reality was so close
+on her, she could not visualize it or relate it to herself. The mere
+juxtaposition of the two names--Coral, Nick--which in old times she had
+so often laughingly coupled, now produced a blur in her brain.
+
+She continued to sit helplessly beside the hall-table, the tears running
+down her cheeks. The appearance of the bonne aroused her. Her youngest
+charge, Geordie, had been feverish for a day or two; he was better,
+but still confined to the nursery, and he had heard Susy unlock the
+house-door, and could not imagine why she had not come straight up to
+him. He now began to manifest his indignation in a series of racking
+howls, and Susy, shaken out of her trance, dropped her cloak and
+umbrella and hurried up.
+
+“Oh, that child!” she groaned.
+
+Under the Fulmer roof there was little time or space for the indulgence
+of private sorrows. From morning till night there was always some
+immediate practical demand on one’s attention; and Susy was beginning
+to see how, in contracted households, children may play a part less
+romantic but not less useful than that assigned to them in fiction,
+through the mere fact of giving their parents no leisure to dwell on
+irremediable grievances. Though her own apprenticeship to family life
+had been so short, she had already acquired the knack of rapid mental
+readjustment, and as she hurried up to the nursery her private cares
+were dispelled by a dozen problems of temperature, diet and medicine.
+
+Such readjustment was of course only momentary; yet each time it
+happened it seemed to give her more firmness and flexibility of temper.
+“What a child I was myself six months ago!” she thought, wondering that
+Nick’s influence, and the tragedy of their parting, should have done
+less to mature and steady her than these few weeks in a house full of
+children.
+
+Pacifying Geordie was not easy, for he had long since learned to use
+his grievances as a pretext for keeping the offender at his beck with a
+continuous supply of stories, songs and games. “You’d better be careful
+never to put yourself in the wrong with Geordie,” the astute Junie had
+warned Susy at the outset, “because he’s got such a memory, and he won’t
+make it up with you till you’ve told him every fairy-tale he’s ever
+heard before.”
+
+But on this occasion, as soon as he saw her, Geordie’s indignation
+melted. She was still in the doorway, compunctious, abject and racking
+her dazed brain for his favourite stories, when she saw, by the
+smoothing out of his mouth and the sudden serenity of his eyes, that he
+was going to give her the delicious but not wholly reassuring shock of
+being a good boy.
+
+Thoughtfully he examined her face as she knelt down beside the cot; then
+he poked out a finger and pressed it on her tearful cheek.
+
+“Poor Susy got a pain too,” he said, putting his arms about her; and
+as she hugged him close, he added philosophically: “Tell Geordie a new
+story, darling, and you’ll forget all about it.”
+
+
+
+
+
+XXVI.
+
+
+
+NICK Lansing arrived in Paris two days after his lawyer had announced
+his coming to Mr. Spearman.
+
+He had left Rome with the definite purpose of freeing himself and Susy;
+and though he was not pledged to Coral Hicks he had not concealed from
+her the object of his journey. In vain had he tried to rouse in himself
+any sense of interest in his own future. Beyond the need of reaching a
+definite point in his relation to Susy his imagination could not travel.
+But he had been moved by Coral’s confession, and his reason told him
+that he and she would probably be happy together, with the temperate
+happiness based on a community of tastes and an enlargement of
+opportunities. He meant, on his return to Rome, to ask her to marry
+him; and he knew that she knew it. Indeed, if he had not spoken before
+leaving it was with no idea of evading his fate, or keeping her longer
+in suspense, but simply because of the strange apathy that had fallen
+on him since he had received Susy’s letter. In his incessant
+self-communings he dressed up this apathy as a discretion which forbade
+his engaging Coral’s future till his own was assured. But in truth he
+knew that Coral’s future was already engaged, and his with it: in Rome
+the fact had seemed natural and even inevitable.
+
+In Paris, it instantly became the thinnest of unrealities. Not because
+Paris was not Rome, nor because it was Paris; but because hidden away
+somewhere in that vast unheeding labyrinth was the half-forgotten part
+of himself that was Susy.... For weeks, for months past, his mind had
+been saturated with Susy: she had never seemed more insistently near him
+than as their separation lengthened, and the chance of reunion became
+less probable. It was as if a sickness long smouldering in him had
+broken out and become acute, enveloping him in the Nessus-shirt of his
+memories. There were moments when, to his memory, their actual embraces
+seemed perfunctory, accidental, compared with this deep deliberate
+imprint of her soul on his.
+
+Yet now it had become suddenly different. Now that he was in the same
+place with her, and might at any moment run across her, meet her eyes,
+hear her voice, avoid her hand--now that penetrating ghost of her
+with which he had been living was sucked back into the shadows, and
+he seemed, for the first time since their parting, to be again in her
+actual presence. He woke to the fact on the morning of his arrival,
+staring down from his hotel window on a street she would perhaps walk
+through that very day, and over a limitless huddle of roofs, one
+of which covered her at that hour. The abruptness of the transition
+startled him; he had not known that her mere geographical nearness would
+take him by the throat in that way. What would it be, then, if she were
+to walk into the room?
+
+Thank heaven that need never happen! He was sufficiently informed as
+to French divorce proceedings to know that they would not necessitate
+a confrontation with his wife; and with ordinary luck, and some
+precautions, he might escape even a distant glimpse of her. He did not
+mean to remain in Paris more than a few days; and during that time it
+would be easy--knowing, as he did, her tastes and Altringham’s--to avoid
+the places where she was likely to be met. He did not know where she was
+living, but imagined her to be staying with Mrs. Melrose, or some other
+rich friend, or else lodged, in prospective affluence, at the Nouveau
+Luxe, or in a pretty flat of her own. Trust Susy--ah, the pang of it--to
+“manage”!
+
+His first visit was to his lawyer’s; and as he walked through the
+familiar streets each approaching face, each distant figure seemed
+hers. The obsession was intolerable. It would not last, of course; but
+meanwhile he had the exposed sense of a fugitive in a nightmare, who
+feels himself the only creature visible in a ghostly and besetting
+multitude. The eye of the metropolis seemed fixed on him in an immense
+unblinking stare.
+
+At the lawyer’s he was told that, as a first step to freedom, he must
+secure a domicile in Paris. He had of course known of this necessity: he
+had seen too many friends through the Divorce Court, in one country
+or another, not to be fairly familiar with the procedure. But the fact
+presented a different aspect as soon as he tried to relate it to himself
+and Susy: it was as though Susy’s personality were a medium through
+which events still took on a transfiguring colour. He found the
+“domicile” that very day: a tawdrily furnished rez-de-chaussee,
+obviously destined to far different uses. And as he sat there, after the
+concierge had discreetly withdrawn with the first quarter’s payment in
+her pocket, and stared about him at the vulgar plushy place, he burst
+out laughing at what it was about to figure in the eyes of the law: a
+Home, and a Home desecrated by his own act! The Home in which he and
+Susy had reared their precarious bliss, and seen it crumble at the
+brutal touch of his unfaithfulness and his cruelty--for he had been told
+that he must be cruel to her as well as unfaithful! He looked at the
+walls hung with sentimental photogravures, at the shiny bronze “nudes,”
+ the moth-eaten animal-skins and the bedizened bed--and once more the
+unreality, the impossibility, of all that was happening to him entered
+like a drug into his veins.
+
+To rouse himself he stood up, turned the key on the hideous place, and
+returned to his lawyer’s. He knew that in the hard dry atmosphere of the
+office the act of giving the address of the flat would restore some kind
+of reality to the phantasmal transaction. And with wonder he watched the
+lawyer, as a matter of course, pencil the street and the number on one
+of the papers enclosed in a folder on which his own name was elaborately
+engrossed.
+
+As he took leave it occurred to him to ask where Susy was living. At
+least he imagined that it had just occurred to him, and that he was
+making the enquiry merely as a measure of precaution, in order to know
+what quarter of Paris to avoid; but in reality the question had been on
+his lips since he had first entered the office, and lurking in his mind
+since he had emerged from the railway station that morning. The fact
+of not knowing where she lived made the whole of Paris a meaningless
+unintelligible place, as useless to him as the face of a huge clock that
+has lost its hour hand.
+
+The address in Passy surprised him: he had imagined that she would be
+somewhere in the neighborhood of the Champs Elysees or the Place de
+l’Etoile. But probably either Mrs. Melrose or Ellie Vanderlyn had taken
+a house at Passy. Well--it was something of a relief to know that she
+was so far off. No business called him to that almost suburban region
+beyond the Trocadero, and there was much less chance of meeting her than
+if she had been in the centre of Paris.
+
+All day he wandered, avoiding the fashionable quarters, the streets
+in which private motors glittered five deep, and furred and feathered
+silhouettes glided from them into tea-rooms, picture-galleries and
+jewellers’ shops. In some such scenes Susy was no doubt figuring:
+slenderer, finer, vivider, than the other images of clay, but imitating
+their gestures, chattering their jargon, winding her hand among the same
+pearls and sables. He struck away across the Seine, along the quays
+to the Cite, the net-work of old Paris, the great grey vaults of St.
+Eustache, the swarming streets of the Marais. He gazed at monuments
+dawdled before shop-windows, sat in squares and on quays, watching
+people bargain, argue, philander, quarrel, work-girls stroll past in
+linked bands, beggars whine on the bridges, derelicts doze in the pale
+winter sun, mothers in mourning hasten by taking children to school, and
+street-walkers beat their weary rounds before the cafes.
+
+The day drifted on. Toward evening he began to grow afraid of his
+solitude, and to think of dining at the Nouveau Luxe, or some
+other fashionable restaurant where he would be fairly sure to
+meet acquaintances, and be carried off to a theatre, a boite or a
+dancing-hall. Anything, anything now, to get away from the maddening
+round of his thoughts. He felt the same blank fear of solitude as months
+ago in Genoa.... Even if he were to run across Susy and Altringham, what
+of it? Better get the job over. People had long since ceased to take on
+tragedy airs about divorce: dividing couples dined together to the last,
+and met afterward in each other’s houses, happy in the consciousness
+that their respective remarriages had provided two new centres of
+entertainment. Yet most of the couples who took their re-matings so
+philosophically had doubtless had their hour of enchantment, of belief
+in the immortality of loving; whereas he and Susy had simply and frankly
+entered into a business contract for their mutual advantage. The fact
+gave the last touch of incongruity to his agonies and exaltations, and
+made him appear to himself as grotesque and superannuated as the hero of
+a romantic novel.
+
+He stood up from a bench on which he had been lounging in the Luxembourg
+gardens, and hailed a taxi. Dusk had fallen, and he meant to go back to
+his hotel, take a rest, and then go out to dine. But instead, he threw
+Susy’s address to the driver, and settled down in the cab, resting both
+hands on the knob of his umbrella and staring straight ahead of him as
+if he were accomplishing some tiresome duty that had to be got through
+with before he could turn his mind to more important things.
+
+“It’s the easiest way,” he heard himself say.
+
+At the street-corner--her street-corner--he stopped the cab, and stood
+motionless while it rattled away. It was a short vague street, much
+farther off than he had expected, and fading away at the farther end in
+a dusky blur of hoardings overhung by trees. A thin rain was beginning
+to fall, and it was already night in this inadequately lit suburban
+quarter. Lansing walked down the empty street. The houses stood a few
+yards apart, with bare-twigged shrubs between, and gates and railings
+dividing them from the pavement. He could not, at first, distinguish
+their numbers; but presently, coming abreast of a street-lamp, he
+discovered that the small shabby facade it illuminated was precisely
+the one he sought. The discovery surprised him. He had imagined that, as
+frequently happened in the outlying quarters of Passy and La Muette,
+the mean street would lead to a stately private hotel, built upon some
+bowery fragment of an old country-place. It was the latest whim of the
+wealthy to establish themselves on these outskirts of Paris, where
+there was still space for verdure; and he had pictured Susy behind
+some pillared house-front, with lights pouring across glossy turf to
+sculptured gateposts. Instead, he saw a six-windowed house, huddled
+among neighbours of its kind, with the family wash fluttering between
+meagre bushes. The arc-light beat ironically on its front, which had
+the worn look of a tired work-woman’s face; and Lansing, as he leaned
+against the opposite railing, vainly tried to fit his vision of Susy
+into so humble a setting.
+
+The probable explanation was that his lawyer had given him the wrong
+address; not only the wrong number but the wrong street. He pulled out
+the slip of paper, and was crossing over to decipher it under the lamp,
+when an errand-boy appeared out of the obscurity, and approached the
+house. Nick drew back, and the boy, unlatching the gate, ran up the
+steps and gave the bell a pull.
+
+Almost immediately the door opened; and there stood Susy, the light full
+upon her, and upon a red-checked child against her shoulder. The space
+behind them was dark, or so dimly lit that it formed a black background
+to her vivid figure. She looked at the errand-boy without surprise, took
+his parcel, and after he had turned away, lingered a moment in the door,
+glancing down the empty street.
+
+That moment, to her watcher, seemed quicker than a flash yet as long
+as a life-time. There she was, a stone’s throw away, but utterly
+unconscious of his presence: his Susy, the old Susy, and yet a new Susy,
+curiously transformed, transfigured almost, by the new attitude in which
+he beheld her.
+
+In the first shock of the vision he forgot his surprise at her being in
+such a place, forgot to wonder whose house she was in, or whose was
+the sleepy child in her arms. For an instant she stood out from the
+blackness behind her, and through the veil of the winter night, a thing
+apart, an unconditioned vision, the eternal image of the woman and
+the child; and in that instant everything within him was changed and
+renewed. His eyes were still absorbing her, finding again the familiar
+curves of her light body, noting the thinness of the lifted arm that
+upheld the little boy, the droop of the shoulder he weighed on, the
+brooding way in which her cheek leaned to his even while she looked
+away; then she drew back, the door closed, and the street-lamp again
+shone on blankness.
+
+“But she’s mine!” Nick cried, in a fierce triumph of recovery...
+
+His eyes were so full of her that he shut them to hold in the crowding
+vision.
+
+It remained with him, at first, as a complete picture; then gradually it
+broke up into its component parts, the child vanished, the strange house
+vanished, and Susy alone stood before him, his own Susy, only his Susy,
+yet changed, worn, tempered--older, even--with sharper shadows under
+the cheek-bones, the brows drawn, the joint of the slim wrist more
+prominent. It was not thus that his memory had evoked her, and he
+recalled, with a remorseful pang, the fact that something in her
+look, her dress, her tired and drooping attitude, suggested poverty,
+dependence, seemed to make her after all a part of the shabby house in
+which, at first sight, her presence had seemed so incongruous.
+
+“But she looks poor!” he thought, his heart tightening. And instantly
+it occurred to him that these must be the Fulmer children whom she
+was living with while their parents travelled in Italy. Rumours of Nat
+Fulmer’s sudden ascension had reached him, and he had heard that the
+couple had lately been seen in Naples and Palermo. No one had mentioned
+Susy’s name in connection with them, and he could hardly tell why he
+had arrived at this conclusion, except perhaps because it seemed natural
+that, if Susy were in trouble, she should turn to her old friend Grace.
+
+But why in trouble? What trouble? What could have happened to check her
+triumphant career?
+
+“That’s what I mean to find out!” he exclaimed.
+
+His heart was beating with a tumult of new hopes and old memories. The
+sight of his wife, so remote in mien and manner from the world in
+which he had imagined her to be re-absorbed, changed in a flash his own
+relation to life, and flung a mist of unreality over all that he
+had been trying to think most solid and tangible. Nothing now was
+substantial to him but the stones of the street in which he stood, the
+front of the house which hid her, the bell-handle he already felt in
+his grasp. He started forward, and was halfway to the threshold when a
+private motor turned the corner, the twin glitter of its lamps carpeting
+the wet street with gold to Susy’s door.
+
+Lansing drew back into the shadow as the motor swept up to the house. A
+man jumped out, and the light fell on Strefford’s shambling figure, its
+lazy disjointed movements so unmistakably the same under his fur coat,
+and in the new setting of prosperity.
+
+Lansing stood motionless, staring at the door. Strefford rang, and
+waited. Would Susy appear again? Perhaps she had done so before only
+because she had been on the watch....
+
+But no: after a slight delay a bonne appeared--the breathless
+maid-of-all-work of a busy household--and at once effaced herself,
+letting the visitor in. Lansing was sure that not a word passed between
+the two, of enquiry on Lord Altringham’s part, or of acquiescence on the
+servant’s. There could be no doubt that he was expected.
+
+The door closed on him, and a light appeared behind the blind of the
+adjoining window. The maid had shown the visitor into the sitting-room
+and lit the lamp. Upstairs, meanwhile, Susy was no doubt running skilful
+fingers through her tumbled hair and daubing her pale lips with red.
+Ah, how Lansing knew every movement of that familiar rite, even to the
+pucker of the brow and the pouting thrust-out of the lower lip! He was
+seized with a sense of physical sickness as the succession of remembered
+gestures pressed upon his eyes.... And the other man? The other man,
+inside the house, was perhaps at that very instant smiling over the
+remembrance of the same scene!
+
+At the thought, Lansing plunged away into the night.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXVII.
+
+
+
+SUSY and Lord Altringham sat in the little drawing-room, divided from
+each other by a table carrying a smoky lamp and heaped with tattered
+school-books.
+
+In another half hour the bonne, despatched to fetch the children from
+their classes, would be back with her flock; and at any moment Geordie’s
+imperious cries might summon his slave up to the nursery. In the scant
+time allotted them, the two sat, and visibly wondered what to say.
+
+Strefford, on entering, had glanced about the dreary room, with its
+piano laden with tattered music, the children’s toys littering the lame
+sofa, the bunches of dyed grass and impaled butterflies flanking the
+cast-bronze clock. Then he had turned to Susy and asked simply: “Why on
+earth are you here?”
+
+She had not tried to explain; from the first, she had understood the
+impossibility of doing so. And she would not betray her secret longing
+to return to Nick, now that she knew that Nick had taken definite steps
+for his release. In dread lest Strefford should have heard of this, and
+should announce it to her, coupling it with the news of Nick’s projected
+marriage, and lest, hearing her fears thus substantiated, she should
+lose her self-control, she had preferred to say, in a voice that she
+tried to make indifferent: “The ‘proceedings,’ or whatever the lawyers
+call them, have begun. While they’re going on I like to stay quite by
+myself.... I don’t know why....”
+
+Strefford, at that, had looked at her keenly. “Ah,” he murmured; and
+his lips were twisted into their old mocking smile. “Speaking of
+proceedings,” he went on carelessly, “what stage have Ellie’s reached,
+I wonder? I saw her and Vanderlyn and Bockheimer all lunching cheerfully
+together to-day at Larue’s.”
+
+The blood rushed to Susy’s forehead. She remembered her tragic evening
+with Nelson Vanderlyn, only two months earlier, and thought to herself.
+“In time, then, I suppose, Nick and I....”
+
+Aloud she said: “I can’t imagine how Nelson and Ellie can ever want to
+see each other again. And in a restaurant, of all places!”
+
+Strefford continued to smile. “My dear, you’re incorrigibly
+old-fashioned. Why should two people who’ve done each other the best
+turn they could by getting out of each other’s way at the right moment
+behave like sworn enemies ever afterward? It’s too absurd; the humbug’s
+too flagrant. Whatever our generation has failed to do, it’s got rid of
+humbug; and that’s enough to immortalize it. I daresay Nelson and Ellie
+never liked each other better than they do to-day. Twenty years ago,
+they’d have been afraid to confess it; but why shouldn’t they now?”
+
+Susy looked at Strefford, conscious that under his words was the ache of
+the disappointment she had caused him; and yet conscious also that that
+very ache was not the overwhelming penetrating emotion he perhaps wished
+it to be, but a pang on a par with a dozen others; and that even while
+he felt it he foresaw the day when he should cease to feel it. And she
+thought to herself that this certainty of oblivion must be bitterer than
+any certainty of pain.
+
+A silence had fallen between them. He broke it by rising from his
+seat, and saying with a shrug: “You’ll end by driving me to marry Joan
+Senechal.”
+
+Susy smiled. “Well, why not? She’s lovely.”
+
+“Yes; but she’ll bore me.”
+
+“Poor Streff! So should I--”
+
+“Perhaps. But nothing like as soon--” He grinned sardonically. “There’d
+be more margin.” He appeared to wait for her to speak. “And what else on
+earth are you going to do?” he concluded, as she still remained silent.
+
+“Oh, Streff, I couldn’t marry you for a reason like that!” she murmured
+at length.
+
+“Then marry me, and find your reason afterward.”
+
+Her lips made a movement of denial, and still in silence she held out
+her hand for good-bye. He clasped it, and then turned away; but on the
+threshold he paused, his screwed-up eyes fixed on her wistfully.
+
+The look moved her, and she added hurriedly: “The only reason I can find
+is one for not marrying you. It’s because I can’t yet feel unmarried
+enough.”
+
+“Unmarried enough? But I thought Nick was doing his best to make you
+feel that.”
+
+“Yes. But even when he has--sometimes I think even that won’t make any
+difference.”
+
+He still scrutinized her hesitatingly, with the gravest eyes she had
+ever seen in his careless face.
+
+“My dear, that’s rather the way I feel about you,” he said simply as he
+turned to go.
+
+That evening after the children had gone to bed Susy sat up late in the
+cheerless sitting-room. She was not thinking of Strefford but of Nick.
+He was coming to Paris--perhaps he had already arrived. The idea that he
+might be in the same place with her at that very moment, and without her
+knowing it, was so strange and painful that she felt a violent revolt of
+all her strong and joy-loving youth. Why should she go on suffering so
+unbearably, so abjectly, so miserably? If only she could see him, hear
+his voice, even hear him say again such cruel and humiliating words as
+he had spoken on that dreadful day in Venice when that would be better
+than this blankness, this utter and final exclusion from his life! He
+had been cruel to her, unimaginably cruel: hard, arrogant, unjust; and
+had been so, perhaps, deliberately, because he already wanted to be
+free. But she was ready to face even that possibility, to humble herself
+still farther than he had humbled her--she was ready to do anything, if
+only she might see him once again.
+
+She leaned her aching head on her hands and pondered. Do anything? But
+what could she do? Nothing that should hurt him, interfere with his
+liberty, be false to the spirit of their pact: on that she was more than
+ever resolved. She had made a bargain, and she meant to stick to it, not
+for any abstract reason, but simply because she happened to love him in
+that way. Yes--but to see him again, only once!
+
+Suddenly she remembered what Strefford had said about Nelson Vanderlyn
+and his wife. “Why should two people who’ve just done each other the
+best turn they could behave like sworn enemies ever after?” If in
+offering Nick his freedom she had indeed done him such a service as
+that, perhaps he no longer hated her, would no longer be unwilling
+to see her.... At any rate, why should she not write to him on that
+assumption, write in a spirit of simple friendliness, suggesting that
+they should meet and “settle things”? The business-like word “settle”
+ (how she hated it) would prove to him that she had no secret designs
+upon his liberty; and besides he was too unprejudiced, too modern, too
+free from what Strefford called humbug, not to understand and accept
+such a suggestion. After all, perhaps Strefford was right; it was
+something to have rid human relations of hypocrisy, even if, in the
+process, so many exquisite things seemed somehow to have been torn away
+with it....
+
+She ran up to her room, scribbled a note, and hurried with it through
+the rain and darkness to the post-box at the corner. As she returned
+through the empty street she had an odd feeling that it was not
+empty--that perhaps Nick was already there, somewhere near her in the
+night, about to follow her to the door, enter the house, go up with
+her to her bedroom in the old way. It was strange how close he had been
+brought by the mere fact of her having written that little note to him!
+
+In the bedroom, Geordie lay in his crib in ruddy slumber, and she blew
+out the candle and undressed softly for fear of waking him.
+
+Nick Lansing, the next day, received Susy’s letter, transmitted to his
+hotel from the lawyer’s office.
+
+He read it carefully, two or three times over, weighing and scrutinizing
+the guarded words. She proposed that they should meet to “settle
+things.” What things? And why should he accede to such a request? What
+secret purpose had prompted her? It was horrible that nowadays, in
+thinking of Susy, he should always suspect ulterior motives, be meanly
+on the watch for some hidden tortuousness. What on earth was she trying
+to “manage” now, he wondered.
+
+A few hours ago, at the sight of her, all his hardness had melted, and
+he had charged himself with cruelty, with injustice, with every sin of
+pride against himself and her; but the appearance of Strefford, arriving
+at that late hour, and so evidently expected and welcomed, had driven
+back the rising tide of tenderness.
+
+Yet, after all, what was there to wonder at? Nothing was changed in
+their respective situations. He had left his wife, deliberately, and for
+reasons which no subsequent experience had caused him to modify. She had
+apparently acquiesced in his decision, and had utilized it, as she was
+justified in doing, to assure her own future.
+
+In all this, what was there to wail or knock the breast between two
+people who prided themselves on looking facts in the face, and making
+their grim best of them, without vain repinings? He had been right in
+thinking their marriage an act of madness. Her charms had overruled his
+judgment, and they had had their year... their mad year... or at least
+all but two or three months of it. But his first intuition had been
+right; and now they must both pay for their madness. The Fates seldom
+forget the bargains made with them, or fail to ask for compound
+interest. Why not, then, now that the time had come, pay up gallantly,
+and remember of the episode only what had made it seem so supremely
+worth the cost?
+
+He sent a pneumatic telegram to Mrs. Nicholas Lansing to say that he
+would call on her that afternoon at four. “That ought to give us time,”
+ he reflected drily, “to ‘settle things,’ as she calls it, without
+interfering with Strefford’s afternoon visit.”
+
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII.
+
+
+
+HER husband’s note had briefly said:
+
+“To-day at four o’clock. N.L.”
+
+All day she pored over the words in an agony of longing, trying to read
+into them regret, emotion, memories, some echo of the tumult in her own
+bosom. But she had signed “Susy,” and he signed “N.L.” That seemed
+to put an abyss between them. After all, she was free and he was not.
+Perhaps, in view of his situation, she had only increased the distance
+between them by her unconventional request for a meeting.
+
+She sat in the little drawing-room, and the cast-bronze clock ticked out
+the minutes. She would not look out of the window: it might bring bad
+luck to watch for him. And it seemed to her that a thousand invisible
+spirits, hidden demons of good and evil, pressed about her, spying out
+her thoughts, counting her heart-beats, ready to pounce upon the least
+symptom of over-confidence and turn it deftly to derision. Oh, for an
+altar on which to pour out propitiatory offerings! But what sweeter
+could they have than her smothered heart-beats, her choked-back tears?
+
+The bell rang, and she stood up as if a spring had jerked her to her
+feet. In the mirror between the dried grasses her face looked long pale
+inanimate. Ah, if he should find her too changed--! If there were but
+time to dash upstairs and put on a touch of red....
+
+The door opened; it shut on him; he was there.
+
+He said: “You wanted to see me?”
+
+She answered: “Yes.” And her heart seemed to stop beating.
+
+At first she could not make out what mysterious change had come over
+him, and why it was that in looking at him she seemed to be looking at a
+stranger; then she perceived that his voice sounded as it used to sound
+when he was talking to other people; and she said to herself, with a
+sick shiver of understanding, that she had become an “other person” to
+him.
+
+There was a deathly pause; then she faltered out, not knowing what she
+said: “Nick--you’ll sit down?”
+
+He said: “Thanks,” but did not seem to have heard her, for he continued
+to stand motionless, half the room between them. And slowly the
+uselessness, the hopelessness of his being there overcame her. A wall of
+granite seemed to have built itself up between them. She felt as if
+it hid her from him, as if with those remote new eyes of his he were
+staring into the wall and not at her. Suddenly she said to herself:
+“He’s suffering more than I am, because he pities me, and is afraid to
+tell me that he is going to be married.”
+
+The thought stung her pride, and she lifted her head and met his eyes
+with a smile.
+
+“Don’t you think,” she said, “it’s more sensible--with everything so
+changed in our lives--that we should meet as friends, in this way? I
+wanted to tell you that you needn’t feel--feel in the least unhappy
+about me.”
+
+A deep flush rose to his forehead. “Oh, I know--I know that--” he
+declared hastily; and added, with a factitious animation: “But thank you
+for telling me.”
+
+“There’s nothing, is there,” she continued, “to make our meeting in this
+way in the least embarrassing or painful to either of us, when both
+have found....” She broke off, and held her hand out to him. “I’ve heard
+about you and Coral,” she ended.
+
+He just touched her hand with cold fingers, and let it drop. “Thank
+you,” he said for the third time.
+
+“You won’t sit down?”
+
+He sat down.
+
+“Don’t you think,” she continued, “that the new way of... of meeting
+as friends... and talking things over without ill-will... is much
+pleasanter and more sensible, after all?”
+
+He smiled. “It’s immensely kind of you to feel that.”
+
+“Oh, I do feel it!” She stopped short, and wondered what on earth she
+had meant to say next, and why she had so abruptly lost the thread of
+her discourse.
+
+In the pause she heard him cough slightly and clear his throat. “Let me
+say, then,” he began, “that I’m glad too--immensely glad that your own
+future is so satisfactorily settled.”
+
+She lifted her glance again to his walled face, in which not a muscle
+stirred.
+
+“Yes: it--it makes everything easier for you, doesn’t it?”
+
+“For you too, I hope.” He paused, and then went on: “I want also to tell
+you that I perfectly understand--”
+
+“Oh,” she interrupted, “so do I; your point of view, I mean.”
+
+They were again silent.
+
+“Nick, why can’t we be friends real friends? Won’t it be easier?” she
+broke out at last with twitching lips.
+
+“Easier--?”
+
+“I mean, about talking things over--arrangements. There are arrangements
+to be made, I suppose?”
+
+“I suppose so.” He hesitated. “I’m doing what I’m told--simply following
+out instructions. The business is easy enough, apparently. I’m taking
+the necessary steps--”
+
+She reddened a little, and drew a gasping breath. “The necessary steps:
+what are they? Everything the lawyers tell one is so confusing.... I
+don’t yet understand--how it’s done.”
+
+“My share, you mean? Oh, it’s very simple.” He paused, and added in a
+tone of laboured ease: “I’m going down to Fontainebleau to-morrow--”
+
+She stared, not understanding. “To Fontainebleau--?”
+
+Her bewilderment drew from him his first frank smile. “Well--I chose
+Fontainebleau--I don’t know why... except that we’ve never been there
+together.”
+
+At that she suddenly understood, and the blood rushed to her forehead.
+She stood up without knowing what she was doing, her heart in her
+throat. “How grotesque--how utterly disgusting!”
+
+He gave a slight shrug. “I didn’t make the laws....”
+
+“But isn’t it too stupid and degrading that such things should be
+necessary when two people want to part--?” She broke off again, silenced
+by the echo of that fatal “want to part.”...
+
+He seemed to prefer not to dwell farther on the legal obligations
+involved.
+
+“You haven’t yet told me,” he suggested, “how you happen to be living
+here.”
+
+“Here--with the Fulmer children?” She roused herself, trying to catch
+his easier note. “Oh, I’ve simply been governessing them for a few
+weeks, while Nat and Grace are in Sicily.” She did not say: “It’s
+because I’ve parted with Strefford.” Somehow it helped her wounded pride
+a little to keep from him the secret of her precarious independence.
+
+He looked his wonder. “All alone with that bewildered bonne? But how
+many of them are there? Five? Good Lord!” He contemplated the clock with
+unseeing eyes, and then turned them again on her face.
+
+“I should have thought a lot of children would rather get on your
+nerves.”
+
+“Oh, not these children. They’re so good to me.”
+
+“Ah, well, I suppose it won’t be for long.”
+
+He sent his eyes again about the room, which his absent-minded gaze
+seemed to reduce to its dismal constituent elements, and added, with an
+obvious effort at small talk: “I hear the Fulmers are not hitting it off
+very well since his success. Is it true that he’s going to marry Violet
+Melrose?”
+
+The blood rose to Susy’s face. “Oh, never, never! He and Grace are
+travelling together now.”
+
+“Oh, I didn’t know. People say things....” He was visibly embarrassed
+with the subject, and sorry that he had broached it.
+
+“Some of the things that people say are true. But Grace doesn’t mind.
+She says she and Nat belong to each other. They can’t help it, she
+thinks, after having been through such a lot together.”
+
+“Dear old Grace!”
+
+He had risen from his chair, and this time she made no effort to detain
+him. He seemed to have recovered his self-composure, and it struck her
+painfully, humiliatingly almost, that he should have spoken in that
+light way of the expedition to Fontainebleau on the morrow.... Well,
+men were different, she supposed; she remembered having felt that once
+before about Nick.
+
+It was on the tip of her tongue to cry out: “But wait--wait! I’m not
+going to marry Strefford after all!”--but to do so would seem like an
+appeal to his compassion, to his indulgence; and that was not what she
+wanted. She could never forget that he had left her because he had not
+been able to forgive her for “managing”--and not for the world would she
+have him think that this meeting had been planned for such a purpose.
+
+“If he doesn’t see that I am different, in spite of appearances... and
+that I never was what he said I was that day--if in all these months it
+hasn’t come over him, what’s the use of trying to make him see it now?”
+ she mused. And then, her thoughts hurrying on: “Perhaps he’s suffering
+too--I believe he is suffering--at any rate, he’s suffering for me, if
+not for himself. But if he’s pledged to Coral, what can he do? What
+would he think of me if I tried to make him break his word to her?”
+
+There he stood--the man who was “going to Fontainebleau to-morrow”; who
+called it “taking the necessary steps!” Who could smile as he made the
+careless statement! A world seemed to divide them already: it was as if
+their parting were already over. All the words, cries, arguments beating
+loud wings in her dropped back into silence. The only thought left was:
+“How much longer does he mean to go on standing there?”
+
+He may have read the question in her face, for turning back from an
+absorbed contemplation of the window curtains he said: “There’s nothing
+else?”
+
+“Nothing else?”
+
+“I mean: you spoke of things to be settled--”
+
+She flushed, suddenly remembering the pretext she had used to summon
+him.
+
+“Oh,” she faltered, “I didn’t know... I thought there might be.... But
+the lawyers, I suppose....”
+
+She saw the relief on his contracted face. “Exactly. I’ve always thought
+it was best to leave it to them. I assure you”--again for a moment the
+smile strained his lips--“I shall do nothing to interfere with a quick
+settlement.”
+
+She stood motionless, feeling herself turn to stone. He appeared already
+a long way off, like a figure vanishing down a remote perspective.
+
+“Then--good-bye,” she heard him say from its farther end.
+
+“Oh,--good-bye,” she faltered, as if she had not had the word ready, and
+was relieved to have him supply it.
+
+He stopped again on the threshold, looked back at her, began to speak.
+“I’ve--” he said; then he repeated “Good-bye,” as though to make sure he
+had not forgotten to say it; and the door closed on him.
+
+It was over; she had had her last chance and missed it. Now, whatever
+happened, the one thing she had lived and longed for would never be. He
+had come, and she had let him go again....
+
+How had it come about? Would she ever be able to explain it to herself?
+How was it that she, so fertile in strategy, so practiced in feminine
+arts, had stood there before him, helpless, inarticulate, like a
+school-girl a-choke with her first love-longing? If he was gone, and
+gone never to return, it was her own fault, and none but hers. What had
+she done to move him, detain him, make his heart beat and his head
+swim as hers were beating and swimming? She stood aghast at her own
+inadequacy, her stony inexpressiveness....
+
+And suddenly she lifted her hands to her throbbing forehead and cried
+out: “But this is love! This must be love!”
+
+She had loved him before, she supposed; for what else was she to call
+the impulse that had drawn her to him, taught her how to overcome his
+scruples, and whirled him away with her on their mad adventure? Well,
+if that was love, this was something so much larger and deeper that the
+other feeling seemed the mere dancing of her blood in tune with his....
+
+But, no! Real love, great love, the love that poets sang, and privileged
+and tortured beings lived and died of, that love had its own superior
+expressiveness, and the sure command of its means. The petty arts of
+coquetry were no farther from it than the numbness of the untaught
+girl. Great love was wise, strong, powerful, like genius, like any other
+dominant form of human power. It knew itself, and what it wanted, and
+how to attain its ends.
+
+Not great love, then... but just the common humble average of human love
+was hers. And it had come to her so newly, so overwhelmingly, with a
+face so grave, a touch so startling, that she had stood there petrified,
+humbled at the first look of its eyes, recognizing that what she had
+once taken for love was merely pleasure and spring-time, and the flavour
+of youth.
+
+“But how was I to know? And now it’s too late!” she wailed.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXIX.
+
+
+
+THE inhabitants of the little house in Passy were of necessity early
+risers; but when Susy jumped out of bed the next morning no one else
+was astir, and it lacked nearly an hour of the call of the bonne’s
+alarm-clock.
+
+For a moment Susy leaned out of her dark room into the darker night.
+A cold drizzle fell on her face, and she shivered and drew back. Then,
+lighting a candle, and shading it, as her habit was, from the sleeping
+child, she slipped on her dressing-gown and opened the door. On the
+threshold she paused to look at her watch. Only half-past five! She
+thought with compunction of the unkindness of breaking in on Junie
+Fulmer’s slumbers; but such scruples did not weigh an ounce in the
+balance of her purpose. Poor Junie would have to oversleep herself on
+Sunday, that was all.
+
+Susy stole into the passage, opened a door, and cast her light on the
+girl’s face.
+
+“Junie! Dearest Junie, you must wake up!”
+
+Junie lay in the abandonment of youthful sleep; but at the sound of her
+name she sat up with the promptness of a grown person on whom domestic
+burdens have long weighed.
+
+“Which one of them is it?” she asked, one foot already out of bed.
+
+“Oh, Junie dear, no... it’s nothing wrong with the children... or with
+anybody,” Susy stammered, on her knees by the bed.
+
+In the candlelight, she saw Junie’s anxious brow darken reproachfully.
+
+“Oh, Susy, then why--? I was just dreaming we were all driving about
+Rome in a great big motor-car with father and mother!”
+
+“I’m so sorry, dear. What a lovely dream! I’m a brute to have
+interrupted it--”
+
+She felt the little girl’s awakening scrutiny. “If there’s nothing wrong
+with anybody, why are you crying, Susy? Is it you there’s something
+wrong with? What has happened?”
+
+“Am I crying?” Susy rose from her knees and sat down on the counterpane.
+“Yes, it is me. And I had to disturb you.”
+
+“Oh, Susy, darling, what is it?” Junie’s arms were about her in a flash,
+and Susy grasped them in burning fingers.
+
+“Junie, listen! I’ve got to go away at once--to leave you all for the
+whole day. I may not be back till late this evening; late to-night; I
+can’t tell. I promised your mother I’d never leave you; but I’ve got
+to--I’ve got to.”
+
+Junie considered her agitated face with fully awakened eyes. “Oh, I
+won’t tell, you know, you old brick,” she said with simplicity.
+
+Susy hugged her. “Junie, Junie, you darling! But that wasn’t what I
+meant. Of course you may tell--you must tell. I shall write to
+your mother myself. But what worries me is the idea of having to go
+away--away from Paris--for the whole day, with Geordie still coughing a
+little, and no one but that silly Angele to stay with him while you’re
+out--and no one but you to take yourself and the others to school. But
+Junie, Junie, I’ve got to do it!” she sobbed out, clutching the child
+tighter.
+
+Junie Fulmer, with her strangely mature perception of the case, and
+seemingly of every case that fate might call on her to deal with, sat
+for a moment motionless in Susy’s hold. Then she freed her wrists with
+an adroit twist, and leaning back against the pillows said judiciously:
+“You’ll never in the world bring up a family of your own if you take on
+like this over other people’s children.”
+
+Through all her turmoil of spirit the observation drew a laugh from
+Susy. “Oh, a family of my own--I don’t deserve one, the way I’m behaving
+to your--”
+
+Junie still considered her. “My dear, a change will do you good: you
+need it,” she pronounced.
+
+Susy rose with a laughing sigh. “I’m not at all sure it will! But I’ve
+got to have it, all the same. Only I do feel anxious--and I can’t even
+leave you my address!”
+
+Junie still seemed to examine the case.
+
+“Can’t you even tell me where you’re going?” she ventured, as if not
+quite sure of the delicacy of asking.
+
+“Well--no, I don’t think I can; not till I get back. Besides, even if
+I could it wouldn’t be much use, because I couldn’t give you my address
+there. I don’t know what it will be.”
+
+“But what does it matter, if you’re coming back to-night?”
+
+“Of course I’m coming back! How could you possibly imagine I should
+think of leaving you for more than a day?”
+
+“Oh, I shouldn’t be afraid--not much, that is, with the poker, and Nat’s
+water-pistol,” emended Junie, still judicious.
+
+Susy again enfolded her vehemently, and then turned to more practical
+matters. She explained that she wished if possible to catch an
+eight-thirty train from the Gare de Lyon, and that there was not a
+moment to lose if the children were to be dressed and fed, and full
+instructions written out for Junie and Angele, before she rushed for the
+underground.
+
+While she bathed Geordie, and then hurried into her own clothes, she
+could not help wondering at her own extreme solicitude for her charges.
+She remembered, with a pang, how often she had deserted Clarissa
+Vanderlyn for the whole day, and even for two or three in
+succession--poor little Clarissa, whom she knew to be so unprotected,
+so exposed to evil influences. She had been too much absorbed in her own
+greedy bliss to be more than intermittently aware of the child; but now,
+she felt, no sorrow however ravaging, no happiness however absorbing,
+would ever again isolate her from her kind.
+
+And then these children were so different! The exquisite Clarissa was
+already the predestined victim of her surroundings: her budding soul
+was divided from Susy’s by the same barrier of incomprehension that
+separated the latter from Mrs. Vanderlyn. Clarissa had nothing to
+teach Susy but the horror of her own hard little appetites; whereas the
+company of the noisy argumentative Fulmers had been a school of wisdom
+and abnegation.
+
+As she applied the brush to Geordie’s shining head and the handkerchief
+to his snuffling nose, the sense of what she owed him was so borne in on
+Susy that she interrupted the process to catch him to her bosom.
+
+“I’ll have such a story to tell you when I get back to-night, if you’ll
+promise me to be good all day,” she bargained with him; and Geordie,
+always astute, bargained back: “Before I promise, I’d like to know what
+story.”
+
+At length all was in order. Junie had been enlightened, and Angele
+stunned, by the minuteness of Susy’s instructions; and the latter,
+waterproofed and stoutly shod, descended the doorstep, and paused to
+wave at the pyramid of heads yearning to her from an upper window.
+
+It was hardly light, and still raining, when she turned into the dismal
+street. As usual, it was empty; but at the corner she perceived a
+hesitating taxi, with luggage piled beside the driver. Perhaps it was
+some early traveller, just arriving, who would release the carriage in
+time for her to catch it, and thus avoid the walk to the metro, and the
+subsequent strap-hanging; for it was the work-people’s hour. Susy raced
+toward the vehicle, which, overcoming its hesitation, was beginning to
+move in her direction. Observing this, she stopped to see where it
+would discharge its load. Thereupon the taxi stopped also, and the load
+discharged itself in front of her in the shape of Nick Lansing.
+
+The two stood staring at each other through the rain till Nick broke
+out: “Where are you going? I came to get you.”
+
+“To get me? To get me?” she repeated. Beside the driver she had suddenly
+remarked the old suit-case from which her husband had obliged her to
+extract Strefford’s cigars as they were leaving Como; and everything
+that had happened since seemed to fall away and vanish in the pang and
+rapture of that memory.
+
+“To get you; yes. Of course.” He spoke the words peremptorily, almost as
+if they were an order. “Where were you going?” he repeated.
+
+Without answering, she turned toward the house. He followed her, and the
+laden taxi closed the procession.
+
+“Why are you out in such weather without an umbrella?” he continued, in
+the same severe tone, drawing her under the shelter of his.
+
+“Oh, because Junie’s umbrella is in tatters, and I had to leave her
+mine, as I was going away for the whole day.” She spoke the words like a
+person in a trance.
+
+“For the whole day? At this hour? Where?”
+
+They were on the doorstep, and she fumbled automatically for her key,
+let herself in, and led the way to the sitting-room. It had not been
+tidied up since the night before. The children’s school books lay
+scattered on the table and sofa, and the empty fireplace was grey with
+ashes. She turned to Nick in the pallid light.
+
+“I was going to see you,” she stammered, “I was going to follow you to
+Fontainebleau, if necessary, to tell you... to prevent you....”
+
+He repeated in the same aggressive tone: “Tell me what? Prevent what?”
+
+“Tell you that there must be some other way... some decent way... of our
+separating... without that horror, that horror of your going off with a
+woman....”
+
+He stared, and then burst into a laugh. The blood rushed to her face.
+She had caught a familiar ring in his laugh, and it wounded her. What
+business had he, at such a time, to laugh in the old way?
+
+“I’m sorry; but there is no other way, I’m afraid. No other way but
+one,” he corrected himself.
+
+She raised her head sharply. “Well?”
+
+“That you should be the woman.--Oh, my dear!” He had dropped his mocking
+smile, and was at her side, her hands in his. “Oh, my dear, don’t you
+see that we’ve both been feeling the same thing, and at the same hour?
+You lay awake thinking of it all night, didn’t you? So did I. Whenever
+the clock struck, I said to myself: ‘She’s hearing it too.’ And I was up
+before daylight, and packed my traps--for I never want to set foot again
+in that awful hotel where I’ve lived in hell for the last three days.
+And I swore to myself that I’d go off with a woman by the first train I
+could catch--and so I mean to, my dear.”
+
+She stood before him numb. Yes, numb: that was the worst of it! The
+violence of the reaction had been too great, and she could hardly
+understand what he was saying. Instead, she noticed that the tassel of
+the window-blind was torn off again (oh, those children!), and vaguely
+wondered if his luggage were safe on the waiting taxi. One heard such
+stories....
+
+His voice came back to her. “Susy! Listen!” he was entreating. “You
+must see yourself that it can’t be. We’re married--isn’t that all that
+matters? Oh, I know--I’ve behaved like a brute: a cursed arrogant ass!
+You couldn’t wish that ass a worse kicking than I’ve given him! But
+that’s not the point, you see. The point is that we’re married....
+Married.... Doesn’t it mean something to you, something--inexorable? It
+does to me. I didn’t dream it would--in just that way. But all I can say
+is that I suppose the people who don’t feel it aren’t really married--and
+they’d better separate; much better. As for us--”
+
+Through her tears she gasped out: “That’s what I felt... that’s what I
+said to Streff....”
+
+He was upon her with a great embrace. “My darling! My darling! You have
+told him?”
+
+“Yes,” she panted. “That’s why I’m living here.” She paused. “And you’ve
+told Coral?”
+
+She felt his embrace relax. He drew away a little, still holding her,
+but with lowered head.
+
+
+“No... I... haven’t.”
+
+“Oh, Nick! But then--?”
+
+He caught her to him again, resentfully. “Well--then what? What do you
+mean? What earthly difference does it make?”
+
+“But if you’ve told her you were going to marry her--” (Try as she
+would, her voice was full of silver chimes.)
+
+“Marry her? Marry her?” he echoed. “But how could I? What does marriage
+mean anyhow? If it means anything at all it means--you! And I can’t ask
+Coral Hicks just to come and live with me, can I?”
+
+Between crying and laughing she lay on his breast, and his hand passed
+over her hair.
+
+They were silent for a while; then he began again: “You said it yourself
+yesterday, you know.”
+
+She strayed back from sunlit distances. “Yesterday?”
+
+“Yes: that Grace Fulmer says you can’t separate two people who’ve been
+through a lot of things--”
+
+“Ah, been through them together--it’s not the things, you see, it’s the
+togetherness,” she interrupted.
+
+“The togetherness--that’s it!” He seized on the word as if it had just
+been coined to express their case, and his mind could rest in it without
+farther labour.
+
+The door-bell rang, and they started. Through the window they saw the
+taxi-driver gesticulating enquiries as to the fate of the luggage.
+
+“He wants to know if he’s to leave it here,” Susy laughed.
+
+“No--no! You’re to come with me,” her husband declared.
+
+“Come with you?” She laughed again at the absurdity of the suggestion.
+
+“Of course: this very instant. What did you suppose? That I was going
+away without you? Run up and pack your things,” he commanded.
+
+“My things? My things? But I can’t leave the children!”
+
+He stared, between indignation and amusement. “Can’t leave the children?
+Nonsense! Why, you said yourself you were going to follow me to
+Fontainebleau--”
+
+She reddened again, this time a little painfully “I didn’t know what
+I was doing.... I had to find you... but I should have come back this
+evening, no matter what happened.”
+
+“No matter what?”
+
+She nodded, and met his gaze resolutely.
+
+“No; but really--”
+
+“Really, I can’t leave the children till Nat and Grace come back. I
+promised I wouldn’t.”
+
+“Yes; but you didn’t know then.... Why on earth can’t their nurse look
+after them?”
+
+“There isn’t any nurse but me.”
+
+“Good Lord!”
+
+“But it’s only for two weeks more,” she pleaded. “Two weeks! Do you know
+how long I’ve been without you!” He seized her by both wrists, and drew
+them against his breast. “Come with me at least for two days--Susy!” he
+entreated her.
+
+“Oh,” she cried, “that’s the very first time you’ve said my name!”
+
+“Susy, Susy, then--my Susy--Susy! And you’ve only said mine once, you
+know.”
+
+“Nick!” she sighed, at peace, as if the one syllable were a magic seed
+that hung out great branches to envelop them.
+
+“Well, then, Susy, be reasonable. Come!”
+
+“Reasonable--oh, reasonable!” she sobbed through laughter.
+
+“Unreasonable, then! That’s even better.”
+
+She freed herself, and drew back gently. “Nick, I swore I wouldn’t leave
+them; and I can’t. It’s not only my promise to their mother--it’s what
+they’ve been to me themselves. You don’t, know... You can’t imagine
+the things they’ve taught me. They’re awfully naughty at times, because
+they’re so clever; but when they’re good they’re the wisest people I
+know.” She paused, and a sudden inspiration illuminated her. “But why
+shouldn’t we take them with us?” she exclaimed.
+
+Her husband’s arms fell away from her, and he stood dumfounded.
+
+“Take them with us?”
+
+“Why not?”
+
+“All five of them?”
+
+“Of course--I couldn’t possibly separate them. And Junie and Nat will
+help us to look after the young ones.”
+
+“Help us!” he groaned.
+
+“Oh, you’ll see; they won’t bother you. Just leave it to me; I’ll
+manage--” The word stopped her short, and an agony of crimson suffused
+her from brow to throat. Their eyes met; and without a word he stooped
+and laid his lips gently on the stain of red on her neck.
+
+“Nick,” she breathed, her hands in his.
+
+“But those children--”
+
+Instead of answering, she questioned: “Where are we going?”
+
+His face lit up.
+
+“Anywhere, dearest, that you choose.”
+
+“Well--I choose Fontainebleau!” she exulted.
+
+“So do I! But we can’t take all those children to an hotel at
+Fontainebleau, can we?” he questioned weakly. “You see, dear, there’s
+the mere expense of it--”
+
+Her eyes were already travelling far ahead of him. “The expense won’t
+amount to much. I’ve just remembered that Angele, the bonne, has a
+sister who is cook there in a nice old-fashioned pension which must be
+almost empty at this time of year. I’m sure I can ma--arrange easily,”
+ she hurried on, nearly tripping again over the fatal word. “And just
+think of the treat it will be to them! This is Friday, and I can get
+them let off from their afternoon classes, and keep them in the country
+till Monday. Poor darlings, they haven’t been out of Paris for months!
+And I daresay the change will cure Geordie’s cough--Geordie’s the
+youngest,” she explained, surprised to find herself, even in the rapture
+of reunion, so absorbed in the welfare of the Fulmers.
+
+She was conscious that her husband was surprised also; but instead of
+prolonging the argument he simply questioned: “Was Geordie the chap you
+had in your arms when you opened the front door the night before last?”
+
+She echoed: “I opened the front door the night before last?”
+
+“To a boy with a parcel.”
+
+“Oh,” she sobbed, “you were there? You were watching?”
+
+He held her to him, and the currents flowed between them warm and full
+as on the night of their moon over Como.
+
+In a trice, after that, she had the matter in hand and her forces
+marshalled. The taxi was paid, Nick’s luggage deposited in the
+vestibule, and the children, just piling down to breakfast, were
+summoned in to hear the news.
+
+It was apparent that, seasoned to surprises as they were, Nick’s
+presence took them aback. But when, between laughter and embraces, his
+identity, and his right to be where he was, had been made clear to them,
+Junie dismissed the matter by asking him in her practical way: “Then
+I suppose we may talk about you to Susy now?”--and thereafter all five
+addressed themselves to the vision of their imminent holiday.
+
+From that moment the little house became the centre of a whirlwind.
+Treats so unforeseen, and of such magnitude, were rare in the young
+Fulmers’ experience, and had it not been for Junie’s steadying influence
+Susy’s charges would have got out of hand. But young Nat, appealed to
+by Nick on the ground of their common manhood, was induced to forego
+celebrating the event on his motor horn (the very same which had
+tortured the New Hampshire echoes), and to assert his authority over
+his juniors; and finally a plan began to emerge from the chaos, and each
+child to fit into it like a bit of a picture puzzle.
+
+Susy, riding the whirlwind with her usual firmness, nevertheless felt an
+undercurrent of anxiety. There had been no time as yet, between her and
+Nick, to revert to money matters; and where there was so little money
+it could not, obviously, much matter. But that was the more reason for
+being secretly aghast at her intrepid resolve not to separate herself
+from her charges. A three days’ honey-moon with five children in the
+party--and children with the Fulmer appetite--could not but be a costly
+business; and while she settled details, packed them off to school, and
+routed out such nondescript receptacles as the house contained in the
+way of luggage, her thoughts remained fixed on the familiar financial
+problem.
+
+Yes--it was cruel to have it rear its hated head, even through the
+bursting boughs of her new spring; but there it was, the perpetual
+serpent in her Eden, to be bribed, fed, sent to sleep with such scraps
+as she could beg, borrow or steal for it. And she supposed it was the
+price that fate meant her to pay for her blessedness, and was surer than
+ever that the blessedness was worth it. Only, how was she to compound
+the business with her new principles?
+
+With the children’s things to pack, luncheon to be got ready, and the
+Fontainebleau pension to be telephoned to, there was little time to
+waste on moral casuistry; and Susy asked herself with a certain irony
+if the chronic lack of time to deal with money difficulties had not been
+the chief cause of her previous lapses. There was no time to deal with
+this question either; no time, in short, to do anything but rush forward
+on a great gale of plans and preparations, in the course of which she
+whirled Nick forth to buy some charcuterie for luncheon, and telephone
+to Fontainebleau.
+
+Once he was gone--and after watching him safely round the corner--she
+too got into her wraps, and transferring a small packet from her
+dressing-case to her pocket, hastened out in a different direction.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXX.
+
+
+
+IT took two brimming taxi-cabs to carry the Nicholas Lansings to the
+station on their second honey-moon. In the first were Nick, Susy and the
+luggage of the whole party (little Nat’s motor horn included, as a last
+concession, and because he had hitherto forborne to play on it); and in
+the second, the five Fulmers, the bonne, who at the eleventh hour had
+refused to be left, a cage-full of canaries, and a foundling kitten who
+had murderous designs on them; all of which had to be taken because, if
+the bonne came, there would be nobody left to look after them.
+
+At the corner Susy tore herself from Nick’s arms and held up the
+procession while she ran back to the second taxi to make sure that the
+bonne had brought the house-key. It was found of course that she hadn’t
+but that Junie had; whereupon the caravan got under way again, and
+reached the station just as the train was starting; and there, by some
+miracle of good nature on the part of the guard, they were all packed
+together into an empty compartment--no doubt, as Susy remarked, because
+train officials never failed to spot a newly-married couple, and treat
+them kindly.
+
+The children, sentinelled by Junie, at first gave promise of superhuman
+goodness; but presently their feelings overflowed, and they were not to
+be quieted till it had been agreed that Nat should blow his motor-horn
+at each halt, while the twins called out the names of the stations, and
+Geordie, with the canaries and kitten, affected to change trains.
+
+Luckily the halts were few; but the excitement of travel, combined
+with over-indulgence in the chocolates imprudently provided by Nick,
+overwhelmed Geordie with a sudden melancholy that could be appeased only
+by Susy’s telling him stories till they arrived at Fontainebleau.
+
+The day was soft, with mild gleams of sunlight on decaying foliage;
+and after luggage and livestock had been dropped at the pension Susy
+confessed that she had promised the children a scamper in the forest,
+and buns in a tea-shop afterward. Nick placidly agreed, and darkness
+had long fallen, and a great many buns been consumed, when at length
+the procession turned down the street toward the pension, headed by Nick
+with the sleeping Geordie on his shoulder, while the others, speechless
+with fatigue and food, hung heavily on Susy.
+
+It had been decided that, as the bonne was of the party, the children
+might be entrusted to her for the night, and Nick and Susy establish
+themselves in an adjacent hotel. Nick had flattered himself that
+they might remove their possessions there when they returned from the
+tea-room; but Susy, manifestly surprised at the idea, reminded him
+that her charges must first be given their supper and put to bed. She
+suggested that he should meanwhile take the bags to the hotel, and
+promised to join him as soon as Geordie was asleep.
+
+She was a long time coming, but waiting for her was sweet, even in a
+deserted hotel reading-room insufficiently heated by a sulky stove; and
+after he had glanced through his morning’s mail, hurriedly thrust into
+his pocket as he left Paris, he sank into a state of drowsy beatitude.
+It was all the maddest business in the world, yet it did not give him
+the sense of unreality that had made their first adventure a mere golden
+dream; and he sat and waited with the security of one in whom dear
+habits have struck deep roots. In this mood of acquiescence even the
+presence of the five Fulmers seemed a natural and necessary consequence
+of all the rest; and when Susy at length appeared, a little pale and
+tired, with the brooding inward look that busy mothers bring from the
+nursery, that too seemed natural and necessary, and part of the new
+order of things.
+
+They had wandered out to a cheap restaurant for dinner; now, in the damp
+December night, they were walking back to the hotel under a sky full of
+rain-clouds. They seemed to have said everything to each other, and yet
+barely to have begun what they had to tell; and at each step they took,
+their heavy feet dragged a great load of bliss.
+
+In the hotel almost all the lights were already out; and they groped
+their way to the third floor room which was the only one that Susy
+had found cheap enough. A ray from a street-lamp struck up through the
+unshuttered windows; and after Nick had revived the fire they drew their
+chairs close to it, and sat quietly for a while in the dark.
+
+Their silence was so sweet that Nick could not make up his mind to break
+it; not to do so gave his tossing spirit such a sense of permanence, of
+having at last unlimited time before him in which to taste his joy and
+let its sweetness stream through him. But at length he roused himself to
+say: “It’s queer how things coincide. I’ve had a little bit of good news
+in one of the letters I got this morning.”
+
+Susy took the announcement serenely. “Well, you would, you know,” she
+commented, as if the day had been too obviously designed for bliss to
+escape the notice of its dispensers.
+
+“Yes,” he continued with a thrill of pardonable pride. “During the
+cruise I did a couple of articles on Crete--oh, just travel-impressions,
+of course; they couldn’t be more. But the editor of the New Review
+has accepted them, and asks for others. And here’s his cheque, if you
+please! So you see you might have let me take the jolly room downstairs
+with the pink curtains. And it makes me awfully hopeful about my book.”
+
+He had expected a rapturous outburst, and perhaps some reassertion
+of wifely faith in the glorious future that awaited The Pageant of
+Alexander; and deep down under the lover’s well-being the author felt a
+faint twinge of mortified vanity when Susy, leaping to her feet, cried
+out, ravenously and without preamble: “Oh, Nick, Nick--let me see how
+much they’ve given you!”
+
+He flourished the cheque before her in the firelight. “A couple of
+hundred, you mercenary wretch!”
+
+“Oh, oh--” she gasped, as if the good news had been almost too much for
+her tense nerves; and then surprised him by dropping to the ground, and
+burying her face against his knees.
+
+“Susy, my Susy,” he whispered, his hand on her shaking shoulder. “Why,
+dear, what is it? You’re not crying?”
+
+“Oh, Nick, Nick--two hundred? Two hundred dollars? Then I’ve got to tell
+you--oh now, at once!”
+
+A faint chill ran over him, and involuntarily his hand drew back from
+her bowed figure.
+
+“Now? Oh, why now?” he protested. “What on earth does it matter
+now--whatever it is?”
+
+“But it does matter--it matters more than you can think!”
+
+She straightened herself, still kneeling before him, and lifted her head
+so that the firelight behind her turned her hair into a ruddy halo. “Oh,
+Nick, the bracelet--Ellie’s bracelet.... I’ve never returned it to her,”
+ she faltered out.
+
+He felt himself recoiling under the hands with which she clutched his
+knees. For an instant he did not remember what she alluded to; it was
+the mere mention of Ellie Vanderlyn’s name that had fallen between them
+like an icy shadow. What an incorrigible fool he had been to think they
+could ever shake off such memories, or cease to be the slaves of such a
+past!
+
+“The bracelet?--Oh, yes,” he said, suddenly understanding, and feeling
+the chill mount slowly to his lips.
+
+“Yes, the bracelet... Oh, Nick, I meant to give it back at once; I
+did--I did; but the day you went away I forgot everything else. And when
+I found the thing, in the bottom of my bag, weeks afterward, I thought
+everything was over between you and me, and I had begun to see Ellie
+again, and she was kind to me and how could I?” To save his life he
+could have found no answer, and she pressed on: “And so this morning,
+when I saw you were frightened by the expense of bringing all the
+children with us, and when I felt I couldn’t leave them, and couldn’t
+leave you either, I remembered the bracelet; and I sent you off to
+telephone while I rushed round the corner to a little jeweller’s where
+I’d been before, and pawned it so that you shouldn’t have to pay for the
+children.... But now, darling, you see, if you’ve got all that money, I
+can get it out of pawn at once, can’t I, and send it back to her?”
+
+She flung her arms about him, and he held her fast, wondering if the
+tears he felt were hers or his. Still he did not speak; but as he
+clasped her close she added, with an irrepressible flash of her old
+irony: “Not that Ellie will understand why I’ve done it. She’s never yet
+been able to make out why you returned her scarf-pin.”
+
+For a long time she continued to lean against him, her head on his
+knees, as she had done on the terrace of Como on the last night of their
+honeymoon. She had ceased to talk, and he sat silent also, passing
+his hand quietly to and fro over her hair. The first rapture had been
+succeeded by soberer feelings. Her confession had broken up the frozen
+pride about his heart, and humbled him to the earth; but it had also
+roused forgotten things, memories and scruples swept aside in the first
+rush of their reunion. He and she belonged to each other for always:
+he understood that now. The impulse which had first drawn them
+together again, in spite of reason, in spite of themselves almost, that
+deep-seated instinctive need that each had of the other, would never
+again wholly let them go. Yet as he sat there he thought of Strefford,
+he thought of Coral Hicks. He had been a coward in regard to Coral, and
+Susy had been sincere and courageous in regard to Strefford. Yet his
+mind dwelt on Coral with tenderness, with compunction, with remorse; and
+he was almost sure that Susy had already put Strefford utterly out of
+her mind.
+
+It was the old contrast between the two ways of loving, the man’s way
+and the woman’s; and after a moment it seemed to Nick natural enough
+that Susy, from the very moment of finding him again, should feel
+neither pity nor regret, and that Strefford should already be to her
+as if he had never been. After all, there was something Providential in
+such arrangements.
+
+He stooped closer, pressed her dreaming head between his hands, and
+whispered: “Wake up; it’s bedtime.”
+
+She rose; but as she moved away to turn on the light he caught her hand
+and drew her to the window. They leaned on the sill in the darkness,
+and through the clouds, from which a few drops were already falling,
+the moon, labouring upward, swam into a space of sky, cast her troubled
+glory on them, and was again hidden.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg’s The Glimpses of the Moon, by Edith Wharton
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1263 ***