University of Virginia Library

2. PART II

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. 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!

17. 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?"

18. 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."

19. 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."

20. 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 ....

21. 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?

22. XXII

STREFFORD was leaving for England.

Once assured that Susy had taken the first step toward freeing herself, he frankly regarded her as his affianced wife, and could see no reason for further mystery. She understood his impatience to have their plans settled; it would protect him from the formidable menace of the marriageable, and cause people, as he said, to stop meddling. Now that the novelty of his situation was wearing off, his natural indolence reasserted itself, and there was nothing he dreaded more than having to be on his guard against the innumerable plans that his well-wishers were perpetually making for him. Sometimes Susy fancied he was marrying her because to do so was to follow the line of least resistance.

"To marry me is the easiest way of not marrying all the others," she laughed, as he stood before her one day in a quiet alley of the Bois de Boulogne, insisting on the settlement of various preliminaries. "I believe I'm only a protection to you."

An odd gleam passed behind his eyes, and she instantly guessed that he was thinking: "And what else am I to you?"

She changed colour, and he rejoined, laughing also: "Well, you're that at any rate, thank the Lord!"

She pondered, and then questioned: "But in the interval-how are you going to defend yourself for another year?"

"Ah, you've got to see to that; you've got to take a little house in London. You've got to look after me, you know."

It was on the tip of her tongue to flash back: "Oh, if that's all you care—!" But caring was exactly the factor she wanted, as much as possible, to keep out of their talk and their thoughts. She could not ask him how much he cared without laying herself open to the same question; and that way terror lay. As a matter of fact, though Strefford was not an ardent wooer—perhaps from tact, perhaps from temperament, perhaps merely from the long habit of belittling and disintegrating every sentiment and every conviction—yet she knew he did care for her as much as he was capable of caring for anyone. If the element of habit entered largely into the feeling—if he liked her, above all, because he was used to her, knew her views, her indulgences, her allowances, knew he was never likely to be bored, and almost certain to be amused, by her; why, such ingredients though not of the fieriest, were perhaps those most likely to keep his feeling for her at a pleasant temperature. She had had a taste of the tropics, and wanted more equable weather; but the idea of having to fan his flame gently for a year was unspeakably depressing to her. Yet all this was precisely what she could not say. The long period of probation, during which, as she knew, she would have to amuse him, to guard him, to hold him, and to keep off the other women, was a necessary part of their situation. She was sure that, as little Breckenridge would have said, she could "pull it off"; but she did not want to think about it. What she would have preferred would have been to go away—no matter where and not see Strefford again till they were married. But she dared not tell him that either.

"A little house in London—?" She wondered.

"Well, I suppose you've got to have some sort of a roof over your head."

"I suppose so."

He sat down beside her. "If you like me well enough to live at Altringham some day, won't you, in the meantime, let me provide you with a smaller and more convenient establishment?"

Still she hesitated. The alternative, she knew, would be to live on Ursula Gillow, Violet Melrose, or some other of her rich friends, any one of whom would be ready to lavish the largest hospitality on the prospective Lady Altringham. Such an arrangement, in the long run, would be no less humiliating to her pride, no less destructive to her independence, than Altringham's little establishment. But she temporized. "I shall go over to London in December, and stay for a while with various people—then we can look about."

"All right; as you like." He obviously considered her hesitation ridiculous, but was too full of satisfaction at her having started divorce proceedings to be chilled by her reply.

"And now, look here, my dear; couldn't I give you some sort of a ring?"

"A ring?" She flushed at the suggestion. "What's the use, Streff, dear? With all those jewels locked away in London—"

"Oh, I daresay you'll think them old-fashioned. And, hang it, why shouldn't I give you something new, I ran across Ellie and Bockheimer yesterday, in the rue de la Paix, picking out sapphires. Do you like sapphires, or emeralds? Or just a diamond? I've seen a thumping one .... I'd like you to have it."

Ellie and Bockheimer! How she hated the conjunction of the names! Their case always seemed to her like a caricature of her own, and she felt an unreasoning resentment against Ellie for having selected the same season for her unmating and re-mating.

"I wish you wouldn't speak of them, Streff ... as if they were like us! I can hardly bear to sit in the same room with Ellie Vanderlyn."

"Hullo? What's wrong? You mean because of her giving up Clarissa?"

"Not that only .... You don't know .... I can't tell you ...." She shivered at the memory, and rose restlessly from the bench where they had been sitting.

Strefford gave his careless shrug. "Well, my dear, you can hardly expect me to agree, for after all it was to Ellie I owed the luck of being so long alone with you in Venice. If she and Algie hadn't prolonged their honeymoon at the villa—"

He stopped abruptly, and looked at Susy. She was conscious that every drop of blood had left her face. She felt it ebbing away from her heart, flowing out of her as if from all her severed arteries, till it seemed as though nothing were left of life in her but one point of irreducible pain.

"Ellie—at your villa? What do you mean? Was it Ellie and Bockheimer who—?"

Strefford still stared. "You mean to say you didn't know?"

"Who came after Nick and me...?" she insisted.

"Why, do you suppose I'd have turned you out otherwise? That beastly Bockheimer simply smothered me with gold. Ah, well, there's one good thing: I shall never have to let the villa again! I rather like the little place myself, and I daresay once in a while we might go there for a day or two .... Susy, what's the matter?" he exclaimed.

She returned his stare, but without seeing him. Everything swam and danced before her eyes.

"Then she was there while I was posting all those letters for her—?"

"Letters—what letters? What makes you look so frightfully upset?"

She pursued her thought as if he had not spoken. "She and Algie Bockheimer arrived there the very day that Nick and I left?"

"I suppose so. I thought she'd told you. Ellie always tells everybody everything."

"She would have told me, I daresay—but I wouldn't let her."

"Well, my dear, that was hardly my fault, was it? Though I really don't see—"

But Susy, still blind to everything but the dance of dizzy sparks before her eyes, pressed on as if she had not heard him. "It was their motor, then, that took us to Milan! It was Algie Bockheimer's motor!" She did not know why, but this seemed to her the most humiliating incident in the whole hateful business. She remembered Nick's reluctance to use the motor-she remembered his look when she had boasted of her "managing." The nausea mounted to her throat.

Strefford burst out laughing. "I say—you borrowed their motor? And you didn't know whose it was?"

"How could I know? I persuaded the chauffeur ... for a little tip .... It was to save our railway fares to Milan ... extra luggage costs so frightfully in Italy ...."

"Good old Susy! Well done! I can see you doing it—"

"Oh, how horrible—how horrible!" she groaned.

"Horrible? What's horrible?"

"Why, your not seeing ... not feeling ..." she began impetuously; and then stopped. How could she explain to him that what revolted her was not so much the fact of his having given the little house, as soon as she and Nick had left it, to those two people of all others—though the vision of them in the sweet secret house, and under the plane-trees of the terrace, drew such a trail of slime across her golden hours? No, it was not that from which she most recoiled, but from the fact that Strefford, living in luxury in Nelson Vanderlyn's house, should at the same time have secretly abetted Ellie Vanderlyn's love-affairs, and allowed her—for a handsome price—to shelter them under his own roof. The reproach trembled on her lip—but she remembered her own part in the wretched business, and the impossibility of avowing it to Strefford, and of revealing to him that Nick had left her for that very reason. She was not afraid that the discovery would diminish her in Strefford's eyes: he was untroubled by moral problems, and would laugh away her avowal, with a sneer at Nick in his new part of moralist. But that was just what she could not bear: that anyone should cast a doubt on the genuineness of Nick's standards, or should know how far below them she had fallen.

She remained silent, and Strefford, after a moment, drew her gently down to the seat beside him. "Susy, upon my soul I don't know what you're driving at. Is it me you're angry with-or yourself? And what's it all about! Are you disgusted because I let the villa to a couple who weren't married! But, hang it, they're the kind that pay the highest price and I had to earn my living somehow! One doesn't run across a bridal pair every day ...."

She lifted her eyes to his puzzled incredulous face. Poor Streff! No, it was not with him that she was angry. Why should she be? Even that ill-advised disclosure had told her nothing she had not already known about him. It had simply revealed to her once more the real point of view of the people he and she lived among, had shown her that, in spite of the superficial difference, he felt as they felt, judged as they judged, was blind as they were-and as she would be expected to be, should she once again become one of them. What was the use of being placed by fortune above such shifts and compromises, if in one's heart one still condoned them? And she would have to—she would catch the general note, grow blunted as those other people were blunted, and gradually come to wonder at her own revolt, as Strefford now honestly wondered at it. She felt as though she were on the point of losing some new-found treasure, a treasure precious only to herself, but beside which all he offered her was nothing, the triumph of her wounded pride nothing, the security of her future nothing.

"What is it, Susy?" he asked, with the same puzzled gentleness.

Ah, the loneliness of never being able to make him understand! She had felt lonely enough when the flaming sword of Nick's indignation had shut her out from their Paradise; but there had been a cruel bliss in the pain. Nick had not opened her eyes to new truths, but had waked in her again something which had lain unconscious under years of accumulated indifference. And that re-awakened sense had never left her since, and had somehow kept her from utter loneliness because it was a secret shared with Nick, a gift she owed to Nick, and which, in leaving her, he could not take from her. It was almost, she suddenly felt, as if he had left her with a child.

"My dear girl," Strefford said, with a resigned glance at his watch, "you know we're dining at the Embassy ...."

At the Embassy? She looked at him vaguely: then she remembered. Yes, they were dining that night at the Ascots', with Strefford's cousin, the Duke of Dunes, and his wife, the handsome irreproachable young Duchess; with the old gambling Dowager Duchess, whom her son and daughter-in-law had come over from England to see; and with other English and French guests of a rank and standing worthy of the Duneses. Susy knew that her inclusion in such a dinner could mean but one thing: it was her definite recognition as Altringham's future wife. She was "the little American" whom one had to ask when one invited him, even on ceremonial occasions. The family had accepted her; the Embassy could but follow suit.

"It's late, dear; and I've got to see someone on business first," Strefford reminded her patiently.

"Oh, Streff—I can't, I can't!" The words broke from her without her knowing what she was saying. "I can't go with you—I can't go to the Embassy. I can't go on any longer like this ...." She lifted her eyes to his in desperate appeal. "Oh, understand-do please understand!" she wailed, knowing, while she spoke, the utter impossibility of what she asked.

Strefford's face had gradually paled and hardened. From sallow it turned to a dusky white, and lines of obstinacy deepened between the ironic eyebrows and about the weak amused mouth.

"Understand? What do you want me to understand," He laughed. "That you're trying to chuck me already?"

She shrank at the sneer of the "already," but instantly remembered that it was the only thing he could be expected to say, since it was just because he couldn't understand that she was flying from him.

"Oh, Streff—if I knew how to tell you!"

"It doesn't so much matter about the how. Is that what you're trying to say?"

Her head drooped, and she saw the dead leaves whirling across the path at her feet, lifted on a sudden wintry gust.

"The reason," he continued, clearing his throat with a stiff smile, "is not quite as important to me as the fact."

She stood speechless, agonized by his pain. But still, she thought, he had remembered the dinner at the Embassy. The thought gave her courage to go on.

"It wouldn't do, Streff. I'm not a bit the kind of person to make you happy."

"Oh, leave that to me, please, won't you?"

"No, I can't. Because I should be unhappy too."

He clicked at the leaves as they whirled past. "You've taken a rather long time to find it out." She saw that his new-born sense of his own consequence was making him suffer even more than his wounded affection; and that again gave her courage.

"If I've taken long it's all the more reason why I shouldn't take longer. If I've made a mistake it's you who would have suffered from it ...."

"Thanks," he said, "for your extreme solicitude."

She looked at him helplessly, penetrated by the despairing sense of their inaccessibility to each other. Then she remembered that Nick, during their last talk together, had seemed as inaccessible, and wondered if, when human souls try to get too near each other, they do not inevitably become mere blurs to each other's vision. She would have liked to say this to Streff-but he would not have understood it either. The sense of loneliness once more enveloped her, and she groped in vain for a word that should reach him.

"Let me go home alone, won't you?" she appealed to him.

"Alone?"

She nodded. "To-morrow—to-morrow ...."

He tried, rather valiantly, to smile. "Hang tomorrow! Whatever is wrong, it needn't prevent my seeing you home." He glanced toward the taxi that awaited them at the end of the deserted drive.

"No, please. You're in a hurry; take the taxi. I want immensely a long long walk by myself ... through the streets, with the lights coming out ...."

He laid his hand on her arm. "I say, my dear, you're not ill?"

"No; I'm not ill. But you may say I am, to-night at the Embassy."

He released her and drew back. "Oh, very well," he answered coldly; and she understood by his tone that the knot was cut, and that at that moment he almost hated her. She turned away, hastening down the deserted alley, flying from him, and knowing, as she fled, that he was still standing there motionless, staring after her, wounded, humiliated, uncomprehending. It was neither her fault nor his ....

23. XXIII

AS she fled on toward the lights of the streets a breath of freedom seemed to blow into her face.

Like a weary load the accumulated hypocrisies of the last months had dropped from her: she was herself again, Nick's Susy, and no one else's. She sped on, staring with bright bewildered eyes at the stately facades of the La Muette quarter, the perspectives of bare trees, the awakening glitter of shop-windows holding out to her all the things she would never again be able to buy ....

In an avenue of shops she paused before a milliner's window, and said to herself: "Why shouldn't I earn my living by trimming hats?" She met work-girls streaming out under a doorway, and scattering to catch trams and omnibuses; and she looked with newly-wakened interest at their tired independent faces. "Why shouldn't I earn my living as well as they do?" she thought. A little farther on she passed a Sister of Charity with softly trotting feet, a calm anonymous glance, and hands hidden in her capacious sleeves. Susy looked at her and thought: "Why shouldn't I be a Sister, and have no money to worry about, and trot about under a white coif helping poor people?"

All these strangers on whom she smiled in passing, and glanced back at enviously, were free from the necessities that enslaved her, and would not have known what she meant if she had told them that she must have so much money for her dresses, so much for her cigarettes, so much for bridge and cabs and tips, and all kinds of extras, and that at that moment she ought to be hurrying back to a dinner at the British Embassy, where her permanent right to such luxuries was to be solemnly recognized and ratified.

The artificiality and unreality of her life overcame her as with stifling fumes. She stopped at a street-corner, drawing long panting breaths as if she had been running a race. Then, slowly and aimlessly, she began to saunter along a street of small private houses in damp gardens that led to the Avenue du Bois. She sat down on a bench. Not far off, the Arc de Triomphe raised its august bulk, and beyond it a river of lights streamed down toward Paris, and the stir of the city's heart-beats troubled the quiet in her bosom. But not for long. She seemed to be looking at it all from the other side of the grave; and as she got up and wandered down the Champs Elysees, half empty in the evening lull between dusk and dinner, she felt as if the glittering avenue were really changed into the Field of Shadows from which it takes its name, and as if she were a ghost among ghosts.

Halfway home, a weakness of loneliness overcame her, and she seated herself under the trees near the Rond Point. Lines of motors and carriages were beginning to animate the converging thoroughfares, streaming abreast, crossing, winding in and out of each other in a tangle of hurried pleasure-seeking. She caught the light on jewels and shirt-fronts and hard bored eyes emerging from dim billows of fur and velvet. She seemed to hear what the couples were saying to each other, she pictured the drawing-rooms, restaurants, dance-halls they were hastening to, the breathless routine that was hurrying them along, as Time, the old vacuum-cleaner, swept them away with the dust of their carriage-wheels. And again the loneliness vanished in a sense of release ....

At the corner of the Place de la Concorde she stopped, recognizing a man in evening dress who was hailing a taxi. Their eyes met, and Nelson Vanderlyn came forward. He was the last person she cared to run across, and she shrank back involuntarily. What did he know, what had he guessed, of her complicity in his wife's affairs? No doubt Ellie had blabbed it all out by this time; she was just as likely to confide her love-affairs to Nelson as to anyone else, now that the Bockheimer prize was landed.

"Well—well—well—so I've caught you at it! Glad to see you, Susy, my dear." She found her hand cordially clasped in Vanderlyn's, and his round pink face bent on her with all its old urbanity. Did nothing matter, then, in this world she was fleeing from, did no one love or hate or remember?

"No idea you were in Paris—just got here myself," Vanderlyn continued, visibly delighted at the meeting. "Look here, don't suppose you're out of a job this evening by any chance, and would come and cheer up a lone bachelor, eh? No? You are? Well, that's luck for once! I say, where shall we go? One of the places where they dance, I suppose? Yes, I twirl the light fantastic once in a while myself. Got to keep up with the times! Hold on, taxi! Here—I'll drive you home first, and wait while you jump into your toggery. Lots of time." As he steered her toward the carriage she noticed that he had a gouty limp, and pulled himself in after her with difficulty.

"Mayn't I come as I am, Nelson, I don't feel like dancing. Let's go and dine in one of those nice smoky little restaurants by the Place de la Bourse."

He seemed surprised but relieved at the suggestion, and they rolled off together. In a corner at Bauge's they found a quiet table, screened from the other diners, and while Vanderlyn adjusted his eyeglasses to study the carte Susy stole a long look at him. He was dressed with even more than his usual formal trimness, and she detected, in an ultra-flat wrist-watch and discreetly expensive waistcoat buttons, an attempt at smartness altogether new. His face had undergone the same change: its familiar look of worn optimism had been, as it were, done up to match his clothes, as though a sort of moral cosmetic had made him pinker, shinier and sprightlier without really rejuvenating him. A thin veil of high spirits had merely been drawn over his face, as the shining strands of hair were skilfully brushed over his baldness.

"Here! Carte des vins, waiter! What champagne, Susy?" He chose, fastidiously, the best the cellar could produce, grumbling a little at the bourgeois character of the dishes. "Capital food of its kind, no doubt, but coarsish, don't you think? Well, I don't mind ... it's rather a jolly change from the Luxe cooking. A new sensation—I'm all for new sensations, ain't you, my dear?" He re-filled their champagne glasses, flung an arm sideways over his chair, and smiled at her with a foggy benevolence.

As the champagne flowed his confidences flowed with it.

"Suppose you know what I'm here for—this divorce business? We wanted to settle it quietly without a fuss, and of course Paris is the best place for that sort of job. Live and let live; no questions asked. None of your dirty newspapers. Great country, this. No hypocrisy ... they understand Life over here!"

Susy gazed and listened. She remembered that people had thought Nelson would make a row when he found out. He had always been addicted to truculent anecdotes about unfaithful wives, and the very formula of his perpetual ejaculation— "Caught you at it, eh?"—seemed to hint at a constant preoccupation with such ideas. But now it was evident that, as the saying was, he had "swallowed his dose" like all the others. No strong blast of indignation had momentarily lifted him above his normal stature: he remained a little man among little men, and his eagerness to rebuild his life with all the old smiling optimism reminded Susy of the patient industry of an ant remaking its ruined ant-heap.

"Tell you what, great thing, this liberty! Everything's changed nowadays; why shouldn't marriage be too? A man can get out of a business partnership when he wants to; but the parsons want to keep us noosed up to each other for life because we've blundered into a church one day and said 'Yes' before one of 'em. No, no—that's too easy. We've got beyond that. Science, and all these new discoveries .... I say the Ten Commandments were made for man, and not man for the Commandments; and there ain't a word against divorce in 'em, anyhow! That's what I tell my poor old mother, who builds everything on her Bible. Find me the place where it says: 'Thou shalt not sue for divorce.' It makes her wild, poor old lady, because she can't; and she doesn't know how they happen to have left it out.... I rather think Moses left it out because he knew more about human nature than these snivelling modern parsons do. Not that they'll always bear investigating either; but I don't care about that. Live and let live, eh, Susy? Haven't we all got a right to our Affinities? I hear you're following our example yourself. First-rate idea: I don't mind telling you I saw it coming on last summer at Venice. Caught you at it, so to speak! Old Nelson ain't as blind as people think. Here, let's open another bottle to the health of Streff and Mrs. Streff!"

She caught the hand with which he was signalling to the sommelier. This flushed and garrulous Nelson moved her more poignantly than a more heroic figure. "No more champagne, please, Nelson. Besides," she suddenly added, "it's not true."

He stared. "Not true that you're going to marry Altringham?"

"No."

"By George then what on earth did you chuck Nick for? Ain't you got an Affinity, my dear?"

She laughed and shook her head.

"Do you mean to tell me it's all Nick's doing, then?"

"I don't know. Let's talk of you instead, Nelson. I'm glad you're in such good spirits. I rather thought—"

He interrupted her quickly. "Thought I'd cut up a rumpus-do some shooting? I know—people did." He twisted his moustache, evidently proud of his reputation. "Well, maybe I did see red for a day or two—but I'm a philosopher, first and last. Before I went into banking I'd made and lost two fortunes out West. Well, how did I build 'em up again? Not by shooting anybody even myself. By just buckling to, and beginning all over again. That's how ... and that's what I am doing now. Beginning all over again. " His voice dropped from boastfulness to a note of wistful melancholy, the look of strained jauntiness fell from his face like a mask, and for an instant she saw the real man, old, ruined, lonely. Yes, that was it: he was lonely, desperately lonely, foundering in such deep seas of solitude that any presence out of the past was like a spar to which he clung. Whatever he knew or guessed of the part she had played in his disaster, it was not callousness that had made him greet her with such forgiving warmth, but the same sense of smallness, insignificance and isolation which perpetually hung like a cold fog on her own horizon. Suddenly she too felt old—old and unspeakably tired.

"It's been nice seeing you, Nelson. But now I must be getting home."

He offered no objection, but asked for the bill, resumed his jaunty air while he scattered largesse among the waiters, and sauntered out behind her after calling for a taxi.

They drove off in silence. Susy was thinking: "And Clarissa?" but dared not ask. Vanderlyn lit a cigarette, hummed a dance-tune, and stared out of the window. Suddenly she felt his hand on hers.

"Susy—do you ever see her?"

"See—Ellie?"

He nodded, without turning toward her.

"Not often ... sometimes ...."

"If you do, for God's sake tell her I'm happy ... happy as a king ... tell her you could see for yourself that I was ...." His voice broke in a little gasp. "I ... I'll be damned if ... if she shall ever be unhappy about me ... if I can help it ...." The cigarette dropped from his fingers, and with a sob he covered his face.

"Oh, poor Nelson—poor Nelson, " Susy breathed. While their cab rattled across the Place du Carrousel, and over the bridge, he continued to sit beside her with hidden face. At last he pulled out a scented handkerchief, rubbed his eyes with it, and groped for another cigarette.

"I'm all right! Tell her that, will you, Susy? There are some of our old times I don't suppose I shall ever forget; but they make me feel kindly to her, and not angry. I didn't know it would be so, beforehand—but it is .... And now the thing's settled I'm as right as a trivet, and you can tell her so .... Look here, Susy ..." he caught her by the arm as the taxi drew up at her hotel .... "Tell her I understand, will you? I'd rather like her to know that .... "

"I'll tell her, Nelson," she promised; and climbed the stairs alone to her dreary room.

Susy's one fear was that Strefford, when he returned the next day, should treat their talk of the previous evening as a fit of "nerves" to be jested away. He might, indeed, resent her behaviour too deeply to seek to see her at once; but his easygoing modern attitude toward conduct and convictions made that improbable. She had an idea that what he had most minded was her dropping so unceremoniously out of the Embassy Dinner.

But, after all, why should she see him again? She had had enough of explanations during the last months to have learned how seldom they explain anything. If the other person did not understand at the first word, at the first glance even, subsequent elucidations served only to deepen the obscurity. And she wanted above all—and especially since her hour with Nelson Vanderlyn—to keep herself free, aloof, to retain her hold on her precariously recovered self. She sat down and wrote to Strefford—and the letter was only a little less painful to write than the one she had despatched to Nick. It was not that her own feelings were in any like measure engaged; but because, as the decision to give up Strefford affirmed itself, she remembered only his kindness, his forbearance, his good humour, and all the other qualities she had always liked in him; and because she felt ashamed of the hesitations which must cause him so much pain and humiliation. Yes: humiliation chiefly. She knew that what she had to say would hurt his pride, in whatever way she framed her renunciation; and her pen wavered, hating its task. Then she remembered Vanderlyn's words about his wife: "There are some of our old times I don't suppose I shall ever forget—" and a phrase of Grace Fulmer's that she had but half grasped at the time: "You haven't been married long enough to understand how trifling such things seem in the balance of one's memories."

Here were two people who had penetrated farther than she into the labyrinth of the wedded state, and struggled through some of its thorniest passages; and yet both, one consciously, the other half-unaware, testified to the mysterious fact which was already dawning on her: that the influence of a marriage begun in mutual understanding is too deep not to reassert itself even in the moment of flight and denial.

"The real reason is that you're not Nick" was what she would have said to Strefford if she had dared to set down the bare truth; and she knew that, whatever she wrote, he was too acute not to read that into it.

"He'll think it's because I'm still in love with Nick ... and perhaps I am. But even if I were, the difference doesn't seem to lie there, after all, but deeper, in things we've shared that seem to be meant to outlast love, or to change it into something different." If she could have hoped to make Strefford understand that, the letter would have been easy enough to write—but she knew just at what point his imagination would fail, in what obvious and superficial inferences it would rest

"Poor Streff—poor me!" she thought as she sealed the letter.

After she had despatched it a sense of blankness descended on her. She had succeeded in driving from her mind all vain hesitations, doubts, returns upon herself: her healthy system naturally rejected them. But they left a queer emptiness in which her thoughts rattled about as thoughts might, she supposed, in the first moments after death—before one got used to it. To get used to being dead: that seemed to be her immediate business. And she felt such a novice at it—felt so horribly alive! How had those others learned to do without living? Nelson—well, he was still in the throes; and probably never would understand, or be able to communicate, the lesson when he had mastered it. But Grace Fulmer—she suddenly remembered that Grace was in Paris, and set forth to find her.

24. XXIV

NICK LANSING had walked out a long way into the Campagna. His hours were seldom his own, for both Mr. and Mrs. Hicks were becoming more and more addicted to sudden and somewhat imperious demands upon his time; but on this occasion he had simply slipped away after luncheon, and taking the tram to the Porta Salaria, had wandered on thence in the direction of the Ponte Nomentano.

He wanted to get away and think; but now that he had done it the business proved as unfruitful as everything he had put his hand to since he had left Venice. Think—think about what? His future seemed to him a negligible matter since he had received, two months earlier, the few lines in which Susy had asked him for her freedom.

The letter had been a shock—though he had fancied himself so prepared for it—yet it had also, in another sense, been a relief, since, now that at last circumstances compelled him to write to her, they also told him what to say. And he had said it as briefly and simply as possible, telling her that he would put no obstacle in the way of her release, that he held himself at her lawyer's disposal to answer any further communication—and that he would never forget their days together, or cease to bless her for them.

That was all. He gave his Roman banker's address, and waited for another letter; but none came. Probably the "formalities," whatever they were, took longer than he had supposed; and being in no haste to recover his own liberty, he did not try to learn the cause of the delay. From that moment, however, he considered himself virtually free, and ceased, by the same token, to take any interest in his own future. His life seemed as flat as a convalescent's first days after the fever has dropped.

The only thing he was sure of was that he was not going to remain in the Hickses' employ: when they left Rome for Central Asia he had no intention of accompanying them. The part of Mr. Buttles' successor was becoming daily more intolerable to him, for the very reasons that had probably made it most gratifying to Mr. Buttles. To be treated by Mr. and Mrs. Hicks as a paid oracle, a paraded and petted piece of property, was a good deal more distasteful than he could have imagined any relation with these kindly people could be. And since their aspirations had become frankly social he found his task, if easier, yet far less congenial than during his first months with them. He preferred patiently explaining to Mrs. Hicks, for the hundredth time, that Sassanian and Saracenic were not interchangeable terms, to unravelling for her the genealogies of her titled guests, and reminding her, when she "seated" her dinner-parties, that Dukes ranked higher than Princes. No—the job was decidedly intolerable; and he would have to look out for another means of earning his living. But that was not what he had really got away to think about. He knew he should never starve; he had even begun to believe again in his book. What he wanted to think of was Susy—or rather, it was Susy that he could not help thinking of, on whatever train of thought he set out.

Again and again he fancied he had established a truce with the past: had come to terms—the terms of defeat and failure with that bright enemy called happiness. And, in truth, he had reached the point of definitely knowing that he could never return to the kind of life that he and Susy had embarked on. It had been the tragedy, of their relation that loving her roused in him ideals she could never satisfy. He had fallen in love with her because she was, like himself, amused, unprejudiced and disenchanted; and he could not go on loving her unless she ceased to be all these things. From that circle there was no issue, and in it he desperately revolved.

If he had not heard such persistent rumours of her re-marriage to Lord Altringham he might have tried to see her again; but, aware of the danger and the hopelessness of a meeting, he was, on the whole, glad to have a reason for avoiding it. Such, at least, he honestly supposed to be his state of mind until he found himself, as on this occasion, free to follow out his thought to its end. That end, invariably, was Susy; not the bundle of qualities and defects into which his critical spirit had tried to sort her out, but the soft blur of identity, of personality, of eyes, hair, mouth, laugh, tricks of speech and gesture, that were all so solely and profoundly her own, and yet so mysteriously independent of what she might do, say, think, in crucial circumstances. He remembered her once saying to him: "After all, you were right when you wanted me to be your mistress," and the indignant stare of incredulity with which he had answered her. Yet in these hours it was the palpable image of her that clung closest, till, as invariably happened, his vision came full circle, and feeling her on his breast he wanted her also in his soul.

Well—such all-encompassing loves were the rarest of human experiences; he smiled at his presumption in wanting no other. Wearily he turned, and tramped homeward through the winter twilight ....

At the door of the hotel he ran across the Prince of Teutoburg's aide-de-camp. They had not met for some days, and Nick had a vague feeling that if the Prince's matrimonial designs took definite shape he himself was not likely, after all, to be their chosen exponent. He had surprised, now and then, a certain distrustful coldness under the Princess Mother's cordial glance, and had concluded that she perhaps suspected him of being an obstacle to her son's aspirations. He had no idea of playing that part, but was not sorry to appear to; for he was sincerely attached to Coral Hicks, and hoped for her a more human fate than that of becoming Prince Anastasius's consort.

This evening, however, he was struck by the beaming alacrity of the aide-de-camp's greeting. Whatever cloud had hung between them had lifted: the Teutoburg clan, for one reason or another, no longer feared or distrusted him. The change was conveyed in a mere hand-pressure, a brief exchange of words, for the aide-de-camp was hastening after a well-known dowager of the old Roman world, whom he helped into a large coronetted brougham which looked as if it had been extracted, for some ceremonial purpose, from a museum of historic vehicles. And in an instant it flashed on Lansing that this lady had been the person chosen to lay the Prince's offer at Miss Hicks's feet.

The discovery piqued him; and instead of making straight for his own room he went up to Mrs. Hicks's drawing-room.

The room was empty, but traces of elaborate tea pervaded it, and an immense bouquet of stiff roses lay on the centre table. As he turned away, Eldorada Tooker, flushed and tear-stained, abruptly entered.

"Oh, Mr. Lansing—we were looking everywhere for you."

"Looking for me?"

"Yes. Coral especially ... she wants to see you. She wants you to come to her own sitting-room."

She led him across the ante-chamber and down the passage to the separate suite which Miss Hicks inhabited. On the threshold Eldorada gasped out emotionally: "You'll find her looking lovely—" and jerked away with a sob as he entered.

Coral Hicks was never lovely: but she certainly looked unusually handsome. Perhaps it was the long dress of black velvet which, outlined against a shaded lamp, made her strong build seem slenderer, or perhaps the slight flush on her dusky cheek: a bloom of womanhood hung upon her which she made no effort to dissemble. Indeed, it was one of her originalities that she always gravely and courageously revealed the utmost of whatever mood possessed her.

"How splendid you look!" he said, smiling at her.

She threw her head back and gazed him straight in the eyes. "That's going to be my future job."

"To look splendid?"

"Yes."

"And wear a crown?"

"And wear a crown ...."

They continued to consider each other without speaking. Nick's heart contracted with pity and perplexity.

"Oh, Coral—it's not decided?"

She scrutinized him for a last penetrating moment; then she looked away. "I'm never long deciding."

He hesitated, choking with contradictory impulses, and afraid to formulate any, lest they should either mislead or pain her.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he questioned lamely; and instantly perceived his blunder.

She sat down, and looked up at him under brooding lashes—had he ever noticed the thickness of her lashes before?

"Would it have made any difference if I had told you?"

"Any difference—?"

"Sit down by me," she commanded. "I want to talk to you. You can say now whatever you might have said sooner. I'm not married yet: I'm still free."

"You haven't given your answer?"

"It doesn't matter if I have."

The retort frightened him with the glimpse of what she still expected of him, and what he was still so unable to give.

"That means you've said yes?" he pursued, to gain time.

"Yes or no—it doesn't matter. I had to say something. What I want is your advice."

"At the eleventh hour?"

"Or the twelfth." She paused. "What shall I do?" she questioned, with a sudden accent of helplessness.

He looked at her as helplessly. He could not say: "Ask yourself—ask your parents." Her next word would sweep away such frail hypocrisies. Her "What shall I do?" meant "What are you going to do?" and he knew it, and knew that she knew it.

"I'm a bad person to give any one matrimonial advice," he began, with a strained smile; "but I had such a different vision for you."

"What kind of a vision?" She was merciless.

"Merely what people call happiness, dear."

"'People call'—you see you don't believe in it yourself! Well, neither do I—in that form, at any rate. "

He considered. "I believe in trying for it—even if the trying's the best of it."

"Well, I've tried, and failed. And I'm twenty-two, and I never was young. I suppose I haven't enough imagination." She drew a deep breath. "Now I want something different." She appeared to search for the word. "I want to be—prominent," she declared.

"Prominent?"

She reddened swarthily. "Oh, you smile—you think it's ridiculous: it doesn't seem worth while to you. That's because you've always had all those things. But I haven't. I know what father pushed up from, and I want to push up as high again— higher. No, I haven't got much imagination. I've always liked Facts. And I find I shall like the fact of being a Princess— choosing the people I associate with, and being up above all these European grandees that father and mother bow down to, though they think they despise them. You can be up above these people by just being yourself; you know how. But I need a platform—a sky-scraper. Father and mother slaved to give me my education. They thought education was the important thing; but, since we've all three of us got mediocre minds, it has just landed us among mediocre people. Don't you suppose I see through all the sham science and sham art and sham everything we're surrounded with? That's why I want to buy a place at the very top, where I shall be powerful enough to get about me the people I want, the big people, the right people, and to help them I want to promote culture, like those Renaissance women you're always talking about. I want to do it for Apex City; do you understand? And for father and mother too. I want all those titles carved on my tombstone. They're facts, anyhow! Don't laugh at me ...." She broke off with one of her clumsy smiles, and moved away from him to the other end of the room.

He sat looking at her with a curious feeling of admiration. Her harsh positivism was like a tonic to his disenchanted mood, and he thought: "What a pity!"

Aloud he said: "I don't feel like laughing at you. You're a great woman."

"Then I shall be a great Princess."

"Oh—but you might have been something so much greater!"

Her face flamed again. "Don't say that!"

He stood up involuntarily, and drew near her.

"Why not?"

"Because you're the only man with whom I can imagine the other kind of greatness."

It moved him—moved him unexpectedly. He got as far as saying to himself: "Good God, if she were not so hideously rich—" and then of yielding for a moment to the persuasive vision of all that he and she might do with those very riches which he dreaded. After all, there was nothing mean in her ideals they were hard and material, in keeping with her primitive and massive person; but they had a certain grim nobility. And when she spoke of "the other kind of greatness" he knew that she understood what she was talking of, and was not merely saying something to draw him on, to get him to commit himself. There was not a drop of guile in her, except that which her very honesty distilled.

"The other kind of greatness?" he repeated.

"Well, isn't that what you said happiness was? I wanted to be happy ... but one can't choose."

He went up to her. "No, one can't choose. And how can anyone give you happiness who hasn't got it himself?" He took her hands, feeling how large, muscular and voluntary they were, even as they melted in his palms.

"My poor Coral, of what use can I ever be to you? What you need is to be loved."

She drew back and gave him one of her straight strong glances: "No," she said gallantly, "but just to love."