THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON

***

EDITH WHARTON
 *
The Glimpses of the Moon
First published in 1922
ISBN 978-1-62012-240-2
Duke Classics
© 2012 Duke Classics and its licensors. All rights reserved.

While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in
this edition, Duke Classics does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this
book. Duke Classics does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the
accuracy or currency of information contained in this book.
Contents
*
Part I
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
Part II
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
Part III
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
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 tile 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 Aegean; 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 tete-a-tete 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 tomorrow, 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 tete-a-tete, 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 tomorrow! 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.

***