The Glimpses of the Moon
by Edith Wharton
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

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
moonflooded 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--"