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The Glimpses of the Moon

by Edith Wharton · English · Gutenberg #1263 · 485,071 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Glimpses of the Moon

Author: Edith Wharton


        
Release date: April 1, 1998 [eBook #1263]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1263

Credits: Produced by Dean Gilley, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON ***

THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON

By Edith Wharton




PART I

I

IT rose for them--their honey-moon--over the waters of a lake so famed
as the scene of romantic raptures that they were rather proud of not
having been afraid to choose it as the setting of their own.

“It required a total lack of humour, or as great a gift for it as ours,
to risk the experiment,” Susy Lansing opined, as they hung over the
inevitable marble balustrade and watched their tutelary orb roll its
magic carpet across the waters to their feet.

“Yes--or the loan of Strefford’s villa,” her husband emended, glancing
upward through the branches at a long low patch of paleness to which the
moonlight was beginning to give the form of a white house-front.

“Oh, come when we’d five to choose from. At least if you count the
Chicago flat.”

“So we had--you wonder!” He laid his hand on hers, and his touch renewed
the sense of marvelling exultation which the deliberate survey of their
adventure always roused in her.... It was characteristic that she merely
added, in her steady laughing tone: “Or, not counting the flat--for
I hate to brag--just consider the others: Violet Melrose’s place at
Versailles, your aunt’s villa at Monte Carlo--and a moor!”

She was conscious of throwing in the moor tentatively, and yet with
a somewhat exaggerated emphasis, as if to make sure that he shouldn’t
accuse her of slurring it over. But he seemed to have no desire to
do so. “Poor old Fred!” he merely remarked; and she breathed out
carelessly: “Oh, well--”

His hand still lay on hers, and for a long interval, while they stood
silent in the enveloping loveliness of the night, she was aware only of
the warm current running from palm to palm, as the moonlight below them
drew its line of magic from shore to shore.

Nick Lansing spoke at last. “Versailles in May would have been
impossible: all our Paris crowd would have run us down within
twenty-four hours. And Monte Carlo is ruled out because it’s exactly
the kind of place everybody expected us to go. So--with all respect to
you--it wasn’t much of a mental strain to decide on Como.”

His wife instantly challenged this belittling of her capacity. “It took
a good deal of argument to convince you that we could face the ridicule
of Como!”

“Well, I should have preferred something in a lower key; at least I
thought I should till we got here. Now I see that this place is idiotic
unless one is perfectly happy; and that then it’s--as good as any other.”

She sighed out a blissful assent. “And I must say that Streffy has done
things to a turn. Even the cigars--who do you suppose gave him those
cigars?” She added thoughtfully: “You’ll miss them when we have to go.”

“Oh, I say, don’t let’s talk to-night about going. Aren’t we outside of
time and space...? Smell that guinea-a-bottle stuff over there: what is
it? Stephanotis?”

“Y--yes.... I suppose so. Or gardenias.... Oh, the fire-flies! Look...
there, against that splash of moonlight on the water. Apples of silver
in a net-work of gold....” They leaned together, one flesh from shoulder
to finger-tips, their eyes held by the snared glitter of the ripples.

“I could bear,” Lansing remarked, “even a nightingale at this
moment....”

A faint gurgle shook the magnolias behind them, and a long liquid
whisper answered it from the thicket of laurel above their heads.

“It’s a little late in the year for them: they’re ending just as we
begin.”

Susy laughed. “I hope when our turn comes we shall say good-bye to each
other as sweetly.”

It was in her husband’s mind to answer: “They’re not saying good-bye,
but only settling down to family cares.” But as this did not happen to
be in his plan, or in Susy’s, he merely echoed her laugh and pressed her
closer.

The spring night drew them into its deepening embrace. The ripples of
the lake had gradually widened and faded into a silken smoothness, and
high above the mountains the moon was turning from gold to white in
a sky powdered with vanishing stars. Across the lake the lights of a
little town went out, one after another, and the distant shore became a
floating blackness. A breeze that rose and sank brushed their faces with
the scents of the garden; once it blew out over the water a great white
moth like a drifting magnolia petal. The nightingales had paused and the
trickle of the fountain behind the house grew suddenly insistent.

When Susy spoke it was in a voice languid with visions. “I have been
thinking,” she said, “that we ought to be able to make it last at least
a year longer.”

Her husband received the remark without any sign of surprise or
disapprobation; his answer showed that he not only understood her, but
had been inwardly following the same train of thought.

“You mean,” he enquired after a pause, “without counting your
grandmother’s pearls?”

“Yes--without the pearls.”

He pondered a while, and then rejoined in a tender whisper: “Tell me
again just how.”

“Let’s sit down, then. No, I like the cushions best.” He stretched
himself in a long willow chair, and she curled up on a heap of
boat-cushions and leaned her head against his knee. Just above her,
when she lifted her lids, she saw bits of moon-flooded sky incrusted
like silver in a sharp black patterning of plane-boughs. All about them
breathed of peace and beauty and stability, and her happiness was so
acute that it was almost a relief to remember the stormy background of
bills and borrowing against which its frail structure had been reared.
“People with a balance can’t be as happy as all this,” Susy mused,
letting the moonlight filter through her lazy lashes.

People with a balance had always been Susy Branch’s bugbear; they were
still, and more dangerously, to be Susy Lansing’s. She detested them,
detested them doubly, as the natural enemies of mankind and as the
people one always had to put one’s self out for. The greater part of her
life having been passed among them, she knew nearly all that there was
to know about them, and judged them with the contemptuous lucidity
of nearly twenty years of dependence. But at the present moment her
animosity was diminished not only by the softening effect of love but
by the fact that she had got out of those very people more--yes, ever so
much more--than she and Nick, in their hours of most reckless planning,
had ever dared to hope for.

“After all, we owe them this!” she mused.

Her husband, lost in the drowsy beatitude of the hour, had not repeated
his question; but she was still on the trail of the thought he had
started. A year--yes, she was sure now that with a little management
they could have a whole year of it! “It” was their marriage, their being
together, and away from bores and bothers, in a comradeship of which
both of them had long ago guessed the immediate pleasure, but she at
least had never imagined the deeper harmony.

It was at one of their earliest meetings--at one of the heterogeneous
dinners that the Fred Gillows tried to think “literary”--that the young
man who chanced to sit next to her, and of whom it was vaguely rumoured
that he had “written,” had presented himself to her imagination as the
sort of luxury to which Susy Branch, heiress, might conceivably have
treated herself as a crowning folly. Susy Branch, pauper, was fond of
picturing how this fancied double would employ her millions: it was one
of her chief grievances against her rich friends that they disposed of
theirs so unimaginatively.

“I’d rather have a husband like that than a steam-yacht!” she had
thought at the end of her talk with the young man who had written, and
as to whom it had at once been clear to her that nothing his pen had
produced, or might hereafter set down, would put him in a position to
offer his wife anything more costly than a row-boat.

“His wife! As if he could ever have one! For he’s not the kind to marry
for a yacht either.” In spite of her past, Susy had preserved enough
inner independence to detect the latent signs of it in others, and also
to ascribe it impulsively to those of the opposite sex who happened to
interest her. She had a natural contempt for people who gloried in what
they need only have endured. She herself meant eventually to marry,
because one couldn’t forever hang on to rich people; but she was going
to wait till she found some one who combined the maximum of wealth with
at least a minimum of companionableness.

She had at once perceived young Lansing’s case to be exactly the
opposite: he was as poor as he could be, and as companionable as it was
possible to imagine. She therefore decided to see as much of him as her
hurried and entangled life permitted; and this, thanks to a series of
adroit adjustments, turned out to be a good deal. They met frequently
all the rest of that winter; so frequently that Mrs. Fred Gillow one
day abruptly and sharply gave Susy to understand that she was “making
herself ridiculous.”

“Ah--” said Susy with a long breath, looking her friend and patroness
straight in the painted eyes.

“Yes,” cried Ursula Gillow in a sob, “before you interfered Nick liked
me awfully... and, of course, I don’t want to reproach you... but when I
think....”

Susy made no answer. How could she, when she thought? The dress she had
on had been given her by Ursula; Ursula’s motor had carried her to the
feast from which they were both returning. She counted on spending the
following August with the Gillows at Newport... and the only alternative
was to go to California with the Bockheimers, whom she had hitherto
refused even to dine with.

“Of course, what you fancy is perfect nonsense, Ursula; and as to my
interfering--” Susy hesitated, and then murmured: “But if it will make
you any happier I’ll arrange to see him less often....” She sounded the
lowest depths of subservience in returning Ursula’s tearful kiss....

Susy Branch had a masculine respect for her word; and the next day she
put on her most becoming hat and sought out young Mr. Lansing in his
lodgings. She was determined to keep her promise to Ursula; but she
meant to look her best when she did it.

She knew at what time the young man was likely to be found, for he was
doing a dreary job on a popular encyclopaedia (V to X), and had told her
what hours were dedicated to the hateful task. “Oh, if only it were a
novel!” she thought as she mounted his dingy stairs; but immediately
reflected that, if it were the kind that she could bear to read, it
probably wouldn’t bring him in much more than his encyclopaedia. Miss
Branch had her standards in literature....

The apartment to which Mr. Lansing admitted her was a good deal cleaner,
but hardly less dingy, than his staircase. Susy, knowing him to be
addicted to Oriental archaeology, had pictured him in a bare room
adorned by a single Chinese bronze of flawless shape, or by some
precious fragment of Asiatic pottery. But such redeeming features were
conspicuously absent, and no attempt had been made to disguise the
decent indigence of the bed-sitting-room.

Lansing welcomed his visitor with every sign of pleasure, and with
apparent indifference as to what she thought of his furniture. He seemed
to be conscious only of his luck in seeing her on a day when they had
not expected to meet. This made Susy all the sorrier to execute her
promise, and the gladder that she had put on her prettiest hat; and for
a moment or two she looked at him in silence from under its conniving
brim.

Warm as their mutual liking was, Lansing had never said a word of love
to her; but this was no deterrent to his visitor, whose habit it was
to speak her meaning clearly when there were no reasons, worldly or
pecuniary, for its concealment. After a moment, therefore, she told him
why she had come; it was a nuisance, of course, but he would understand.
Ursula Gillow was jealous, and they would have to give up seeing each
other.

The young man’s burst of laughter was music to her; for, after all, she
had been rather afraid that being devoted to Ursula might be as much in
his day’s work as doing the encyclopaedia.

“But I give you my word it’s a raving-mad mistake! And I don’t believe
she ever meant me, to begin with--” he protested; but Susy, her
common-sense returning with her reassurance, promptly cut short his
denial.

“You can trust Ursula to make herself clear on such occasions. And it
doesn’t make any difference what you think. All that matters is what she
believes.”

“Oh, come! I’ve got a word to say about that too, haven’t I?”

Susy looked slowly and consideringly about the room. There was nothing
in it, absolutely nothing, to show that he had ever possessed a spare
dollar--or accepted a present.

“Not as far as I’m concerned,” she finally pronounced.

“How do you mean? If I’m as free as air--?”

“I’m not.”

He grew thoughtful. “Oh, then, of course--. It only seems a little odd,”
 he added drily, “that in that case, the protest should have come from
Mrs. Gillow.”

“Instead of coming from my millionaire bridegroom, Oh, I haven’t any; in
that respect I’m as free as you.”

“Well, then--? Haven’t we only got to stay free?”

Susy drew her brows together anxiously. It was going to be rather more
difficult than she had supposed.

“I said I was as free in that respect. I’m not going to marry--and I
don’t suppose you are?”

“God, no!” he ejaculated fervently.

“But that doesn’t always imply complete freedom....”

He stood just above her, leaning his elbow against the hideous black
marble arch that framed his fireless grate. As she glanced up she saw
his face harden, and the colour flew to hers.

“Was that what you came to tell me?” he asked.

“Oh, you don’t understand--and I don’t see why you don’t, since we’ve
knocked about so long among exactly the same kind of people.” She stood
up impulsively and laid her hand on his arm. “I do wish you’d help
me--!”

He remained motionless, letting the hand lie untouched.

“Help you to tell me that poor Ursula was a pretext, but that there IS
someone who--for one reason or another--really has a right to object to
your seeing me too often?”

Susy laughed impatiently. “You talk like the hero of a novel--the kind
my governess used to read. In the first place I should never recognize
that kind of right, as you call it--never!”

“Then what kind do you?” he asked with a clearing brow.

“Why--the kind I suppose you recognize on the part of your publisher.”
 This evoked a hollow laugh from him. “A business claim, call it,” she
pursued. “Ursula does a lot for me: I live on her for half the year.
This dress I’ve got on now is one she gave me. Her motor is going to
take me to a dinner to-night. I’m going to spend next summer with her
at Newport.... If I don’t, I’ve got to go to California with the
Bockheimers--so good-bye.”

Suddenly in tears, she was out of the door and down his steep three
flights before he could stop her--though, in thinking it over, she
didn’t even remember if he had tried to. She only recalled having stood
a long time on the corner of Fifth Avenue, in the harsh winter radiance,
waiting till a break in the torrent of motors laden with fashionable
women should let her cross, and saying to herself: “After all, I might
have promised Ursula... and kept on seeing him....”

Instead of which, when Lansing wrote the next day entreating a word with
her, she had sent back a friendly but firm refusal; and had managed soon
afterward to get taken to Canada for a fortnight’s ski-ing, and then to
Florida for six weeks in a house-boat....

As she reached this point in her retrospect the remembrance of Florida
called up a vision of moonlit waters, magnolia fragrance and balmy airs;
merging with the circumambient sweetness, it laid a drowsy spell upon
her lids. Yes, there had been a bad moment: but it was over; and she was
here, safe and blissful, and with Nick; and this was his knee her head
rested on, and they had a year ahead of them... a whole year.... “Not
counting the pearls,” she murmured, shutting her eyes....





II.



LANSING threw the end of Strefford’s expensive cigar into the lake, and
bent over his wife. Poor child! She had fallen asleep.... He leaned
back and stared up again at the silver-flooded sky. How queer--how
inexpressibly queer--it was to think that that light was shed by his
honey-moon! A year ago, if anyone had predicted his risking such an
adventure, he would have replied by asking to be locked up at the first
symptoms....

There was still no doubt in his mind that the adventure was a mad one.
It was all very well for Susy to remind him twenty times a day that they
had pulled it off--and so why should he worry? Even in the light of her
far-seeing cleverness, and of his own present bliss, he knew the future
would not bear the examination of sober thought. And as he sat there
in the summer moonlight, with her head on his knee, he tried to
recapitulate the successive steps that had landed them on Streffy’s
lake-front.

On Lansing’s side, no doubt, it dated back to his leaving Harvard with
the large resolve not to miss anything. There stood the evergreen Tree
of Life, the Four Rivers flowing from its foot; and on every one of the
four currents he meant to launch his little skiff. On two of them he had
not gone very far, on the third he had nearly stuck in the mud; but the
fourth had carried him to the very heart of wonder. It was the stream of
his lively imagination, of his inexhaustible interest in every form of
beauty and strangeness and folly. On this stream, sitting in the stout
little craft of his poverty, his insignificance and his independence, he
had made some notable voyages.... And so, when Susy Branch, whom he had
sought out through a New York season as the prettiest and most amusing
girl in sight, had surprised him with the contradictory revelation of
her modern sense of expediency and her old-fashioned standard of good
faith, he had felt an irresistible desire to put off on one more cruise
into the unknown.

It was of the essence of the adventure that, after her one brief visit
to his lodgings, he should have kept his promise and not tried to see
her again. Even if her straightforwardness had not roused his emulation,
his understanding of her difficulties would have moved his pity. He knew
on how frail a thread the popularity of the penniless hangs, and how
miserably a girl like Susy was the sport of other people’s moods and
whims. It was a part of his difficulty and of hers that to get what they
liked they so often had to do what they disliked. But the keeping of his
promise was a greater bore than he had expected. Susy Branch had become
a delightful habit in a life where most of the fixed things were
dull, and her disappearance had made it suddenly clear to him that his
resources were growing more and more limited. Much that had once amused
him hugely now amused him less, or not at all: a good part of his world
of wonder had shrunk to a village peep-show. And the things which had
kept their stimulating power--distant journeys, the enjoyment of art,
the contact with new scenes and strange societies--were becoming less
and less attainable. Lansing had never had more than a pittance; he had
spent rather too much of it in his first plunge into life, and the best
he could look forward to was a middle-age of poorly-paid hack-work,
mitigated by brief and frugal holidays. He knew that he was more
intelligent than the average, but he had long since concluded that
his talents were not marketable. Of the thin volume of sonnets which a
friendly publisher had launched for him, just seventy copies had been
sold; and though his essay on “Chinese Influences in Greek Art” had
created a passing stir, it had resulted in controversial correspondence
and dinner invitations rather than in more substantial benefits.
There seemed, in short, no prospect of his ever earning money, and his
restricted future made him attach an increasing value to the kind of
friendship that Susy Branch had given him. Apart from the pleasure of
looking at her and listening to her--of enjoying in her what others less
discriminatingly but as liberally appreciated--he had the sense, between
himself and her, of a kind of free-masonry of precocious tolerance and
irony. They had both, in early youth, taken the measure of the world
they happened to live in: they knew just what it was worth to them
and for what reasons, and the community of these reasons lent to their
intimacy its last exquisite touch. And now, because of some jealous whim
of a dissatisfied fool of a woman, as to whom he felt himself no more to
blame than any young man who has paid for good dinners by good manners,
he was to be deprived of the one complete companionship he had ever
known....

His thoughts travelled on. He recalled the long dull spring in New York
after his break with Susy, the weary grind on his last articles,
his listless speculations as to the cheapest and least boring way of
disposing of the summer; and then the amazing luck of going, reluctantly
and at the last minute, to spend a Sunday with the poor Nat Fulmers, in
the wilds of New Hampshire, and of finding Susy there--Susy, whom he had
never even suspected of knowing anybody in the Fulmers’ set!

She had behaved perfectly--and so had he--but they were obviously much
too glad to see each other. And then it was unsettling to be with her in
such a house as the Fulmers’, away from the large setting of luxury
they were both used to, in the cramped cottage where their host had
his studio in the verandah, their hostess practiced her violin in the
dining-room, and five ubiquitous children sprawled and shouted and blew
trumpets and put tadpoles in the water-jugs, and the mid-day dinner was
two hours late--and proportionately bad--because the Italian cook was
posing for Fulmer.

Lansing’s first thought had been that meeting Susy in such circumstances
would be the quickest way to cure them both of their regrets. The case
of the Fulmers was an awful object-lesson in what happened to young
people who lost their heads; poor Nat, whose pictures nobody bought, had
gone to seed so terribly--and Grace, at twenty-nine, would never again be
anything but the woman of whom people say, “I can remember her when she
was lovely.”

But the devil of it was that Nat had never been such good company, or
Grace so free from care and so full of music; and that, in spite of
their disorder and dishevelment, and the bad food and general crazy
discomfort, there was more amusement to be got out of their society
than out of the most opulently staged house-party through which Susy and
Lansing had ever yawned their way.

It was almost a relief to the young man when, on the second afternoon,
Miss Branch drew him into the narrow hall to say: “I really can’t
stand the combination of Grace’s violin and little Nat’s motor-horn any
longer. Do let us slip out till the duet is over.”

“How do they stand it, I wonder?” he basely echoed, as he followed her
up the wooded path behind the house.

“It might be worth finding out,” she rejoined with a musing smile.

But he remained resolutely skeptical. “Oh, give them a year or two more
and they’ll collapse--! His pictures will never sell, you know. He’ll
never even get them into a show.”

“I suppose not. And she’ll never have time to do anything worth while
with her music.”

They had reached a piny knoll high above the ledge on which the house
was perched. All about them stretched an empty landscape of endless
featureless wooded hills. “Think of sticking here all the year round!”
 Lansing groaned.

“I know. But then think of wandering over the world with some people!”

“Oh, Lord, yes. For instance, my trip to India with the Mortimer
Hickses. But it was my only chance and what the deuce is one to do?”

“I wish I knew!” she sighed, thinking of the Bockheimers; and he turned
and looked at her.

“Knew what?”

“The answer to your question. What is one to do--when one sees both
sides of the problem? Or every possible side of it, indeed?”

They had seated themselves on a commanding rock under the pines, but
Lansing could not see the view at their feet for the stir of the brown
lashes on her cheek.

“You mean: Nat and Grace may after all be having the best of it?”

“How can I say, when I’ve told you I see all the sides? Of course,”
 Susy added hastily, “I couldn’t live as they do for a week. But it’s
wonderful how little it’s dimmed them.”

“Certainly Nat was never more coruscating. And she keeps it up even
better.” He reflected. “We do them good, I daresay.”

“Yes--or they us. I wonder which?”

After that, he seemed to remember that they sat a long time silent, and
that his next utterance was a boyish outburst against the tyranny of the
existing order of things, abruptly followed by the passionate query why,
since he and she couldn’t alter it, and since they both had the habit of
looking at facts as they were, they wouldn’t be utter fools not to take
their chance of being happy in the only way that was open to them, To
this challenge he did not recall Susy’s making any definite answer; but
after another interval, in which all the world seemed framed in a
sudden kiss, he heard her murmur to herself in a brooding tone: “I don’t
suppose it’s ever been tried before; but we might--.” And then and there
she had laid before him the very experiment they had since hazarded.

She would have none of surreptitious bliss, she began by declaring;
and she set forth her reasons with her usual lucid impartiality. In the
first place, she should have to marry some day, and when she made the
bargain she meant it to be an honest one; and secondly, in the matter
of love, she would never give herself to anyone she did not really care
for, and if such happiness ever came to her she did not want it shorn of
half its brightness by the need of fibbing and plotting and dodging.

“I’ve seen too much of that kind of thing. Half the women I know who’ve
had lovers have had them for the fun of sneaking and lying about it; but
the other half have been miserable. And I should be miserable.”

It was at this point that she unfolded her plan. Why shouldn’t they
marry; belong to each other openly and honourably, if for ever so short
a time, and with the definite understanding that whenever either of them
got the chance to do better he or she should be immediately released?
The law of their country facilitated such exchanges, and society was
beginning to view them as indulgently as the law. As Susy talked, she
warmed to her theme and began to develop its endless possibilities.

“We should really, in a way, help more than we should hamper each
other,” she ardently explained. “We both know the ropes so well; what
one of us didn’t see the other might--in the way of opportunities, I
mean. And then we should be a novelty as married people. We’re both
rather unusually popular--why not be frank!--and it’s such a blessing
for dinner-givers to be able to count on a couple of whom neither one is
a blank. Yes, I really believe we should be more than twice the success
we are now; at least,” she added with a smile, “if there’s that amount
of room for improvement. I don’t know how you feel; a man’s popularity
is so much less precarious than a girl’s--but I know it would furbish me
up tremendously to reappear as a married woman.” She glanced away from
him down the long valley at their feet, and added in a lower tone: “And
I should like, just for a little while, to feel I had something in life
of my very own--something that nobody had lent me, like a fancy-dress or
a motor or an opera cloak.”

The suggestion, at first, had seemed to Lansing as mad as it was
enchanting: it had thoroughly frightened him. But Susy’s arguments were
irrefutable, her ingenuities inexhaustible. Had he ever thought it all
out? She asked. No. Well, she had; and would he kindly not interrupt? In
the first place, there would be all the wedding-presents. Jewels, and a
motor, and a silver dinner service, did she mean? Not a bit of it! She
could see he’d never given the question proper thought. Cheques, my
dear, nothing but cheques--she undertook to manage that on her side: she
really thought she could count on about fifty, and she supposed he could
rake up a few more? Well, all that would simply represent pocket-money!
For they would have plenty of houses to live in: he’d see. People were
always glad to lend their house to a newly-married couple. It was such
fun to pop down and see them: it made one feel romantic and jolly. All
they need do was to accept the houses in turn: go on honey-mooning for
a year! What was he afraid of? Didn’t he think they’d be happy enough to
want to keep it up? And why not at least try--get engaged, and then
see what would happen? Even if she was all wrong, and her plan failed,
wouldn’t it have been rather nice, just for a month or two, to fancy
they were going to be happy? “I’ve often fancied it all by myself,”
 she concluded; “but fancying it with you would somehow be so awfully
different....”

That was how it began: and this lakeside dream was what it had led up
to. Fantastically improbable as they had seemed, all her previsions had
come true. If there were certain links in the chain that Lansing
had never been able to put his hand on, certain arrangements and
contrivances that still needed further elucidation, why, he was lazily
resolved to clear them up with her some day; and meanwhile it was worth
all the past might have cost, and every penalty the future might exact
of him, just to be sitting here in the silence and sweetness, her
sleeping head on his knee, clasped in his joy as the hushed world was
clasped in moonlight.

He stooped down and kissed her. “Wake up,” he whispered, “it’s
bed-time.”




III.


THEIR month of Como was within a few hours of ending. Till the last
moment they had hoped for a reprieve; but the accommodating Streffy had
been unable to put the villa at their disposal for a longer time, since
he had had the luck to let it for a thumping price to some beastly
bouncers who insisted on taking possession at the date agreed on.

Lansing, leaving Susy’s side at dawn, had gone down to the lake for a
last plunge; and swimming homeward through the crystal light he looked
up at the garden brimming with flowers, the long low house with the
cypress wood above it, and the window behind which his wife still
slept. The month had been exquisite, and their happiness as rare, as
fantastically complete, as the scene before him. He sank his chin into
the sunlit ripples and sighed for sheer content....

It was a bore to be leaving the scene of such complete well-being, but
the next stage in their progress promised to be hardly less delightful.
Susy was a magician: everything she predicted came true. Houses were
being showered on them; on all sides he seemed to see beneficent spirits
winging toward them, laden with everything from a piano nobile in Venice
to a camp in the Adirondacks. For the present, they had decided on the
former. Other considerations apart, they dared not risk the expense of a
journey across the Atlantic; so they were heading instead for the Nelson
Vanderlyns’ palace on the Giudecca. They were agreed that, for reasons
of expediency, it might be wise to return to New York for the coming
winter. It would keep them in view, and probably lead to fresh
opportunities; indeed, Susy already had in mind the convenient flat that
she was sure a migratory cousin (if tactfully handled, and assured that
they would not overwork her cook) could certainly be induced to lend
them. Meanwhile the need of making plans was still remote; and if there
was one art in which young Lansing’s twenty-eight years of existence had
perfected him it was that of living completely and unconcernedly in the
present....

If of late he had tried to look into the future more insistently than
was his habit, it was only because of Susy. He had meant, when they
married, to be as philosophic for her as for himself; and he knew she
would have resented above everything his regarding their partnership as
a reason for anxious thought. But since they had been together she had
given him glimpses of her past that made him angrily long to shelter
and defend her future. It was intolerable that a spirit as fine as hers
should be ever so little dulled or diminished by the kind of compromises
out of which their wretched lives were made. For himself, he didn’t care
a hang: he had composed for his own guidance a rough-and-ready code,
a short set of “mays” and “mustn’ts” which immensely simplified his
course. There were things a fellow put up with for the sake of certain
definite and otherwise unattainable advantages; there were other things
he wouldn’t traffic with at any price. But for a woman, he began to
see, it might be different. The temptations might be greater, the cost
considerably higher, the dividing line between the “mays” and “mustn’ts”
 more fluctuating and less sharply drawn. Susy, thrown on the world
at seventeen, with only a weak wastrel of a father to define that
treacherous line for her, and with every circumstance soliciting her to
overstep it, seemed to have been preserved chiefly by an innate scorn
of most of the objects of human folly. “Such trash as he went to pieces
for,” was her curt comment on her parent’s premature demise: as
though she accepted in advance the necessity of ruining one’s self for
something, but was resolved to discriminate firmly between what was
worth it and what wasn’t.

This philosophy had at first enchanted Lansing; but now it began to
rouse vague fears. The fine armour of her fastidiousness had preserved
her from the kind of risks she had hitherto been exposed to; but what if
others, more subtle, found a joint in it? Was there, among her delicate
discriminations, any equivalent to his own rules? Might not her taste
for the best and rarest be the very instrument of her undoing; and if
something that wasn’t “trash” came her way, would she hesitate a second
to go to pieces for it?

He was determined to stick to the compact that they should do nothing to
interfere with what each referred to as the other’s “chance”; but what
if, when hers came, he couldn’t agree with her in recognizing it? He
wanted for her, oh, so passionately, the best; but his conception of
that best had so insensibly, so subtly been transformed in the light of
their first month together!

His lazy strokes were carrying him slowly shoreward; but the hour was so
exquisite that a few yards from the landing he laid hold of the mooring
rope of Streffy’s boat and floated there, following his dream.... It
was a bore to be leaving; no doubt that was what made him turn things
inside-out so uselessly. Venice would be delicious, of course; but
nothing would ever again be as sweet as this. And then they had only a
year of security before them; and of that year a month was gone.

Reluctantly he swam ashore, walked up to the house, and pushed open a
window of the cool painted drawing-room. Signs of departure were already
visible. There were trunks in the hall, tennis rackets on the stairs; on
the landing, the cook Giulietta had both arms around a slippery hold-all
that refused to let itself be strapped. It all gave him a chill sense
of unreality, as if the past month had been an act on the stage, and its
setting were being folded away and rolled into the wings to make room
for another play in which he and Susy had no part.

By the time he came down again, dressed and hungry, to the terrace
where coffee awaited him, he had recovered his usual pleasant sense of
security. Susy was there, fresh and gay, a rose in her breast and the
sun in her hair: her head was bowed over Bradshaw, but she waved a fond
hand across the breakfast things, and presently looked up to say: “Yes,
I believe we can just manage it.”

“Manage what?”

“To catch the train at Milan--if we start in the motor at ten sharp.”

He stared. “The motor? What motor?”

“Why, the new people’s--Streffy’s tenants. He’s never told me their
name, and the chauffeur says he can’t pronounce it. The chauffeur’s is
Ottaviano, anyhow; I’ve been making friends with him. He arrived last
night, and he says they’re not due at Como till this evening. He simply
jumped at the idea of running us over to Milan.”

“Good Lord--” said Lansing, when she stopped.

She sprang up from the table with a laugh. “It will be a scramble; but
I’ll manage it, if you’ll go up at once and pitch the last things into
your trunk.”

“Yes; but look here--have you any idea what it’s going to cost?”

She raised her eyebrows gaily. “Why, a good deal less than our railway
tickets. Ottaviano’s got a sweetheart in Milan, and hasn’t seen her for
six months. When I found that out I knew he’d be going there anyhow.”

It was clever of her, and he laughed. But why was it that he had grown
to shrink from even such harmless evidence of her always knowing how to
“manage”? “Oh, well,” he said to himself, “she’s right: the fellow would
be sure to be going to Milan.”

Upstairs, on the way to his dressing room, he found her in a cloud of
finery which her skilful hands were forcibly compressing into a last
portmanteau. He had never seen anyone pack as cleverly as Susy: the way
she coaxed reluctant things into a trunk was a symbol of the way she
fitted discordant facts into her life. “When I’m rich,” she often said,
“the thing I shall hate most will be to see an idiot maid at my trunks.”

As he passed, she glanced over her shoulder, her face pink with the
struggle, and drew a cigar-box from the depths. “Dearest, do put a
couple of cigars into your pocket as a tip for Ottaviano.”

Lansing stared. “Why, what on earth are you doing with Streffy’s
cigars?”

“Packing them, of course.... You don’t suppose he meant them for those
other people?” She gave him a look of honest wonder.

“I don’t know whom he meant them for--but they’re not ours....”

She continued to look at him wonderingly. “I don’t see what there is to
be solemn about. The cigars are not Streffy’s either... you may be sure
he got them out of some bounder. And there’s nothing he’d hate more than
to have them passed on to another.”

“Nonsense. If they’re not Streffy’s they’re much less mine. Hand them
over, please, dear.”

“Just as you like. But it does seem a waste; and, of course, the other
people will never have one of them.... The gardener and Giulietta’s
lover will see to that!”

Lansing looked away from her at the waves of lace and muslin from which
she emerged like a rosy Nereid. “How many boxes of them are left?”

“Only four.”

“Unpack them, please.”

Before she moved there was a pause so full of challenge that Lansing had
time for an exasperated sense of the disproportion between his anger and
its cause. And this made him still angrier.

She held out a box. “The others are in your suitcase downstairs. It’s
locked and strapped.”

“Give me the key, then.”

“We might send them back from Venice, mightn’t we? That lock is so
nasty: it will take you half an hour.”

“Give me the key, please.” She gave it.

He went downstairs and battled with the lock, for the allotted
half-hour, under the puzzled eyes of Giulietta and the sardonic grin of
the chauffeur, who now and then, from the threshold, politely reminded
him how long it would take to get to Milan. Finally the key turned, and
Lansing, broken-nailed and perspiring, extracted the cigars and stalked
with them into the deserted drawing room. The great bunches of golden
roses that he and Susy had gathered the day before were dropping their
petals on the marble embroidery of the floor, pale camellias floated in
the alabaster tazzas between the windows, haunting scents of the garden
blew in on him with the breeze from the lake. Never had Streffy’s little
house seemed so like a nest of pleasures. Lansing laid the cigar boxes
on a console and ran upstairs to collect his last possessions. When
he came down again, his wife, her eyes brilliant with achievement, was
seated in their borrowed chariot, the luggage cleverly stowed away, and
Giulietta and the gardener kissing her hand and weeping out inconsolable
farewells.

“I wonder what she’s given them?” he thought, as he jumped in beside her
and the motor whirled them through the nightingale-thickets to the gate.




IV.


CHARLIE STREFFORD’S villa was like a nest in a rose-bush; the Nelson
Vanderlyns’ palace called for loftier analogies.

Its vastness and splendour seemed, in comparison, oppressive to Susy.
Their landing, after dark, at the foot of the great shadowy staircase,
their dinner at a dimly-lit table under a ceiling weighed down with
Olympians, their chilly evening in a corner of a drawing room where
minuets should have been danced before a throne, contrasted with the
happy intimacies of Como as their sudden sense of disaccord contrasted
with the mutual confidence of the day before.

The journey had been particularly jolly: both Susy and Lansing had had
too long a discipline in the art of smoothing things over not to make
a special effort to hide from each other the ravages of their first
disagreement. But, deep down and invisible, the disagreement remained;
and compunction for having been its cause gnawed at Susy’s bosom as she
sat in her tapestried and vaulted bedroom, brushing her hair before a
tarnished mirror.

“I thought I liked grandeur; but this place is really out of scale,” she
mused, watching the reflection of a pale hand move back and forward
in the dim recesses of the mirror. “And yet,” she continued, “Ellie
Vanderlyn’s hardly half an inch taller than I am; and she certainly
isn’t a bit more dignified.... I wonder if it’s because I feel so
horribly small to-night that the place seems so horribly big.”

She loved luxury: splendid things always made her feel handsome and
high ceilings arrogant; she did not remember having ever before been
oppressed by the evidences of wealth.

She laid down the brush and leaned her chin on her clasped hands....
Even now she could not understand what had made her take the cigars.
She had always been alive to the value of her inherited scruples: her
reasoned opinions were unusually free, but with regard to the things
one couldn’t reason about she was oddly tenacious. And yet she had taken
Streffy’s cigars! She had taken them--yes, that was the point--she
had taken them for Nick, because the desire to please him, to make
the smallest details of his life easy and agreeable and luxurious,
had become her absorbing preoccupation. She had committed, for him,
precisely the kind of little baseness she would most have scorned to
commit for herself; and, since he hadn’t instantly felt the difference,
she would never be able to explain it to him.

She stood up with a sigh, shook out her loosened hair, and glanced
around the great frescoed room. The maid-servant had said something
about the Signora’s having left a letter for her; and there it lay on
the writing-table, with her mail and Nick’s; a thick envelope addressed
in Ellie’s childish scrawl, with a glaring “Private” dashed across the
corner.

“What on earth can she have to say, when she hates writing so,” Susy
mused.

She broke open the envelope, and four or five stamped and sealed letters
fell from it. All were addressed, in Ellie’s hand, to Nelson Vanderlyn
Esqre; and in the corner of each was faintly pencilled a number and a
date: one, two, three, four--with a week’s interval between the dates.

“Goodness--” gasped Susy, understanding.

She had dropped into an armchair near the table, and for a long time
she sat staring at the numbered letters. A sheet of paper covered with
Ellie’s writing had fluttered out among them, but she let it lie;
she knew so well what it would say! She knew all about her friend, of
course; except poor old Nelson, who didn’t, But she had never imagined
that Ellie would dare to use her in this way. It was unbelievable... she
had never pictured anything so vile.... The blood rushed to her face,
and she sprang up angrily, half minded to tear the letters in bits and
throw them all into the fire.

She heard her husband’s knock on the door between their rooms, and swept
the dangerous packet under the blotting-book.

“Oh, go away, please, there’s a dear,” she called out; “I haven’t
finished unpacking, and everything’s in such a mess.” Gathering up
Nick’s papers and letters, she ran across the room and thrust them
through the door. “Here’s something to keep you quiet,” she laughed,
shining in on him an instant from the threshold.

She turned back feeling weak with shame. Ellie’s letter lay on the
floor: reluctantly she stooped to pick it up, and one by one the
expected phrases sprang out at her.

“One good turn deserves another.... Of course you and Nick are welcome
to stay all summer.... There won’t be a particle of expense for you--the
servants have orders.... If you’ll just be an angel and post these
letters yourself.... It’s been my only chance for such an age; when we
meet I’ll explain everything. And in a month at latest I’ll be back to
fetch Clarissa....”

Susy lifted the letter to the lamp to be sure she had read aright. To
fetch Clarissa! Then Ellie’s child was here? Here, under the roof with
them, left to their care? She read on, raging. “She’s so delighted, poor
darling, to know you’re coming. I’ve had to sack her beastly governess
for impertinence, and if it weren’t for you she’d be all alone with a
lot of servants I don’t much trust. So for pity’s sake be good to my
child, and forgive me for leaving her. She thinks I’ve gone to take a
cure; and she knows she’s not to tell her Daddy that I’m away, because
it would only worry him if he thought I was ill. She’s perfectly to be
trusted; you’ll see what a clever angel she is....” And then, at the
bottom of the page, in a last slanting postscript: “Susy darling, if
you’ve ever owed me anything in the way of kindness, you won’t, on your
sacred honour, say a word of this to any one, even to Nick. And I know I
can count on you to rub out the numbers.”

Susy sprang up and tossed Mrs. Vanderlyn’s letter into the fire: then
she came slowly back to the chair. There, at her elbow, lay the four
fatal envelopes; and her next affair was to make up her mind what to do
with them.

To destroy them on the spot had seemed, at first thought, inevitable: it
might be saving Ellie as well as herself. But such a step seemed to Susy
to involve departure on the morrow, and this in turn involved notifying
Ellie, whose letter she had vainly scanned for an address. Well--perhaps
Clarissa’s nurse would know where one could write to her mother; it was
unlikely that even Ellie would go off without assuring some means of
communication with her child. At any rate, there was nothing to be done
that night: nothing but to work out the details of their flight on the
morrow, and rack her brains to find a substitute for the hospitality
they were rejecting. Susy did not disguise from herself how much she had
counted on the Vanderlyn apartment for the summer: to be able to do
so had singularly simplified the future. She knew Ellie’s largeness of
hand, and had been sure in advance that as long as they were her guests
their only expense would be an occasional present to the servants. And
what would the alternative be? She and Lansing, in their endless talks,
had so lived themselves into the vision of indolent summer days on the
lagoon, of flaming hours on the beach of the Lido, and evenings of music
and dreams on their broad balcony above the Giudecca, that the idea of
having to renounce these joys, and deprive her Nick of them, filled Susy
with a wrath intensified by his having confided in her that when they
were quietly settled in Venice he “meant to write.” Already nascent in
her breast was the fierce resolve of the author’s wife to defend her
husband’s privacy and facilitate his encounters with the Muse. It was
abominable, simply abominable, that Ellie Vanderlyn should have drawn
her into such a trap!

Well--there was nothing for it but to make a clean breast of the whole
thing to Nick. The trivial incident of the cigars--how trivial it now
seemed!--showed her the kind of stand he would take, and communicated to
her something of his own uncompromising energy. She would tell him the
whole story in the morning, and try to find a way out with him: Susy’s
faith in her power of finding a way out was inexhaustible. But suddenly
she remembered the adjuration at the end of Mrs. Vanderlyn’s letter: “If
you’re ever owed me anything in the way of kindness, you won’t, on your
sacred honour, say a word to Nick....”

It was, of course, exactly what no one had the right to ask of her: if
indeed the word “right”, could be used in any conceivable relation to
this coil of wrongs. But the fact remained that, in the way of kindness,
she did owe much to Ellie; and that this was the first payment her
friend had ever exacted. She found herself, in fact, in exactly the same
position as when Ursula Gillow, using the same argument, had appealed
to her to give up Nick Lansing. Yes, Susy reflected; but then Nelson
Vanderlyn had been kind to her too; and the money Ellie had been so kind
with was Nelson’s.... The queer edifice of Susy’s standards tottered on
its base she honestly didn’t know where fairness lay, as between so much
that was foul.

The very depth of her perplexity puzzled her. She had been in “tight
places” before; had indeed been in so few that were not, in one way or
another, constricting! As she looked back on her past it lay before her
as a very network of perpetual concessions and contrivings. But
never before had she had such a sense of being tripped up, gagged and
pinioned. The little misery of the cigars still galled her, and now
this big humiliation superposed itself on the raw wound. Decidedly, the
second month of their honey-moon was beginning cloudily....

She glanced at the enamel led travelling-clock on her dressing
table--one of the few wedding-presents she had consented to accept in
kind--and was startled at the lateness of the hour. In a moment Nick
would be coming; and an uncomfortable sensation in her throat warned
her that through sheer nervousness and exasperation she might blurt out
something ill-advised. The old habit of being always on her guard made
her turn once more to the looking-glass. Her face was pale and haggard;
and having, by a swift and skilful application of cosmetics, increased
its appearance of fatigue, she crossed the room and softly opened her
husband’s door.

He too sat by a lamp, reading a letter which he put aside as she
entered. His face was grave, and she said to herself that he was
certainly still thinking about the cigars.

“I’m very tired, dearest, and my head aches so horribly that I’ve come
to bid you good-night.” Bending over the back of his chair, she laid
her arms on his shoulders. He lifted his hands to clasp hers, but, as
he threw his head back to smile up at her she noticed that his look was
still serious, almost remote. It was as if, for the first time, a faint
veil hung between his eyes and hers.

“I’m so sorry: it’s been a long day for you,” he said absently, pressing
his lips to her hands

She felt the dreaded twitch in her throat.

“Nick!” she burst out, tightening her embrace, “before I go, you’ve got
to swear to me on your honour that you know I should never have taken
those cigars for myself!”

For a moment he stared at her, and she stared back at him with equal
gravity; then the same irresistible mirth welled up in both, and Susy’s
compunctions were swept away on a gale of laughter.

When she woke the next morning the sun was pouring in between her
curtains of old brocade, and its refraction from the ripples of the
Canal was drawing a network of golden scales across the vaulted ceiling.
The maid had just placed a tray on a slim marquetry table near the bed,
and over the edge of the tray Susy discovered the small serious face
of Clarissa Vanderlyn. At the sight of the little girl all her dormant
qualms awoke.

Clarissa was just eight, and small for her age: her little round chin
was barely on a level with the tea-service, and her clear brown eyes
gazed at Susy between the ribs of the toast-rack and the single tea-rose
in an old Murano glass. Susy had not seen her for two years, and she
seemed, in the interval, to have passed from a thoughtful infancy to
complete ripeness of feminine experience. She was looking with approval
at her mother’s guest.

“I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said in a small sweet voice. “I like you
so very much. I know I’m not to be often with you; but at least you’ll
have an eye on me, won’t you?”

“An eye on you! I shall never want to have it off you, if you say such
nice things to me!” Susy laughed, leaning from her pillows to draw the
little girl up to her side.

Clarissa smiled and settled herself down comfortably on the silken
bedspread. “Oh, I know I’m not to be always about, because you’re just
married; but could you see to it that I have my meals regularly?”

“Why, you poor darling! Don’t you always?”

“Not when mother’s away on these cures. The servants don’t always obey
me: you see I’m so little for my age. In a few years, of course, they’ll
have to--even if I don’t grow much,” she added judiciously. She put out
her hand and touched the string of pearls about Susy’s throat. “They’re
small, but they’re very good. I suppose you don’t take the others when
you travel?”

“The others? Bless you! I haven’t any others--and never shall have,
probably.”

“No other pearls?”

“No other jewels at all.”

Clarissa stared. “Is that really true?” she asked, as if in the presence
of the unprecedented.

“Awfully true,” Susy confessed. “But I think I can make the servants
obey me all the same.”

This point seemed to have lost its interest for Clarissa, who was still
gravely scrutinizing her companion. After a while she brought forth
another question.

“Did you have to give up all your jewels when you were divorced?”

“Divorced--?” Susy threw her head back against the pillows and laughed.
“Why, what are you thinking of? Don’t you remember that I wasn’t even
married the last time you saw me?”

“Yes; I do. But that was two years ago.” The little girl wound her arms
about Susy’s neck and leaned against her caressingly. “Are you going to
be soon, then? I’ll promise not to tell if you don’t want me to.”

“Going to be divorced? Of course not! What in the world made you think
so? ”

“Because you look so awfully happy,” said Clarissa Vanderlyn simply.




V.


IT was a trifling enough sign, but it had remained in Susy’s mind: that
first morning in Venice Nick had gone out without first coming in to see
her. She had stayed in bed late, chatting with Clarissa, and expecting
to see the door open and her husband appear; and when the child left,
and she had jumped up and looked into Nick’s room, she found it empty,
and a line on his dressing table informed her that he had gone out to
send a telegram.

It was lover-like, and even boyish, of him to think it necessary to
explain his absence; but why had he not simply come in and told her! She
instinctively connected the little fact with the shade of preoccupation
she had noticed on his face the night before, when she had gone to his
room and found him absorbed in letter; and while she dressed she had
continued to wonder what was in the letter, and whether the telegram he
had hurried out to send was an answer to it.

She had never found out. When he reappeared, handsome and happy as the
morning, he proffered no explanation; and it was part of her life-long
policy not to put uncalled-for questions. It was not only that her
jealous regard for her own freedom was matched by an equal respect for
that of others; she had steered too long among the social reefs and
shoals not to know how narrow is the passage that leads to peace of
mind, and she was determined to keep her little craft in mid-channel.
But the incident had lodged itself in her memory, acquiring a sort of
symbolic significance, as of a turning-point in her relations with her
husband. Not that these were less happy, but that she now beheld them,
as she had always formerly beheld such joys, as an unstable islet in
a sea of storms. Her present bliss was as complete as ever, but it was
ringed by the perpetual menace of all she knew she was hiding from Nick,
and of all she suspected him of hiding from her....

She was thinking of these things one afternoon about three weeks after
their arrival in Venice. It was near sunset, and she sat alone on the
balcony, watching the cross-lights on the water weave their pattern
above the flushed reflection of old palace-basements. She was
almost always alone at that hour. Nick had taken to writing in the
afternoons--he had been as good as his word, and so, apparently, had the
Muse and it was his habit to join his wife only at sunset, for a late
row on the lagoon. She had taken Clarissa, as usual, to the Giardino
Pubblico, where that obliging child had politely but indifferently
“played”--Clarissa joined in the diversions of her age as if conforming
to an obsolete tradition--and had brought her back for a music lesson,
echoes of which now drifted down from a distant window.

Susy had come to be extremely thankful for Clarissa. But for the little
girl, her pride in her husband’s industry might have been tinged with
a faint sense of being at times left out and forgotten; and as Nick’s
industry was the completest justification for their being where they
were, and for her having done what she had, she was grateful to Clarissa
for helping her to feel less alone. Clarissa, indeed, represented the
other half of her justification: it was as much on the child’s account
as on Nick’s that Susy had held her tongue, remained in Venice, and
slipped out once a week to post one of Ellie’s numbered letters. A
day’s experience of the Palazzo Vanderlyn had convinced Susy of the
impossibility of deserting Clarissa. Long experience had shown her that
the most crowded households often contain the loneliest nurseries,
and that the rich child is exposed to evils unknown to less pampered
infancy; but hitherto such things had merely been to her one of the
uglier bits in the big muddled pattern of life. Now she found herself
feeling where before she had only judged: her precarious bliss came to
her charged with a new weight of pity.

She was thinking of these things, and of the approaching date of Ellie
Vanderlyn’s return, and of the searching truths she was storing up for
that lady’s private ear, when she noticed a gondola turning its
prow toward the steps below the balcony. She leaned over, and a tall
gentleman in shabby clothes, glancing up at her as he jumped out, waved
a mouldy Panama in joyful greeting.

“Streffy!” she exclaimed as joyfully; and she was half-way down the
stairs when he ran up them followed by his luggage-laden boatman.

“It’s all right, I suppose?--Ellie said I might come,” he explained in
a shrill cheerful voice; “and I’m to have my same green room with the
parrot-panels, because its furniture is already so frightfully stained
with my hair-wash.”

Susy was beaming on him with the deep sense of satisfaction which his
presence always produced in his friends. There was no one in the world,
they all agreed, half as ugly and untidy and delightful as Streffy; no
one who combined such outspoken selfishness with such imperturbable good
humour; no one who knew so well how to make you believe he was being
charming to you when it was you who were being charming to him.

In addition to these seductions, of which none estimated the value
more accurately than their possessor, Strefford had for Susy another
attraction of which he was probably unconscious. It was that of being
the one rooted and stable being among the fluid and shifting figures
that composed her world. Susy had always lived among people so
denationalized that those one took for Russians generally turned out to
be American, and those one was inclined to ascribe to New York proved to
have originated in Rome or Bucharest. These cosmopolitan people, who, in
countries not their own, lived in houses as big as hotels, or in
hotels where the guests were as international as the waiters, had
inter-married, inter-loved and inter-divorced each other over the whole
face of Europe, and according to every code that attempts to regulate
human ties. Strefford, too, had his home in this world, but only one
of his homes. The other, the one he spoke of, and probably thought
of, least often, was a great dull English country-house in a northern
county, where a life as monotonous and self-contained as his own was
chequered and dispersed had gone on for generation after generation;
and it was the sense of that house, and of all it typified even to his
vagrancy and irreverence, which, coming out now and then in his talk, or
in his attitude toward something or somebody, gave him a firmer
outline and a steadier footing than the other marionettes in the dance.
Superficially so like them all, and so eager to outdo them in detachment
and adaptability, ridiculing the prejudices he had shaken off, and the
people to whom he belonged, he still kept, under his easy pliancy, the
skeleton of old faiths and old fashions. “He talks every language as
well as the rest of us,” Susy had once said of him, “but at least he
talks one language better than the others”; and Strefford, told of the
remark, had laughed, called her an idiot, and been pleased.

As he shambled up the stairs with her, arm in arm, she was thinking of
this quality with a new appreciation of its value. Even she and Lansing,
in spite of their unmixed Americanism, their substantial background of
old-fashioned cousinships in New York and Philadelphia, were as
mentally detached, as universally at home, as touts at an International
Exhibition. If they were usually recognized as Americans it was only
because they spoke French so well, and because Nick was too fair to be
“foreign,” and too sharp-featured to be English. But Charlie Strefford
was English with all the strength of an inveterate habit; and something
in Susy was slowly waking to a sense of the beauty of habit.

Lounging on the balcony, whither he had followed her without pausing
to remove the stains of travel, Strefford showed himself immensely
interested in the last chapter of her history, greatly pleased at its
having been enacted under his roof, and hugely and flippantly amused
at the firmness with which she refused to let him see Nick till the
latter’s daily task was over.

“Writing? Rot! What’s he writing? He’s breaking you in, my dear; that’s
what he’s doing: establishing an alibi. What’ll you bet he’s just
sitting there smoking and reading Le Rire? Let’s go and see.”

But Susy was firm. “He’s read me his first chapter: it’s wonderful. It’s
a philosophic romance--rather like Marius, you know.”

“Oh, yes--I do!” said Strefford, with a laugh that she thought idiotic.

She flushed up like a child. “You’re stupid, Streffy. You forget that
Nick and I don’t need alibis. We’ve got rid of all that hyprocrisy by
agreeing that each will give the other a hand up when either of us wants
a change. We’ve not married to spy and lie, and nag each other; we’ve
formed a partnership for our mutual advantage.”

“I see; that’s capital. But how can you be sure that, when Nick wants a
change, you’ll consider it for his advantage to have one?”

It was the point that had always secretly tormented Susy; she often
wondered if it equally tormented Nick.

“I hope I shall have enough common sense--” she began.

“Oh, of course: common sense is what you’re both bound to base your
argument on, whichever way you argue.”

This flash of insight disconcerted her, and she said, a little
irritably: “What should you do then, if you married?--Hush, Streffy! I
forbid you to shout like that--all the gondolas are stopping to look!”

“How can I help it?” He rocked backward and forward in his chair. “‘If
you marry,’ she says: ‘Streffy, what have you decided to do if you
suddenly become a raving maniac?’”

“I said no such thing. If your uncle and your cousin died, you’d marry
to-morrow; you know you would.”

“Oh, now you’re talking business.” He folded his long arms and leaned
over the balcony, looking down at the dusky ripples streaked with fire.
“In that case I should say: ‘Susan, my dear--Susan--now that by
the merciful intervention of Providence you have become Countess of
Altringham in the peerage of Great Britain, and Baroness Dunsterville
and d’Amblay in the peerages of Ireland and Scotland, I’ll thank you to
remember that you are a member of one of the most ancient houses in the
United Kingdom--and not to get found out.’”

Susy laughed. “We know what those warnings mean! I pity my namesake.”

He swung about and gave her a quick look out of his small ugly twinkling
eyes. “Is there any other woman in the world named Susan?”

“I hope so, if the name’s an essential. Even if Nick chucks me, don’t
count on me to carry out that programme. I’ve seen it in practice too
often.”

“Oh, well: as far as I know, everybody’s in perfect health at
Altringham.” He fumbled in his pocket and drew out a fountain pen,
a handkerchief over which it had leaked, and a packet of dishevelled
cigarettes. Lighting one, and restoring the other objects to his pocket,
he continued calmly: “Tell me how did you manage to smooth things over
with the Gillows? Ursula was running amuck when I was in Newport last
Summer; it was just when people were beginning to say that you were
going to marry Nick. I was afraid she’d put a spoke in your wheel; and I
hear she put a big cheque in your hand instead.”

Susy was silent. From the first moment of Strefford’s appearance she had
known that in the course of time he would put that question. He was as
inquisitive as a monkey, and when he had made up his mind to find out
anything it was useless to try to divert his attention. After a moment’s
hesitation she said: “I flirted with Fred. It was a bore but he was very
decent.”

“He would be--poor Fred. And you got Ursula thoroughly frightened!”

“Well--enough. And then luckily that young Nerone Altineri turned up
from Rome: he went over to New York to look for a job as an engineer,
and Ursula made Fred put him in their iron works.” She paused again,
and then added abruptly: “Streffy! If you knew how I hate that kind of
thing. I’d rather have Nick come in now and tell me frankly, as I know
he would, that he’s going off with--”

“With Coral Hicks?” Strefford suggested.

She laughed. “Poor Coral Hicks! What on earth made you think of the
Hickses?”

“Because I caught a glimpse of them the other day at Capri. They’re
cruising about: they said they were coming in here.”

“What a nuisance! I do hope they won’t find us out. They were
awfully kind to Nick when he went to India with them, and they’re so
simple-minded that they would expect him to be glad to see them.”

Strefford aimed his cigarette-end at a tourist on a puggaree who was
gazing up from his guidebook at the palace. “Ah,” he murmured with
satisfaction, seeing the shot take effect; then he added: “Coral Hicks
is growing up rather pretty.”

“Oh, Streff--you’re dreaming! That lump of a girl with spectacles and
thick ankles! Poor Mrs. Hicks used to say to Nick: ‘When Mr. Hicks and
I had Coral educated we presumed culture was in greater demand in Europe
than it appears to be.’”

“Well, you’ll see: that girl’s education won’t interfere with her, once
she’s started. So then: if Nick came in and told you he was going off--”

“I should be so thankful if it was with a fright like Coral! But you
know,” she added with a smile, “we’ve agreed that it’s not to happen for
a year.”




VI.


SUSY found Strefford, after his first burst of nonsense, unusually kind
and responsive. The interest he showed in her future and Nick’s seemed
to proceed not so much from his habitual spirit of scientific curiosity
as from simple friendliness. He was privileged to see Nick’s first
chapter, of which he formed so favourable an impression that he spoke
sternly to Susy on the importance of respecting her husband’s working
hours; and he even carried his general benevolence to the length
of showing a fatherly interest in Clarissa Vanderlyn. He was always
charming to children, but fitfully and warily, with an eye on his
independence, and on the possibility of being suddenly bored by them;
Susy had never seen him abandon these precautions so completely as he
did with Clarissa.

“Poor little devil! Who looks after her when you and Nick are off
together? Do you mean to tell me Ellie sacked the governess and went
away without having anyone to take her place?”

“I think she expected me to do it,” said Susy with a touch of asperity.
There were moments when her duty to Clarissa weighed on her somewhat
heavily; whenever she went off alone with Nick she was pursued by the
vision of a little figure waving wistful farewells from the balcony.

“Ah, that’s like Ellie: you might have known she’d get an equivalent
when she lent you all this. But I don’t believe she thought you’d be so
conscientious about it.”

Susy considered. “I don’t suppose she did; and perhaps I shouldn’t have
been, a year ago. But you see”--she hesitated--“Nick’s so awfully good:
it’s made me look; at a lot of things differently....”

“Oh, hang Nick’s goodness! It’s happiness that’s done it, my dear.
You’re just one of the people with whom it happens to agree.”

Susy, leaning back, scrutinized between her lashes his crooked ironic
face.

“What is it that’s agreeing with you, Streffy? I’ve never seen you so
human. You must be getting an outrageous price for the villa.”

Strefford laughed and clapped his hand on his breast-pocket. “I should
be an ass not to: I’ve got a wire here saying they must have it for
another month at any price.”

“What luck! I’m so glad. Who are they, by the way?”

He drew himself up out of the long chair in which he was disjointedly
lounging, and looked down at her with a smile. “Another couple of
love-sick idiots like you and Nick.... I say, before I spend it all
let’s go out and buy something ripping for Clarissa.”

The days passed so quickly and radiantly that, but for her concern
for Clarissa, Susy would hardly have been conscious of her hostess’s
protracted absence. Mrs. Vanderlyn had said: “Four weeks at the latest,”
 and the four weeks were over, and she had neither arrived nor written
to explain her non-appearance. She had, in fact, given no sign of life
since her departure, save in the shape of a post-card which had
reached Clarissa the day after the Lansings’ arrival, and in which Mrs.
Vanderlyn instructed her child to be awfully good, and not to forget
to feed the mongoose. Susy noticed that this missive had been posted in
Milan.

She communicated her apprehensions to Strefford. “I don’t trust
that green-eyed nurse. She’s forever with the younger gondolier; and
Clarissa’s so awfully sharp. I don’t see why Ellie hasn’t come: she was
due last Monday.”

Her companion laughed, and something in the sound of his laugh suggested
that he probably knew as much of Ellie’s movements as she did, if not
more. The sense of disgust which the subject always roused in her made
her look away quickly from his tolerant smile. She would have given
the world, at that moment, to have been free to tell Nick what she had
learned on the night of their arrival, and then to have gone away with
him, no matter where. But there was Clarissa--!

To fortify herself against the temptation, she resolutely fixed her
thoughts on her husband. Of Nick’s beatitude there could be no doubt.
He adored her, he revelled in Venice, he rejoiced in his work; and
concerning the quality of that work her judgment was as confident as
her heart. She still doubted if he would ever earn a living by what
he wrote, but she no longer doubted that he would write something
remarkable. The mere fact that he was engaged on a philosophic romance,
and not a mere novel, seemed the proof of an intrinsic superiority. And
if she had mistrusted her impartiality Strefford’s approval would have
reassured her. Among their friends Strefford passed as an authority on
such matters: in summing him up his eulogists always added: “And you
know he writes.” As a matter of fact, the paying public had remained
cold to his few published pages; but he lived among the kind of people
who confuse taste with talent, and are impressed by the most artless
attempts at literary expression; and though he affected to disdain their
judgment, and his own efforts, Susy knew he was not sorry to have it
said of him: “Oh, if only Streffy had chosen--!”

Strefford’s approval of the philosophic romance convinced her that it
had been worth while staying in Venice for Nick’s sake; and if
only Ellie would come back, and carry off Clarissa to St. Moritz or
Deauville, the disagreeable episode on which their happiness was based
would vanish like a cloud, and leave them to complete enjoyment.

Ellie did not come; but the Mortimer Hickses did, and Nick Lansing was
assailed by the scruples his wife had foreseen. Strefford, coming back
one evening from the Lido, reported having recognized the huge outline
of the Ibis among the pleasure craft of the outer harbour; and the very
next evening, as the guests of Palazzo Vanderlyn were sipping their ices
at Florian’s, the Hickses loomed up across the Piazza.

Susy pleaded in vain with her husband in defence of his privacy.
“Remember you’re here to write, dearest; it’s your duty not to let any
one interfere with that. Why shouldn’t we tell them we’re just leaving!”

“Because it’s no use: we’re sure to be always meeting them. And besides,
I’ll be hanged if I’m going to shirk the Hickses. I spent five whole
months on the Ibis, and if they bored me occasionally, India didn’t.”

“We’ll make them take us to Aquileia anyhow,” said Strefford
philosophically; and the next moment the Hickses were bearing down on
the defenceless trio.

They presented a formidable front, not only because of their mere
physical bulk--Mr. and Mrs. Hicks were equally and majestically
three-dimensional--but because they never moved abroad without the
escort of two private secretaries (one for the foreign languages), Mr.
Hicks’s doctor, a maiden lady known as Eldoradder Tooker, who was Mrs.
Hicks’s cousin and stenographer, and finally their daughter, Coral
Hicks.

Coral Hicks, when Susy had last encountered the party, had been a
fat spectacled school-girl, always lagging behind her parents, with a
reluctant poodle in her wake. Now the poodle had gone, and his mistress
led the procession. The fat school-girl had changed into a young lady
of compact if not graceful outline; a long-handled eyeglass had replaced
the spectacles, and through it, instead of a sullen glare, Miss Coral
Hicks projected on the world a glance at once confident and critical.
She looked so strong and so assured that Susy, taking her measure in
a flash, saw that her position at the head of the procession was not
fortuitous, and murmured inwardly: “Thank goodness she’s not pretty
too!”

If she was not pretty, she was well-dressed; and if she was
overeducated, she seemed capable, as Strefford had suggested, of
carrying off even this crowning disadvantage. At any rate, she was above
disguising it; and before the whole party had been seated five minutes
in front of a fresh supply of ices (with Eldorada and the secretaries
at a table slightly in the background) she had taken up with Nick the
question of exploration in Mesopotamia.

“Queer child, Coral,” he said to Susy that night as they smoked a last
cigarette on their balcony. “She told me this afternoon that she’d
remembered lots of things she heard me say in India. I thought at the
time that she cared only for caramels and picture-puzzles, but it seems
she was listening to everything, and reading all the books she could lay
her hands on; and she got so bitten with Oriental archaeology that she
took a course last year at Bryn Mawr. She means to go to Bagdad next
spring, and back by the Persian plateau and Turkestan.”

Susy laughed luxuriously: she was sitting with her hand in Nick’s, while
the late moon--theirs again--rounded its orange-coloured glory above the
belfry of San Giorgio.

“Poor Coral! How dreary--” Susy murmured

“Dreary? Why? A trip like that is about as well worth doing as anything
I know.”

“Oh, I meant: dreary to do it without you or me,” she laughed, getting up
lazily to go indoors. A broad band of moonlight, dividing her room onto
two shadowy halves, lay on the painted Venetian bed with its folded-back
sheet, its old damask coverlet and lace-edged pillows. She felt the
warmth of Nick’s enfolding arm and lifted her face to his.

The Hickses retained the most tender memory of Nick’s sojourn on the
Ibis, and Susy, moved by their artless pleasure in meeting him again,
was glad he had not followed her advice and tried to elude them. She had
always admired Strefford’s ruthless talent for using and discarding the
human material in his path, but now she began to hope that Nick would
not remember her suggestion that he should mete out that measure to the
Hickses. Even if it had been less pleasant to have a big yacht at their
door during the long golden days and the nights of silver fire, the
Hickses’ admiration for Nick would have made Susy suffer them gladly.
She even began to be aware of a growing liking for them, a liking
inspired by the very characteristics that would once have provoked her
disapproval. Susy had had plenty of training in liking common people
with big purses; in such cases her stock of allowances and extenuations
was inexhaustible. But they had to be successful common people; and the
trouble was that the Hickses, judged by her standards, were failures.
It was not only that they were ridiculous; so, heaven knew, were many
of their rivals. But the Hickses were both ridiculous and unsuccessful.
They had consistently resisted the efforts of the experienced advisers
who had first descried them on the horizon and tried to help them
upward. They were always taking up the wrong people, giving the wrong
kind of party, and spending millions on things that nobody who mattered
cared about. They all believed passionately in “movements” and “causes”
 and “ideals,” and were always attended by the exponents of their latest
beliefs, always asking you to hear lectures by haggard women in peplums,
and having their portraits painted by wild people who never turned out
to be the fashion.

All this would formerly have increased Susy’s contempt; now she found
herself liking the Hickses most for their failings. She was touched by
their simple good faith, their isolation in the midst of all their
queer apostles and parasites, their way of drifting about an alien
and indifferent world in a compactly clinging group of which Eldorada
Tooker, the doctor and the two secretaries formed the outer fringe, and
by their view of themselves as a kind of collective re-incarnation of
some past state of princely culture, symbolised for Mrs. Hicks in what
she called “the court of the Renaissance.” Eldorada, of course, was
their chief prophetess; but even the intensely “bright” and modern young
secretaries, Mr. Beck and Mr. Buttles, showed a touching tendency to
share her view, and spoke of Mr. Hicks as “promoting art,” in the spirit
of Pandolfino celebrating the munificence of the Medicis.

“I’m getting really fond of the Hickses; I believe I should be nice to
them even if they were staying at Danieli’s,” Susy said to Strefford.

“And even if you owned the yacht?” he answered; and for once his banter
struck her as beside the point.

The Ibis carried them, during the endless June days, far and wide along
the enchanted shores; they roamed among the Euganeans, they saw Aquileia
and Pomposa and Ravenna. Their hosts would gladly have taken them
farther, across the Adriatic and on into the golden network of the
Ægean; but Susy resisted this infraction of Nick’s rules, and he
himself preferred to stick to his task. Only now he wrote in the early
mornings, so that on most days they could set out before noon and steam
back late to the low fringe of lights on the lagoon. His work continued
to progress, and as page was added to page Susy obscurely but surely
perceived that each one corresponded with a hidden secretion of energy,
the gradual forming within him of something that might eventually alter
both their lives. In what sense she could not conjecture: she merely
felt that the fact of his having chosen a job and stuck to it, if only
through a few rosy summer weeks, had already given him a new way of
saying “Yes” and “No.”




VII.


OF some new ferment at work in him Nick Lansing himself was equally
aware. He was a better judge of the book he was trying to write than
either Susy or Strefford; he knew its weaknesses, its treacheries,
its tendency to slip through his fingers just as he thought his grasp
tightest; but he knew also that at the very moment when it seemed to
have failed him it would suddenly be back, beating its loud wings in his
face.

He had no delusions as to its commercial value, and had winced more than
he triumphed when Susy produced her allusion to Marius. His book was to
be called The Pageant of Alexander. His imagination had been enchanted
by the idea of picturing the young conqueror’s advance through the
fabulous landscapes of Asia: he liked writing descriptions, and vaguely
felt that under the guise of fiction he could develop his theory of
Oriental influences in Western art at the expense of less learning than
if he had tried to put his ideas into an essay. He knew enough of his
subject to know that he did not know enough to write about it; but he
consoled himself by remembering that Wilhelm Meister has survived many
weighty volumes on aesthetics; and between his moments of self-disgust
he took himself at Susy’s valuation, and found an unmixed joy in his
task.

Never--no, never!--had he been so boundlessly, so confidently happy. His
hack-work had given him the habit of application, and now habit wore the
glow of inspiration. His previous literary ventures had been timid and
tentative: if this one was growing and strengthening on his hands, it
must be because the conditions were so different. He was at ease, he was
secure, he was satisfied; and he had also, for the first time since his
early youth, before his mother’s death, the sense of having some one to
look after, some one who was his own particular care, and to whom he
was answerable for himself and his actions, as he had never felt himself
answerable to the hurried and indifferent people among whom he had
chosen to live.

Susy had the same standards as these people: she spoke their language,
though she understood others, she required their pleasures if she did
not revere their gods. But from the moment that she had become his
property he had built up in himself a conception of her answering to
some deep-seated need of veneration. She was his, he had chosen her,
she had taken her place in the long line of Lansing women who had been
loved, honoured, and probably deceived, by bygone Lansing men. He didn’t
pretend to understand the logic of it; but the fact that she was his
wife gave purpose and continuity to his scattered impulses, and a
mysterious glow of consecration to his task.

Once or twice, in the first days of his marriage, he had asked himself
with a slight shiver what would happen if Susy should begin to bore
him. The thing had happened to him with other women as to whom his first
emotions had not differed in intensity from those she inspired. The part
he had played in his previous love-affairs might indeed have been summed
up in the memorable line: “I am the hunter and the prey,” for he had
invariably ceased to be the first only to regard himself as the second.
This experience had never ceased to cause him the liveliest pain, since
his sympathy for his pursuer was only less keen than his commiseration
for himself; but as he was always a little sorrier for himself, he had
always ended by distancing the pursuer.

All these pre-natal experiences now seemed utterly inapplicable to the
new man he had become. He could not imagine being bored by Susy--or
trying to escape from her if he were. He could not think of her as
an enemy, or even as an accomplice, since accomplices are potential
enemies: she was some one with whom, by some unheard-of miracle, joys
above the joys of friendship were to be tasted, but who, even through
these fleeting ecstasies, remained simply and securely his friend.

These new feelings did not affect his general attitude toward life: they
merely confirmed his faith in its ultimate “jolliness.” Never had he
more thoroughly enjoyed the things he had always enjoyed. A good dinner
had never been as good to him, a beautiful sunset as beautiful; he still
rejoiced in the fact that he appreciated both with an equal acuity. He
was as proud as ever of Susy’s cleverness and freedom from prejudice:
she couldn’t be too “modern” for him now that she was his. He shared to
the full her passionate enjoyment of the present, and all her feverish
eagerness to make it last. He knew when she was thinking of ways of
extending their golden opportunity, and he secretly thought with her,
wondering what new means they could devise. He was thankful that Ellie
Vanderlyn was still absent, and began to hope they might have the palace
to themselves for the remainder of the summer. If they did, he would
have time to finish his book, and Susy to lay up a little interest on
their wedding cheques; and thus their enchanted year might conceivably
be prolonged to two.

Late as the season was, their presence and Strefford’s in Venice had
already drawn thither several wandering members of their set. It was
characteristic of these indifferent but agglutinative people that they
could never remain long parted from each other without a dim sense of
uneasiness. Lansing was familiar with the feeling. He had known slight
twinges of it himself, and had often ministered to its qualms in others.
It was hardly stronger than the faint gnawing which recalls the tea-hour
to one who has lunched well and is sure of dining as abundantly; but it
gave a purpose to the purposeless, and helped many hesitating spirits
over the annual difficulty of deciding between Deauville and St. Moritz,
Biarritz and Capri.

Nick was not surprised to learn that it was becoming the fashion, that
summer, to pop down to Venice and take a look at the Lansings. Streffy
had set the example, and Streffy’s example was always followed. And then
Susy’s marriage was still a subject of sympathetic speculation. People
knew the story of the wedding cheques, and were interested in seeing
how long they could be made to last. It was going to be the thing,
that year, to help prolong the honey-moon by pressing houses on the
adventurous couple. Before June was over a band of friends were basking
with the Lansings on the Lido.

Nick found himself unexpectedly disturbed by their arrival. To avoid
comment and banter he put his book aside and forbade Susy to speak
of it, explaining to her that he needed an interval of rest. His wife
instantly and exaggeratedly adopted this view, guarding him from the
temptation to work as jealously as she had discouraged him from idling;
and he was careful not to let her find out that the change in his habits
coincided with his having reached a difficult point in his book. But
though he was not sorry to stop writing he found himself unexpectedly
oppressed by the weight of his leisure. For the first time communal
dawdling had lost its charm for him; not because his fellow dawdlers
were less congenial than of old, but because in the interval he had
known something so immeasurably better. He had always felt himself to be
the superior of his habitual associates, but now the advantage was too
great: really, in a sense, it was hardly fair to them.

He had flattered himself that Susy would share this feeling; but he
perceived with annoyance that the arrival of their friends heightened
her animation. It was as if the inward glow which had given her a new
beauty were now refracted upon her by the presence of the very people
they had come to Venice to avoid.

Lansing was vaguely irritated; and when he asked her how she liked being
with their old crowd again his irritation was increased by her answering
with a laugh that she only hoped the poor dears didn’t see too plainly
how they bored her. The patent insincerity of the reply was a shock to
Lansing. He knew that Susy was not really bored, and he understood that
she had simply guessed his feelings and instinctively adopted them: that
henceforth she was always going to think as he thought. To confirm this
fear he said carelessly: “Oh, all the same, it’s rather jolly knocking
about with them again for a bit;” and she answered at once, and with
equal conviction: “Yes, isn’t it? The old darlings--all the same!”

A fear of the future again laid its cold touch on Lansing. Susy’s
independence and self-sufficiency had been among her chief attractions;
if she were to turn into an echo their delicious duet ran the risk of
becoming the dullest of monologues. He forgot that five minutes earlier
he had resented her being glad to see their friends, and for a moment
he found himself leaning dizzily over that insoluble riddle of the
sentimental life: that to be differed with is exasperating, and to be
agreed with monotonous.

Once more he began to wonder if he were not fundamentally unfitted for
the married state; and was saved from despair only by remembering that
Susy’s subjection to his moods was not likely to last. But even then
it never occurred to him to reflect that his apprehensions were
superfluous, since their tie was avowedly a temporary one. Of the
special understanding on which their marriage had been based not a trace
remained in his thoughts of her; the idea that he or she might ever
renounce each other for their mutual good had long since dwindled to the
ghost of an old joke.

It was borne in on him, after a week or two of unbroken sociability,
that of all his old friends it was the Mortimer Hickses who bored him
the least. The Hickses had left the Ibis for an apartment in a vast
dilapidated palace near the Canareggio. They had hired the apartment
from a painter (one of their newest discoveries), and they put up
philosophically with the absence of modern conveniences in order to
secure the inestimable advantage of “atmosphere.” In this privileged
air they gathered about them their usual mixed company of quiet
studious people and noisy exponents of new theories, themselves totally
unconscious of the disparity between their different guests, and
beamingly convinced that at last they were seated at the source of
wisdom.

In old days Lansing would have got half an hour’s amusement, followed
by a long evening of boredom, from the sight of Mrs. Hicks, vast and
jewelled, seated between a quiet-looking professor of archaeology and a
large-browed composer, or the high priest of a new dance-step, while
Mr. Hicks, beaming above his vast white waistcoat, saw to it that the
champagne flowed more abundantly than the talk, and the bright young
secretaries industriously “kept up” with the dizzy cross-current of
prophecy and erudition. But a change had come over Lansing. Hitherto
it was in contrast to his own friends that the Hickses had seemed most
insufferable; now it was as an escape from these same friends that they
had become not only sympathetic but even interesting. It was something,
after all, to be with people who did not regard Venice simply as
affording exceptional opportunities for bathing and adultery, but who
were reverently if confusedly aware that they were in the presence of
something unique and ineffable, and determined to make the utmost of
their privilege.

“After all,” he said to himself one evening, as his eyes wandered, with
somewhat of a convalescent’s simple joy, from one to another of their
large confiding faces, “after all, they’ve got a religion....” The
phrase struck him, in the moment of using it, as indicating a new
element in his own state of mind, and as being, in fact, the key to his
new feeling about the Hickses. Their muddled ardour for great things
was related to his own new view of the universe: the people who felt,
however dimly, the wonder and weight of life must ever after be nearer
to him than those to whom it was estimated solely by one’s balance at
the bank. He supposed, on reflexion, that that was what he meant when he
thought of the Hickses as having “a religion”....

A few days later, his well-being was unexpectedly disturbed by the
arrival of Fred Gillow. Lansing had always felt a tolerant liking for
Gillow, a large smiling silent young man with an intense and serious
desire to miss nothing attainable by one of his fortune and standing.
What use he made of his experiences, Lansing, who had always gone into
his own modest adventures rather thoroughly, had never been able to
guess; but he had always suspected the prodigal Fred of being no more
than a well-disguised looker-on. Now for the first time he began to view
him with another eye. The Gillows were, in fact, the one uneasy point in
Nick’s conscience. He and Susy from the first, had talked of them less
than of any other members of their group: they had tacitly avoided the
name from the day on which Susy had come to Lansing’s lodgings to say
that Ursula Gillow had asked her to renounce him, till that other day,
just before their marriage, when she had met him with the rapturous cry:
“Here’s our first wedding present! Such a thumping big cheque from Fred
and Ursula!”

Plenty of sympathizing people were ready, Lansing knew, to tell him just
what had happened in the interval between those two dates; but he had
taken care not to ask. He had even affected an initiation so complete
that the friends who burned to enlighten him were discouraged by his so
obviously knowing more than they; and gradually he had worked himself
around to their view, and had taken it for granted that he really did.

Now he perceived that he knew nothing at all, and that the “Hullo, old
Fred!” with which Susy hailed Gillow’s arrival might be either the usual
tribal welcome--since they were all “old,” and all nicknamed, in their
private jargon--or a greeting that concealed inscrutable depths of
complicity.

Susy was visibly glad to see Gillow; but she was glad of everything just
then, and so glad to show her gladness! The fact disarmed her husband
and made him ashamed of his uneasiness. “You ought to have thought this
all out sooner, or else you ought to chuck thinking of it at all,”
 was the sound but ineffectual advice he gave himself on the day after
Gillow’s arrival; and immediately set to work to rethink the whole
matter.

Fred Gillow showed no consciousness of disturbing any one’s peace of
mind. Day after day he sprawled for hours on the Lido sands, his arms
folded under his head, listening to Streffy’s nonsense and watching Susy
between sleepy lids; but he betrayed no desire to see her alone, or
to draw her into talk apart from the others. More than ever he seemed
content to be the gratified spectator of a costly show got up for his
private entertainment. It was not until he heard her, one morning,
grumble a little at the increasing heat and the menace of mosquitoes,
that he said, quite as if they had talked the matter over long before,
and finally settled it: “The moor will be ready any time after the first
of August.”

Nick fancied that Susy coloured a little, and drew herself up more
defiantly than usual as she sent a pebble skimming across the dying
ripples at their feet.

“You’ll be a lot cooler in Scotland,” Fred added, with what, for him,
was an unusual effort at explicitness.

“Oh, shall we?” she retorted gaily; and added with an air of mystery
and importance, pivoting about on her high heels: “Nick’s got work to do
here. It will probably keep us all summer.”

“Work? Rot! You’ll die of the smells.” Gillow stared perplexedly skyward
from under his tilted hat-brim; and then brought out, as from the depth
of a rankling grievance: “I thought it was all understood.”

“Why,” Nick asked his wife that night, as they re-entered Ellie’s cool
drawing-room after a late dinner at the Lido, “did Gillow think it was
understood that we were going to his moor in August?” He was conscious
of the oddness of speaking of their friend by his surname, and reddened
at his blunder.

Susy had let her lace cloak slide to her feet, and stood before him
in the faintly-lit room, slim and shimmering-white through black
transparencies.

She raised her eyebrows carelessly. “I told you long ago he’d asked us
there for August.”

“You didn’t tell me you’d accepted.”

She smiled as if he had said something as simple as Fred. “I accepted
everything--from everybody!”

What could he answer? It was the very principle on which their bargain
had been struck. And if he were to say: “Ah, but this is different,
because I’m jealous of Gillow,” what light would such an answer shed on
his past? The time for being jealous--if so antiquated an attitude were
on any ground defensible--would have been before his marriage, and before
the acceptance of the bounties which had helped to make it possible. He
wondered a little now that in those days such scruples had not troubled
him. His inconsistency irritated him, and increased his irritation
against Gillow. “I suppose he thinks he owns us!” he grumbled inwardly.

He had thrown himself into an armchair, and Susy, advancing across the
shining arabesques of the floor, slid down at his feet, pressed her
slender length against him, and whispered with lifted face and lips
close to his: “We needn’t ever go anywhere you don’t want to.” For
once her submission was sweet, and folding her close he whispered back
through his kiss: “Not there, then.”

In her response to his embrace he felt the acquiescence of her whole
happy self in whatever future he decided on, if only it gave them enough
of such moments as this; and as they held each other fast in silence his
doubts and distrust began to seem like a silly injustice.

“Let us stay here as long as ever Ellie will let us,” he said, as if the
shadowy walls and shining floors were a magic boundary drawn about his
happiness.

She murmured her assent and stood up, stretching her sleepy arm above
her shoulders. “How dreadfully late it is.... Will you unhook me?... Oh,
there’s a telegram.”

She picked it up from the table, and tearing it open stared a moment at
the message. “It’s from Ellie. She’s coming to-morrow.”

She turned to the window and strayed out onto the balcony. Nick followed
her with enlacing arm. The canal below them lay in moonless shadow,
barred with a few lingering lights. A last snatch of gondola-music came
from far off, carried upward on a sultry gust.

“Dear old Ellie. All the same... I wish all this belonged to you and
me.” Susy sighed.




VIII.


IT was not Mrs. Vanderlyn’s fault if, after her arrival, her palace
seemed to belong any less to the Lansings.

She arrived in a mood of such general benevolence that it was impossible
for Susy, when they finally found themselves alone, to make her view
even her own recent conduct in any but the most benevolent light.

“I knew you’d be the veriest angel about it all, darling, because I knew
you’d understand me--especially now,” she declared, her slim hands
in Susy’s, her big eyes (so like Clarissa’s) resplendent with past
pleasures and future plans.

The expression of her confidence was unexpectedly distasteful to Susy
Lansing, who had never lent so cold an ear to such warm avowals. She had
always imagined that being happy one’s self made one--as Mrs. Vanderlyn
appeared to assume--more tolerant of the happiness of others, of however
doubtful elements composed; and she was almost ashamed of responding so
languidly to her friend’s outpourings. But she herself had no desire to
confide her bliss to Ellie; and why should not Ellie observe a similar
reticence?

“It was all so perfect--you see, dearest, I was meant to be happy,”
 that lady continued, as if the possession of so unusual a characteristic
singled her out for special privileges.

Susy, with a certain sharpness, responded that she had always supposed
we all were.

“Oh, no, dearest: not governesses and mothers-in-law and companions, and
that sort of people. They wouldn’t know how if they tried. But you and
I, darling--”

“Oh, I don’t consider myself in any way exceptional,” Susy intervened.
She longed to add: “Not in your way, at any rate--” but a few minutes
earlier Mrs. Vanderlyn had told her that the palace was at her disposal
for the rest of the summer, and that she herself was only going to perch
there--if they’d let her!--long enough to gather up her things and
start for St. Moritz. The memory of this announcement had the effect of
curbing Susy’s irony, and of making her shift the conversation to the
safer if scarcely less absorbing topic of the number of day and evening
dresses required for a season at St. Moritz.

As she listened to Mrs. Vanderlyn--no less eloquent on this theme
than on the other--Susy began to measure the gulf between her past and
present. “This is the life I used to lead; these are the things I used
to live for,” she thought, as she stood before the outspread glories of
Mrs. Vanderlyn’s wardrobe. Not that she did not still care: she could
not look at Ellie’s laces and silks and furs without picturing herself
in them, and wondering by what new miracle of management she could give
herself the air of being dressed by the same consummate artists. But
these had become minor interests: the past few months had given her a
new perspective, and the thing that most puzzled and disconcerted her
about Ellie was the fact that love and finery and bridge and dining-out
were seemingly all on the same plane to her.

The inspection of the dresses lasted a long time, and was marked by
many fluctuations of mood on the part of Mrs. Vanderlyn, who passed
from comparative hopefulness to despair at the total inadequacy of her
wardrobe. It wouldn’t do to go to St. Moritz looking like a frump, and
yet there was no time to get anything sent from Paris, and, whatever she
did, she wasn’t going to show herself in any dowdy re-arrangements done
at home. But suddenly light broke on her, and she clasped her hands
for joy. “Why, Nelson’ll bring them--I’d forgotten all about Nelson!
There’ll be just time if I wire to him at once.”

“Is Nelson going to join you at St. Moritz?” Susy asked, surprised.

“Heavens, no! He’s coming here to pick up Clarissa and take her to some
stuffy cure in Austria with his mother. It’s too lucky: there’s just
time to telegraph him to bring my things. I didn’t mean to wait for him;
but it won’t delay me more than day or two.”

Susy’s heart sank. She was not much afraid of Ellie alone, but Ellie and
Nelson together formed an incalculable menace. No one could tell what
spark of truth might dash from their collision. Susy felt that she could
deal with the two dangers separately and successively, but not together
and simultaneously.

“But, Ellie, why should you wait for Nelson? I’m certain to find someone
here who’s going to St. Moritz and will take your things if he brings
them. It’s a pity to risk losing your rooms.”

This argument appealed for a moment to Mrs. Vanderlyn. “That’s
true; they say all the hotels are jammed. You dear, you’re always
so practical!” She clasped Susy to her scented bosom. “And you know,
darling, I’m sure you’ll be glad to get rid of me--you and Nick! Oh,
don’t be hypocritical and say ‘Nonsense!’ You see, I understand... I
used to think of you so often, you two... during those blessed weeks
when we two were alone....”

The sudden tears, brimming over Ellie’s lovely eyes, and threatening to
make the blue circles below them run into the adjoining carmine, filled
Susy with compunction.

“Poor thing--oh, poor thing!” she thought; and hearing herself called
by Nick, who was waiting to take her out for their usual sunset on the
lagoon, she felt a wave of pity for the deluded creature who would
never taste that highest of imaginable joys. “But all the same,” Susy
reflected, as she hurried down to her husband, “I’m glad I persuaded her
not to wait for Nelson.”

Some days had elapsed since Susy and Nick had had a sunset to
themselves, and in the interval Susy had once again learned the superior
quality of the sympathy that held them together. She now viewed all the
rest of life as no more than a show: a jolly show which it would have
been a thousand pities to miss, but which, if the need arose, they could
get up and leave at any moment--provided that they left it together.

In the dusk, while their prow slid over inverted palaces, and through
the scent of hidden gardens, she leaned against him and murmured, her
mind returning to the recent scene with Ellie: “Nick, should you hate me
dreadfully if I had no clothes?”

Her husband was kindling a cigarette, and the match lit up the grin
with which he answered: “But, my dear, have I ever shown the slightest
symptom--?”

“Oh, rubbish! When a woman says: ‘No clothes,’ she means: ‘Not the right
clothes.’”

He took a meditative puff. “Ah, you’ve been going over Ellie’s finery
with her.”

“Yes: all those trunks and trunks full. And she finds she’s got nothing
for St. Moritz!”

“Of course,” he murmured, drowsy with content, and manifesting but a
languid interest in the subject of Mrs. Vanderlyn’s wardrobe.

“Only fancy--she very nearly decided to stop over for Nelson’s arrival
next week, so that he might bring her two or three more trunkfuls from
Paris. But mercifully I’ve managed to persuade her that it would be
foolish to wait.”

Susy felt a hardly perceptible shifting of her husband’s lounging body,
and was aware, through all her watchful tentacles, of a widening of his
half-closed lids.

“You ‘managed’--?” She fancied he paused on the word ironically. “But
why?”

“Why--what?”

“Why on earth should you try to prevent Ellie’s waiting for Nelson, if
for once in her life she wants to?”

Susy, conscious of reddening suddenly, drew back as though the leap
of her tell-tale heart might have penetrated the blue flannel shoulder
against which she leaned.

“Really, dearest--!” she murmured; but with a sudden doggedness he
renewed his “Why?”

“Because she’s in such a fever to get to St. Moritz--and in such a funk
lest the hotel shouldn’t keep her rooms,” Susy somewhat breathlessly
produced.

“Ah--I see.” Nick paused again. “You’re a devoted friend, aren’t you!”

“What an odd question! There’s hardly anyone I’ve reason to be more
devoted to than Ellie,” his wife answered; and she felt his contrite
clasp on her hand.

“Darling! No; nor I--. Or more grateful to for leaving us alone in this
heaven.”

Dimness had fallen on the waters, and her lifted lips met his bending
ones.

Trailing late into dinner that evening, Ellie announced that, after all,
she had decided it was safest to wait for Nelson.

“I should simply worry myself ill if I weren’t sure of getting my
things,” she said, in the tone of tender solicitude with which she
always discussed her own difficulties. “After all, people who deny
themselves everything do get warped and bitter, don’t they?” she argued
plaintively, her lovely eyes wandering from one to the other of her
assembled friends.

Strefford remarked gravely that it was the complaint which had fatally
undermined his own health; and in the laugh that followed the party
drifted into the great vaulted dining-room.

“Oh, I don’t mind your laughing at me, Streffy darling,” his hostess
retorted, pressing his arm against her own; and Susy, receiving the
shock of their rapidly exchanged glance, said to herself, with a sharp
twinge of apprehension: “Of course Streffy knows everything; he showed
no surprise at finding Ellie away when he arrived. And if he knows,
what’s to prevent Nelson’s finding out?” For Strefford, in a mood of
mischief, was no more to be trusted than a malicious child.

Susy instantly resolved to risk speaking to him, if need be even
betraying to him the secret of the letters. Only by revealing the depth
of her own danger could she hope to secure his silence.

On the balcony, late in the evening, while the others were listening
indoors to the low modulations of a young composer who had embroidered
his fancies on Browning’s “Toccata,” Susy found her chance. Strefford,
unsummoned, had followed her out, and stood silently smoking at her
side.

“You see, Streff--oh, why should you and I make mysteries to each
other?” she suddenly began.

“Why, indeed: but do we?”

Susy glanced back at the group around the piano. “About Ellie, I
mean--and Nelson.”

“Lord! Ellie and Nelson? You call that a mystery? I should as soon apply
the term to one of the million candle-power advertisements that adorn
your native thoroughfares.”

“Well, yes. But--” She stopped again. Had she not tacitly promised Ellie
not to speak?

“My Susan, what’s wrong?” Strefford asked.

“I don’t know....”

“Well, I do, then: you’re afraid that, if Ellie and Nelson meet here,
she’ll blurt out something--injudicious.”

“Oh, she won’t!” Susy cried with conviction.

“Well, then--who will! I trust that superhuman child not to. And you and
I and Nick--”

“Oh,” she gasped, interrupting him, “that’s just it. Nick doesn’t
know... doesn’t even suspect. And if he did....”

Strefford flung away his cigar and turned to scrutinize her. “I don’t
see--hanged if I do. What business is it of any of us, after all?”

That, of course, was the old view that cloaked connivance in an air of
decency. But to Susy it no longer carried conviction, and she hesitated.

“If Nick should find out that I know....”

“Good Lord--doesn’t he know that you know? After all, I suppose it’s not
the first time--”

She remained silent.

“The first time you’ve received confidences--from married friends. Does
Nick suppose you’ve lived even to your tender age without... Hang it,
what’s come over you, child?”

What had, indeed, that she could make clear to him? And yet more than
ever she felt the need of having him securely on her side. Once his word
was pledged, he was safe: otherwise there was no limit to his capacity
for wilful harmfulness.

“Look here, Streff, you and I know that Ellie hasn’t been away for a
cure; and that if poor Clarissa was sworn to secrecy it was not because
it ‘worries father’ to think that mother needs to take care of her
health.” She paused, hating herself for the ironic note she had tried to
sound.

“Well--?” he questioned, from the depths of the chair into which he had
sunk.

“Well, Nick doesn’t... doesn’t dream of it. If he knew that we owed our
summer here to... to my knowing....”

Strefford sat silent: she felt his astonished stare through the
darkness. “Jove!” he said at last, with a low whistle Susy bent over the
balustrade, her heart thumping against the stone rail.

“What was left of soul, I wonder--?” the young composer’s voice shrilled
through the open windows.

Strefford sank into another silence, from which he roused himself only
as Susy turned back toward the lighted threshold.

“Well, my dear, we’ll see it through between us; you and I--and
Clarissa,” he said with his rasping laugh, rising to follow her. He
caught her hand and gave it a short pressure as they re-entered the
drawing-room, where Ellie was saying plaintively to Fred Gillow: “I can
never hear that thing sung without wanting to cry like a baby.”




IX.


NELSON VANDERLYN, still in his travelling clothes, paused on the
threshold of his own dining-room and surveyed the scene with pardonable
satisfaction.

He was a short round man, with a grizzled head, small facetious eyes and
a large and credulous smile.

At the luncheon table sat his wife, between Charlie Strefford and Nick
Lansing. Next to Strefford, perched on her high chair, Clarissa throned
in infant beauty, while Susy Lansing cut up a peach for her. Through
wide orange awnings the sun slanted in upon the white-clad group.

“Well--well--well! So I’ve caught you at it!” cried the happy father,
whose inveterate habit it was to address his wife and friends as if he
had surprised them at an inopportune moment. Stealing up from behind, he
lifted his daughter into the air, while a chorus of “Hello, old Nelson,”
 hailed his appearance.

It was two or three years since Nick Lansing had seen Mr. Vanderlyn, who
was now the London representative of the big New York bank of Vanderlyn
& Co., and had exchanged his sumptuous house in Fifth Avenue for
another, more sumptuous still, in Mayfair; and the young man looked
curiously and attentively at his host.

Mr. Vanderlyn had grown older and stouter, but his face still kept
its look of somewhat worn optimism. He embraced his wife, greeted Susy
affectionately, and distributed cordial hand-grasps to the two men.

“Hullo,” he exclaimed, suddenly noticing a pearl and coral trinket
hanging from Clarissa’s neck. “Who’s been giving my daughter jewellery,
I’d like to know!”

“Oh, Streffy did--just think, father! Because I said I’d rather have it
than a book, you know,” Clarissa lucidly explained, her arms tight about
her father’s neck, her beaming eyes on Strefford.

Nelson Vanderlyn’s own eyes took on the look of shrewdness which came
into them whenever there was a question of material values.

“What, Streffy? Caught you at it, eh? Upon my soul-spoiling the brat
like that! You’d no business to, my dear chap-a lovely baroque pearl--”
 he protested, with the half-apologetic tone of the rich man embarrassed
by too costly a gift from an impecunious friend.

“Oh, hadn’t I? Why? Because it’s too good for Clarissa, or too expensive
for me? Of course you daren’t imply the first; and as for me--I’ve had a
windfall, and am blowing it in on the ladies.”

Strefford, Lansing had noticed, always used American slang when he was
slightly at a loss, and wished to divert attention from the main point.
But why was he embarrassed, whose attention did he wish to divert, It
was plain that Vanderlyn’s protest had been merely formal: like most of
the wealthy, he had only the dimmest notion of what money represented
to the poor. But it was unusual for Strefford to give any one a present,
and especially an expensive one: perhaps that was what had fixed
Vanderlyn’s attention.

“A windfall?” he gaily repeated.

“Oh, a tiny one: I was offered a thumping rent for my little place at
Como, and dashed over here to squander my millions with the rest of
you,” said Strefford imperturbably.

Vanderlyn’s look immediately became interested and sympathetic.
“What--the scene of the honey-moon?” He included Nick and Susy in his
friendly smile.

“Just so: the reward of virtue. I say, give me a cigar, will you, old
man, I left some awfully good ones at Como, worse luck--and I don’t mind
telling you that Ellie’s no judge of tobacco, and that Nick’s too far
gone in bliss to care what he smokes,” Strefford grumbled, stretching a
hand toward his host’s cigar-case.

“I do like jewellery best,” Clarissa murmured, hugging her father.

Nelson Vanderlyn’s first word to his wife had been that he had
brought her all her toggery; and she had welcomed him with appropriate
enthusiasm. In fact, to the lookers-on her joy at seeing him seemed
rather too patently in proportion to her satisfaction at getting her
clothes. But no such suspicion appeared to mar Mr. Vanderlyn’s happiness
in being, for once, and for nearly twenty-four hours, under the same
roof with his wife and child. He did not conceal his regret at having
promised his mother to join her the next day; and added, with a wistful
glance at Ellie: “If only I’d known you meant to wait for me!”

But being a man of duty, in domestic as well as business affairs, he did
not even consider the possibility of disappointing the exacting old lady
to whom he owed his being. “Mother cares for so few people,” he used to
say, not without a touch of filial pride in the parental exclusiveness,
“that I have to be with her rather more than if she were more sociable”;
and with smiling resignation he gave orders that Clarissa should be
ready to start the next evening.

“And meanwhile,” he concluded, “we’ll have all the good time that’s
going.”

The ladies of the party seemed united in the desire to further this
resolve; and it was settled that as soon as Mr. Vanderlyn had despatched
a hasty luncheon, his wife, Clarissa and Susy should carry him off for a
tea-picnic at Torcello. They did not even suggest that Strefford or Nick
should be of the party, or that any of the other young men of the group
should be summoned; as Susy said, Nelson wanted to go off alone with his
harem. And Lansing and Strefford were left to watch the departure of the
happy Pasha ensconced between attentive beauties.

“Well--that’s what you call being married!” Strefford commented, waving
his battered Panama at Clarissa.

“Oh, no, I don’t!” Lansing laughed.

“He does. But do you know--” Strefford paused and swung about on his
companion--“do you know, when the Rude Awakening comes, I don’t care to
be there. I believe there’ll be some crockery broken.”

“Shouldn’t wonder,” Lansing answered indifferently. He wandered away to
his own room, leaving Strefford to philosophize to his pipe.

Lansing had always known about poor old Nelson: who hadn’t, except poor
old Nelson? The case had once seemed amusing because so typical; now, it
rather irritated Nick that Vanderlyn should be so complete an ass. But
he would be off the next day, and so would Ellie, and then, for many
enchanted weeks, the palace would once more be the property of Nick and
Susy. Of all the people who came and went in it, they were the only ones
who appreciated it, or knew how it was meant to be lived in; and that
made it theirs in the only valid sense. In this light it became easy to
regard the Vanderlyns as mere transient intruders.

Having relegated them to this convenient distance, Lansing shut himself
up with his book. He had returned to it with fresh energy after his few
weeks of holiday-making, and was determined to finish it quickly. He did
not expect that it would bring in much money; but if it were moderately
successful it might give him an opening in the reviews and magazines,
and in that case he meant to abandon archaeology for novels, since
it was only as a purveyor of fiction that he could count on earning a
living for himself and Susy.

Late in the afternoon he laid down his pen and wandered out of doors.
He loved the increasing heat of the Venetian summer, the bruised
peach-tints of worn house-fronts, the enamelling of sunlight on dark
green canals, the smell of half-decayed fruits and flowers thickening
the languid air. What visions he could build, if he dared, of being
tucked away with Susy in the attic of some tumble-down palace, above
a jade-green waterway, with a terrace overhanging a scrap of neglected
garden--and cheques from the publishers dropping in at convenient
intervals! Why should they not settle in Venice if he pulled it off!

He found himself before the church of the Scalzi, and pushing open the
leathern door wandered up the nave under the whirl of rose-and-lemon
angels in Tiepolo’s great vault. It was not a church in which one was
likely to run across sight-seers; but he presently remarked a young lady
standing alone near the choir, and assiduously applying her field-glass
to the celestial vortex, from which she occasionally glanced down at an
open manual.

As Lansing’s step sounded on the pavement, the young lady, turning,
revealed herself as Miss Hicks.

“Ah--you like this too? It’s several centuries out of your line, though,
isn’t it!” Nick asked as they shook hands.

She gazed at him gravely. “Why shouldn’t one like things that are out
of one’s line?” she answered; and he agreed, with a laugh, that it was
often an incentive.

She continued to fix her grave eyes on him, and after one or two remarks
about the Tiepolos he perceived that she was feeling her way toward a
subject of more personal interest.

“I’m glad to see you alone,” she said at length, with an abruptness that
might have seemed awkward had it not been so completely unconscious.
She turned toward a cluster of straw chairs, and signed to Nick to seat
himself beside her.

“I seldom do,” she added, with the serious smile that made her heavy
face almost handsome; and she went on, giving him no time to protest: “I
wanted to speak to you--to explain about father’s invitation to go with
us to Persia and Turkestan.”

“To explain?”

“Yes. You found the letter when you arrived here just after your
marriage, didn’t you? You must have thought it odd, our asking you just
then; but we hadn’t heard that you were married.”

“Oh, I guessed as much: it happened very quietly, and I was remiss about
announcing it, even to old friends.”

Lansing frowned. His thoughts had wandered away to the evening when he
had found Mrs. Hicks’s letter in the mail awaiting him at Venice.
The day was associated in his mind with the ridiculous and mortifying
episode of the cigars--the expensive cigars that Susy had wanted to
carry away from Strefford’s villa. Their brief exchange of views on the
subject had left the first blur on the perfect surface of his happiness,
and he still felt an uncomfortable heat at the remembrance. For a few
hours the prospect of life with Susy had seemed unendurable; and it was
just at that moment that he had found the letter from Mrs. Hicks, with
its almost irresistible invitation. If only her daughter had known how
nearly he had accepted it!

“It was a dreadful temptation,” he said, smiling.

“To go with us? Then why--?”

“Oh, everything’s different now: I’ve got to stick to my writing.”

Miss Hicks still bent on him the same unblinking scrutiny. “Does that
mean that you’re going to give up your real work?”

“My real work--archaeology?” He smiled again to hide a twitch of regret.
“Why, I’m afraid it hardly produces a living wage; and I’ve got to think
of that.” He coloured suddenly, as if suspecting that Miss Hicks might
consider the avowal an opening for he hardly knew what ponderous
offer of aid. The Hicks munificence was too uncalculating not to be
occasionally oppressive. But looking at her again he saw that her eyes
were full of tears.

“I thought it was your vocation,” she said.

“So did I. But life comes along, and upsets things.”

“Oh, I understand. There may be things--worth giving up all other things
for.”

“There are!” cried Nick with beaming emphasis.

He was conscious that Miss Hicks’s eyes demanded of him even more than
this sweeping affirmation.

“But your novel may fail,” she said with her odd harshness.

“It may--it probably will,” he agreed. “But if one stopped to consider
such possibilities--”

“Don’t you have to, with a wife?”

“Oh, my dear Coral--how old are you? Not twenty?” he questioned, laying
a brotherly hand on hers.

She stared at him a moment, and sprang up clumsily from her chair. “I
was never young... if that’s what you mean. It’s lucky, isn’t it, that
my parents gave me such a grand education? Because, you see, art’s a
wonderful resource.” (She pronounced it RE-source.)

He continued to look at her kindly. “You won’t need it--or any
other--when you grow young, as you will some day,” he assured her.

“Do you mean, when I fall in love? But I am in love--Oh, there’s
Eldorada and Mr. Beck!” She broke off with a jerk, signalling with her
field-glass to the pair who had just appeared at the farther end of the
nave. “I told them that if they’d meet me here to-day I’d try to make
them understand Tiepolo. Because, you see, at home we never really
have understood Tiepolo; and Mr. Beck and Eldorada are the only ones to
realize it. Mr. Buttles simply won’t.” She turned to Lansing and held
out her hand. “I am in love,” she repeated earnestly, “and that’s the
reason why I find art such a RE source.”

She restored her eye-glasses, opened her manual, and strode across the
church to the expectant neophytes.

Lansing, looking after her, wondered for half a moment whether Mr. Beck
were the object of this apparently unrequited sentiment; then, with a
queer start of introspection, abruptly decided that, no, he certainly
was not. But then--but then--. Well, there was no use in following up
such conjectures.... He turned home-ward, wondering if the picnickers
had already reached Palazzo Vanderlyn.

They got back only in time for a late dinner, full of chaff and
laughter, and apparently still enchanted with each other’s society.
Nelson Vanderlyn beamed on his wife, sent his daughter off to bed with a
kiss, and leaning back in his armchair before the fruit-and-flower-laden
table, declared that he’d never spent a jollier day in his life. Susy
seemed to come in for a full share of his approbation, and Lansing
thought that Ellie was unusually demonstrative to her friend. Strefford,
from his hostess’s side, glanced across now and then at young Mrs.
Lansing, and his glance seemed to Lansing a confidential comment on the
Vanderlyn raptures. But then Strefford was always having private jokes
with people or about them; and Lansing was irritated with himself for
perpetually suspecting his best friends of vague complicities at his
expense. “If I’m going to be jealous of Streffy now--!” he concluded
with a grimace of self-derision.

Certainly Susy looked lovely enough to justify the most irrational
pangs. As a girl she had been, for some people’s taste, a trifle
fine-drawn and sharp-edged; now, to her old lightness of line was added
a shadowy bloom, a sort of star-reflecting depth. Her movements were
slower, less angular; her mouth had a needing droop, her lids seemed
weighed down by their lashes; and then suddenly the old spirit would
reveal itself through the new languor, like the tartness at the core
of a sweet fruit. As her husband looked at her across the flowers and
lights he laughed inwardly at the nothingness of all things else.

Vanderlyn and Clarissa left betimes the next morning; and Mrs.
Vanderlyn, who was to start for St. Moritz in the afternoon, devoted
her last hours to anxious conferences with her maid and Susy. Strefford,
with Fred Gillow and the others, had gone for a swim at the Lido, and
Lansing seized the opportunity to get back to his book.

The quietness of the great echoing place gave him a foretaste of the
solitude to come. By mid-August all their party would be scattered: the
Hickses off on a cruise to Crete and the AEgean, Fred Gillow on the way
to his moor, Strefford to stay with friends in Capri till his annual
visit to Northumberland in September. One by one the others would
follow, and Lansing and Susy be left alone in the great sun-proof
palace, alone under the star-laden skies, alone with the great orange
moons--still theirs!--above the bell-tower of San Giorgio. The novel, in
that blessed quiet, would unfold itself as harmoniously as his dreams.

He wrote on, forgetful of the passing hours, till the door opened and he
heard a step behind him. The next moment two hands were clasped over his
eyes, and the air was full of Mrs. Vanderlyn’s last new scent.

“You dear thing--I’m just off, you know,” she said. “Susy told me you
were working, and I forbade her to call you down. She and Streffy are
waiting to take me to the station, and I’ve run up to say good-bye.”

“Ellie, dear!” Full of compunction, Lansing pushed aside his writing and
started up; but she pressed him back into his seat.

“No, no! I should never forgive myself if I’d interrupted you. I
oughtn’t to have come up; Susy didn’t want me to. But I had to tell you,
you dear.... I had to thank you...”

In her dark travelling dress and hat, so discreetly conspicuous, so
negligent and so studied, with a veil masking her paint, and gloves
hiding her rings, she looked younger, simpler, more natural than he had
ever seen her. Poor Ellie such a good fellow, after all!

“To thank me? For what? For being so happy here?” he laughed, taking her
hands.

She looked at him, laughed back, and flung her arms about his neck.

“For helping me to be so happy elsewhere--you and Susy, you two blessed
darlings!” she cried, with a kiss on his cheek.

Their eyes met for a second; then her arms slipped slowly downward,
dropping to her sides. Lansing sat before her like a stone.

“Oh,” she gasped, “why do you stare so? Didn’t you know...?”

They heard Strefford’s shrill voice on the stairs. “Ellie, where the
deuce are you? Susy’s in the gondola. You’ll miss the train!”

Lansing stood up and caught Mrs. Vanderlyn by the wrist. “What do you
mean? What are you talking about?”

“Oh, nothing... But you were both such bricks about the letters.... And
when Nelson was here, too.... Nick, don’t hurt my wrist so! I must run!”

He dropped her hand and stood motionless, staring after her and
listening to the click of her high heels as she fled across the room and
along the echoing corridor.

When he turned back to the table he noticed that a small morocco case
had fallen among his papers. In falling it had opened, and before him,
on the pale velvet lining, lay a scarf-pin set with a perfect pearl. He
picked the box up, and was about to hasten after Mrs. Vanderlyn--it
was so like her to shed jewels on her path!--when he noticed his own
initials on the cover.

He dropped the box as if it had been a hot coal, and sat for a long
while gazing at the gold N. L., which seemed to have burnt itself into
his flesh.

At last he roused himself and stood up.




X.


WITH a sigh of relief Susy drew the pins from her hat and threw herself
down on the lounge.

The ordeal she had dreaded was over, and Mr. and Mrs. Vanderlyn had
safely gone their several ways. Poor Ellie was not noted for prudence,
and when life smiled on her she was given to betraying her gratitude too
openly; but thanks to Susy’s vigilance (and, no doubt, to Strefford’s
tacit co-operation), the dreaded twenty-four hours were happily over.
Nelson Vanderlyn had departed without a shadow on his brow, and though
Ellie’s, when she came down from bidding Nick good-bye, had seemed to
Susy less serene than usual, she became her normal self as soon as it
was discovered that the red morocco bag with her jewel-box was missing.
Before it had been discovered in the depths of the gondola they had
reached the station, and there was just time to thrust her into her
“sleeper,” from which she was seen to wave an unperturbed farewell to
her friends.

“Well, my dear, we’ve been it through,” Strefford remarked with a deep
breath as the St. Moritz express rolled away.

“Oh,” Susy sighed in mute complicity; then, as if to cover her
self-betrayal: “Poor darling, she does so like what she likes!”

“Yes--even if it’s a rotten bounder,” Strefford agreed.

“A rotten bounder? Why, I thought--”

“That it was still young Davenant? Lord, no--not for the last six
months. Didn’t she tell you--?”

Susy felt herself redden. “I didn’t ask her--”

“Ask her? You mean you didn’t let her!”

“I didn’t let her. And I don’t let you,” Susy added sharply, as he
helped her into the gondola.

“Oh, all right: I daresay you’re right. It simplifies things,” Strefford
placidly acquiesced.

She made no answer, and in silence they glided homeward.

Now, in the quiet of her own room, Susy lay and pondered on the distance
she had travelled during the last year. Strefford had read her mind with
his usual penetration. It was true that there had been a time when
she would have thought it perfectly natural that Ellie should tell
her everything; that the name of young Davenant’s successor should be
confided to her as a matter of course. Apparently even Ellie had been
obscurely aware of the change, for after a first attempt to force her
confidences on Susy she had contented herself with vague expressions of
gratitude, allusive smiles and sighs, and the pretty “surprise” of the
sapphire bangle slipped onto her friend’s wrist in the act of their
farewell embrace.

The bangle was extremely handsome. Susy, who had an auctioneer’s eye
for values, knew to a fraction the worth of those deep convex stones
alternating with small emeralds and brilliants. She was glad to own the
bracelet, and enchanted with the effect it produced on her slim wrist;
yet, even while admiring it, and rejoicing that it was hers, she had
already transmuted it into specie, and reckoned just how far it would go
toward the paying of domestic necessities. For whatever came to her now
interested her only as something more to be offered up to Nick.

The door opened and Nick came in. Dusk had fallen, and she could not
see his face; but something in the jerk of the door-handle roused her
ever-wakeful apprehension. She hurried toward him with outstretched
wrist.

“Look, dearest--wasn’t it too darling of Ellie?”

She pressed the button of the lamp that lit her dressing-table, and her
husband’s face started unfamiliarly out of the twilight. She slipped off
the bracelet and held it up to him.

“Oh, I can go you one better,” he said with a laugh; and pulling a
morocco case from his pocket he flung it down among the scent-bottles.

Susy opened the case automatically, staring at the pearl because she was
afraid to look again at Nick.

“Ellie--gave you this?” she asked at length.

“Yes. She gave me this.” There was a pause. “Would you mind telling
me,” Lansing continued in the same dead-level tone, “exactly for what
services we’ve both been so handsomely paid?”

“The pearl is beautiful,” Susy murmured, to gain time, while her head
spun round with unimaginable terrors.

“So are your sapphires; though, on closer examination, my services would
appear to have been valued rather higher than yours. Would you be kind
enough to tell me just what they were?”

Susy threw her head back and looked at him. “What on earth are you
talking about, Nick! Why shouldn’t Ellie have given us these things? Do
you forget that it’s like our giving her a pen-wiper or a button-hook?
What is it you are trying to suggest?”

It had cost her a considerable effort to hold his eyes while she put
the questions. Something had happened between him and Ellie, that was
evident--one of those hideous unforeseeable blunders that may cause one’s
cleverest plans to crumble at a stroke; and again Susy shuddered at
the frailty of her bliss. But her old training stood her in good stead.
There had been more than one moment in her past when everything--somebody
else’s everything--had depended on her keeping a cool head and a clear
glance. It would have been a wonder if now, when she felt her own
everything at stake, she had not been able to put up as good a defence.

“What is it?” she repeated impatiently, as Lansing continued to remain
silent.

“That’s what I’m here to ask,” he returned, keeping his eyes as steady
as she kept hers. “There’s no reason on earth, as you say, why Ellie
shouldn’t give us presents--as expensive presents as she likes; and the
pearl is a beauty. All I ask is: for what specific services were they
given? For, allowing for all the absence of scruple that marks the
intercourse of truly civilized people, you’ll probably agree that there
are limits; at least up to now there have been limits....”

“I really don’t know what you mean. I suppose Ellie wanted to show that
she was grateful to us for looking after Clarissa.”

“But she gave us all this in exchange for that, didn’t she?” he
suggested, with a sweep of the hand around the beautiful shadowy room.
“A whole summer of it if we choose.”

Susy smiled. “Apparently she didn’t think that enough.”

“What a doting mother! It shows the store she sets upon her child.”

“Well, don’t you set store upon Clarissa?”

“Clarissa is exquisite; but her mother didn’t mention her in offering me
this recompense.”

Susy lifted her head again. “Whom did she mention?”

“Vanderlyn,” said Lansing.

“Vanderlyn? Nelson?”

“Yes--and some letters... something about letters.... What is it, my
dear, that you and I have been hired to hide from Vanderlyn? Because I
should like to know,” Nick broke out savagely, “if we’ve been adequately
paid.”

Susy was silent: she needed time to reckon up her forces, and study her
next move; and her brain was in such a whirl of fear that she could at
last only retort: “What is it that Ellie said to you?”

Lansing laughed again. “That’s just what you’d like to find out--isn’t
it?--in order to know the line to take in making your explanation.”

The sneer had an effect that he could not have foreseen, and that Susy
herself had not expected.

“Oh, don’t--don’t let us speak to each other like that!” she cried; and
sinking down by the dressing-table she hid her face in her hands.

It seemed to her, now, that nothing mattered except that their love
for each other, their faith in each other, should be saved from some
unhealable hurt. She was willing to tell Nick everything--she wanted to
tell him everything--if only she could be sure of reaching a responsive
chord in him. But the scene of the cigars came back to her, and benumbed
her. If only she could make him see that nothing was of any account as
long as they continued to love each other!

His touch fell compassionately on her shoulder. “Poor child--don’t,” he
said.

Their eyes met, but his expression checked the smile breaking through
her tears. “Don’t you see,” he continued, “that we’ve got to have this
thing out?”

She continued to stare at him through a prism of tears. “I can’t--while
you stand up like that,” she stammered, childishly.

She had cowered down again into a corner of the lounge; but Lansing did
not seat himself at her side. He took a chair facing her, like a caller
on the farther side of a stately tea-tray. “Will that do?” he asked with
a stiff smile, as if to humour her.

“Nothing will do--as long as you’re not you!”

“Not me?”

She shook her head wearily. “What’s the use? You accept things
theoretically--and then when they happen....”

“What things? What has happened!”

A sudden impatience mastered her. What did he suppose, after all--? “But
you know all about Ellie. We used to talk about her often enough in old
times,” she said.

“Ellie and young Davenant?”

“Young Davenant; or the others....”

“Or the others. But what business was it of ours?”

“Ah, that’s just what I think!” she cried, springing up with an
explosion of relief. Lansing stood up also, but there was no answering
light in his face.

“We’re outside of all that; we’ve nothing to do with it, have we?” he
pursued.

“Nothing whatever.”

“Then what on earth is the meaning of Ellie’s gratitude? Gratitude for
what we’ve done about some letters--and about Vanderlyn?”

“Oh, not you,” Susy cried, involuntarily.

“Not I? Then you?” He came close and took her by the wrist. “Answer me.
Have you been mixed up in some dirty business of Ellie’s?”

There was a pause. She found it impossible to speak, with that burning
grasp on the wrist where the bangle had been. At length he let her go
and moved away. “Answer,” he repeated.

“I’ve told you it was my business and not yours.”

He received this in silence; then he questioned: “You’ve been sending
letters for her, I suppose? To whom?”

“Oh, why do you torment me? Nelson was not supposed to know that she’d
been away. She left me the letters to post to him once a week. I found
them here the night we arrived.... It was the price--for this. Oh,
Nick, say it’s been worth it--say at least that it’s been worth it!” she
implored him.

He stood motionless, unresponding. One hand drummed on the corner of her
dressing-table, making the jewelled bangle dance.

“How many letters?”

“I don’t know... four... five... What does it matter?”

“And once a week, for six weeks--?”

“Yes.”

“And you took it all as a matter of course?”

“No: I hated it. But what could I do?”

“What could you do?”

“When our being together depended on it? Oh, Nick, how could you think
I’d give you up?”

“Give me up?” he echoed.

“Well--doesn’t our being together depend on--on what we can get out of
people? And hasn’t there always got to be some give-and-take? Did you
ever in your life get anything for nothing?” she cried with sudden
exasperation. “You’ve lived among these people as long as I have; I
suppose it’s not the first time--”

“By God, but it is,” he exclaimed, flushing. “And that’s the
difference--the fundamental difference.”

“The difference!”

“Between you and me. I’ve never in my life done people’s dirty work for
them--least of all for favours in return. I suppose you guessed it, or
you wouldn’t have hidden this beastly business from me.”

The blood rose to Susy’s temples also. Yes, she had guessed it;
instinctively, from the day she had first visited him in his bare
lodgings, she had been aware of his stricter standard. But how could she
tell him that under his influence her standard had become stricter
too, and that it was as much to hide her humiliation from herself as to
escape his anger that she had held her tongue?

“You knew I wouldn’t have stayed here another day if I’d known,” he
continued.

“Yes: and then where in the world should we have gone?”

“You mean that--in one way or another--what you call give-and-take is
the price of our remaining together?”

“Well--isn’t it,” she faltered.

“Then we’d better part, hadn’t we?”

He spoke in a low tone, thoughtfully and deliberately, as if this had
been the inevitable conclusion to which their passionate argument had
led.

Susy made no answer. For a moment she ceased to be conscious of the
causes of what had happened; the thing itself seemed to have smothered
her under its ruins.

Nick wandered away from the dressing-table and stood gazing out of the
window at the darkening canal flecked with lights. She looked at his
back, and wondered what would happen if she were to go up to him and
fling her arms about him. But even if her touch could have broken the
spell, she was not sure she would have chosen that way of breaking it.
Beneath her speechless anguish there burned the half-conscious sense
of having been unfairly treated. When they had entered into their
queer compact, Nick had known as well as she on what compromises and
concessions the life they were to live together must be based. That he
should have forgotten it seemed so unbelievable that she wondered, with
a new leap of fear, if he were using the wretched Ellie’s indiscretion
as a means of escape from a tie already wearied of. Suddenly she raised
her head with a laugh.

“After all--you were right when you wanted me to be your mistress.”

He turned on her with an astonished stare. “You--my mistress?”

Through all her pain she thrilled with pride at the discovery that
such a possibility had long since become unthinkable to him. But she
insisted. “That day at the Fulmers’--have you forgotten? When you said
it would be sheer madness for us to marry.”

Lansing stood leaning in the embrasure of the window, his eyes fixed on
the mosaic volutes of the floor.

“I was right enough when I said it would be sheer madness for us to
marry,” he rejoined at length.

She sprang up trembling. “Well, that’s easily settled. Our compact--”

“Oh, that compact--” he interrupted her with an impatient laugh.

“Aren’t you asking me to carry it out now?”

“Because I said we’d better part?” He paused. “But the compact--I’d
almost forgotten it--was to the effect, wasn’t it, that we were to give
each other a helping hand if either of us had a better chance? The thing
was absurd, of course; a mere joke; from my point of view, at least. I
shall never want any better chance... any other chance....”

“Oh, Nick, oh, Nick... but then....” She was close to him, his face
looming down through her tears; but he put her back.

“It would have been easy enough, wouldn’t it,” he rejoined, “if we’d
been as detachable as all that? As it is, it’s going to hurt horribly.
But talking it over won’t help. You were right just now when you asked
how else we were going to live. We’re born parasites, both, I suppose,
or we’d have found out some way long ago. But I find there are things I
might put up with for myself, at a pinch--and should, probably, in time
that I can’t let you put up with for me... ever.... Those cigars at
Como: do you suppose I didn’t know it was for me? And this too? Well, it
won’t do... it won’t do....”

He stopped, as if his courage failed him; and she moaned out: “But your
writing--if your book’s a success....”

“My poor Susy--that’s all part of the humbug. We both know that my sort
of writing will never pay. And what’s the alternative except more of
the same kind of baseness? And getting more and more blunted to it? At
least, till now, I’ve minded certain things; I don’t want to go on till
I find myself taking them for granted.”

She reached out a timid hand. “But you needn’t ever, dear... if you’d
only leave it to me....”

He drew back sharply. “That seems simple to you, I suppose? Well, men
are different.” He walked toward the dressing-table and glanced at the
little enamelled clock which had been one of her wedding-presents.

“Time to dress, isn’t it? Shall you mind if I leave you to dine with
Streffy, and whoever else is coming? I’d rather like a long tramp, and
no more talking just at present except with myself.”

He passed her by and walked rapidly out of the room. Susy stood
motionless, unable to lift a detaining hand or to find a final word
of appeal. On her disordered dressing-table Mrs. Vanderlyn’s gifts
glittered in the rosy lamp-light.

Yes: men were different, as he said.




XI.


BUT there were necessary accommodations, there always had been; Nick in
old times, had been the first to own it.... How they had laughed at the
Perpendicular People, the people who went by on the other side (since
you couldn’t be a good Samaritan without stooping over and poking
into heaps of you didn’t know what)! And now Nick had suddenly become
perpendicular....

Susy, that evening, at the head of the dinner table, saw--in the breaks
between her scudding thoughts--the nauseatingly familiar faces of the
people she called her friends: Strefford, Fred Gillow, a giggling fool
of a young Breckenridge, of their New York group, who had arrived that
day, and Prince Nerone Altineri, Ursula’s Prince, who, in Ursula’s
absence at a tiresome cure, had, quite simply and naturally, preferred
to join her husband at Venice. Susy looked from one to the other of
them, as if with newly-opened eyes, and wondered what life would be like
with no faces but such as theirs to furnish it....

Ah, Nick had become perpendicular!... After all, most people went
through life making a given set of gestures, like dance-steps learned
in advance. If your dancing manual told you at a given time to be
perpendicular, you had to be, automatically--and that was Nick!

“But what on earth, Susy,” Gillow’s puzzled voice suddenly came to her
as from immeasurable distances, “Are you going to do in this beastly
stifling hole for the rest of the summer?”

“Ask Nick, my dear fellow,” Strefford answered for her; and: “By the
way, where is Nick--if one may ask?” young Breckenridge interposed,
glancing up to take belated note of his host’s absence.

“Dining out,” said Susy glibly. “People turned up: blighting bores that
I wouldn’t have dared to inflict on you.” How easily the old familiar
fibbing came to her!

“The kind to whom you say, ‘Now mind you look me up’; and then spend the
rest of your life dodging-like our good Hickses,” Strefford amplified.

The Hickses--but, of course, Nick was with the Hickses! It went through
Susy like a knife, and the dinner she had so lightly fibbed became a
hateful truth. She said to herself feverishly: “I’ll call him up there
after dinner--and then he will feel silly”--but only to remember that
the Hickses, in their mediaeval setting, had of course sternly denied
themselves a telephone.

The fact of Nick’s temporary inaccessibility--since she was now
convinced that he was really at the Hickses’--turned her distress to a
mocking irritation. Ah, that was where he carried his principles, his
standards, or whatever he called the new set of rules he had suddenly
begun to apply to the old game! It was stupid of her not to have guessed
it at once.

“Oh, the Hickses--Nick adores them, you know. He’s going to marry Coral
next,” she laughed out, flashing the joke around the table with all her
practiced flippancy.

“Lord!” grasped Gillow, inarticulate: while the Prince displayed the
unsurprised smile which Susy accused him of practicing every morning
with his Mueller exercises.

Suddenly Susy felt Strefford’s eyes upon her.

“What’s the matter with me? Too much rouge?” she asked, passing her arm
in his as they left the table.

“No: too little. Look at yourself,” he answered in a low tone.

“Oh, in these cadaverous old looking-glasses-everybody looks fished up
from the canal!”

She jerked away from him to spin down the long floor of the sala, hands
on hips, whistling a rag-time tune. The Prince and young Breckenridge
caught her up, and she spun back with the latter, while Gillow--it was
believed to be his sole accomplishment--snapped his fingers in simulation
of bones, and shuffled after the couple on stamping feet.

Susy sank down on a sofa near the window, fanning herself with a
floating scarf, and the men foraged for cigarettes, and rang for the
gondoliers, who came in with trays of cooling drinks.

“Well, what next--this ain’t all, is it?” Gillow presently queried, from
the divan where he lolled half-asleep with dripping brow. Fred Gillow,
like Nature, abhorred a void, and it was inconceivable to him that every
hour of man’s rational existence should not furnish a motive for getting
up and going somewhere else. Young Breckenridge, who took the same view,
and the Prince, who earnestly desired to, reminded the company that
somebody they knew was giving a dance that night at the Lido.

Strefford vetoed the Lido, on the ground that he’d just come back from
there, and proposed that they should go out on foot for a change.

“Why not? What fun!” Susy was up in an instant. “Let’s pay somebody a
surprise visit--I don’t know who! Streffy, Prince, can’t you think of
somebody who’d be particularly annoyed by our arrival?”

“Oh, the list’s too long. Let’s start, and choose our victim on the
way,” Strefford suggested.

Susy ran to her room for a light cloak, and without changing her
high-heeled satin slippers went out with the four men. There was no
moon--thank heaven there was no moon!--but the stars hung over them as
close as fruit, and secret fragrances dropped on them from garden-walls.
Susy’s heart tightened with memories of Como.

They wandered on, laughing and dawdling, and yielding to the drifting
whims of aimless people. Presently someone proposed taking a nearer look
at the facade of San Giorgio Maggiore, and they hailed a gondola and
were rowed out through the bobbing lanterns and twanging guitar-strings.
When they landed again, Gillow, always acutely bored by scenery, and
particularly resentful of midnight aesthetics, suggested a night club
near at hand, which was said to be jolly. The Prince warmly supported
this proposal; but on Susy’s curt refusal they started their rambling
again, circuitously threading the vague dark lanes and making for the
Piazza and Florian’s ices. Suddenly, at a calle-corner, unfamiliar and
yet somehow known to her, Susy paused to stare about her with a laugh.

“But the Hickses--surely that’s their palace? And the windows all lit
up! They must be giving a party! Oh, do let’s go up and surprise them!”
 The idea struck her as one of the drollest that she had ever originated,
and she wondered that her companions should respond so languidly.

“I can’t see anything very thrilling in surprising the Hickses,” Gillow
protested, defrauded of possible excitements; and Strefford added: “It
would surprise me more than them if I went.”

But Susy insisted feverishly: “You don’t know. It may be awfully
exciting! I have an idea that Coral’s announcing her engagement--her
engagement to Nick! Come, give me a hand, Streff--and you the other,
Fred-” she began to hum the first bars of Donna Anna’s entrance in Don
Giovanni. “Pity I haven’t got a black cloak and a mask....”

“Oh, your face will do,” said Strefford, laying his hand on her arm.

She drew back, flushing crimson. Breckenridge and the Prince had sprung
on ahead, and Gillow, lumbering after them, was already halfway up the
stairs.

“My face? My face? What’s the matter with my face? Do you know any
reason why I shouldn’t go to the Hickses to-night?” Susy broke out in
sudden wrath.

“None whatever; except that if you do it will bore me to death,”
 Strefford returned, with serenity.

“Oh, in that case--!”

“No; come on. I hear those fools banging on the door already.” He caught
her by the hand, and they started up the stairway. But on the first
landing she paused, twisted her hand out of his, and without a word,
without a conscious thought, dashed down the long flight, across the
great resounding vestibule and out into the darkness of the calle.

Strefford caught up with her, and they stood a moment silent in the
night.

“Susy--what the devil’s the matter?”

“The matter? Can’t you see? That I’m tired, that I’ve got a splitting
headache--that you bore me to death, one and all of you!” She turned and
laid a deprecating hand on his arm. “Streffy, old dear, don’t mind me:
but for God’s sake find a gondola and send me home.”

“Alone?”

“Alone.”

It was never any concern of Streff’s if people wanted to do things he
did not understand, and she knew that she could count on his obedience.
They walked on in silence to the next canal, and he picked up a passing
gondola and put her in it.

“Now go and amuse yourself,” she called after him, as the boat shot
under the nearest bridge. Anything, anything, to be alone, away from the
folly and futility that would be all she had left if Nick were to drop
out of her life....

“But perhaps he has dropped already--dropped for good,” she thought as
she set her foot on the Vanderlyn threshold.

The short summer night was already growing transparent: a new born
breeze stirred the soiled surface of the water and sent it lapping
freshly against the old palace doorways. Nearly two o’clock! Nick had no
doubt come back long ago. Susy hurried up the stairs, reassured by the
mere thought of his nearness. She knew that when their eyes and their
lips met it would be impossible for anything to keep them apart.

The gondolier dozing on the landing roused himself to receive her, and
to proffer two envelopes. The upper one was a telegram for Strefford:
she threw it down again and paused under the lantern hanging from the
painted vault, the other envelope in her hand. The address it bore was
in Nick’s writing. “When did the signore leave this for me? Has he gone
out again?”

Gone out again? But the signore had not come in since dinner: of that
the gondolier was positive, as he had been on duty all the evening.
A boy had brought the letter--an unknown boy: he had left it without
waiting. It must have been about half an hour after the signora had
herself gone out with her guests.

Susy, hardly hearing him, fled on to her own room, and there, beside the
very lamp which, two months before, had illuminated Ellie Vanderlyn’s
fatal letter, she opened Nick’s.

“Don’t think me hard on you, dear; but I’ve got to work this thing out
by myself. The sooner the better--don’t you agree? So I’m taking the
express to Milan presently. You’ll get a proper letter in a day or two.
I wish I could think, now, of something to say that would show you I’m
not a brute--but I can’t. N. L.”

There was not much of the night left in which to sleep, even had a
semblance of sleep been achievable. The letter fell from Susy’s hands,
and she crept out onto the balcony and cowered there, her forehead
pressed against the balustrade, the dawn wind stirring in her thin
laces. Through her closed eyelids and the tightly-clenched fingers
pressed against them, she felt the penetration of the growing light,
the relentless advance of another day--a day without purpose and without
meaning--a day without Nick. At length she dropped her hands, and
staring from dry lids saw a rim of fire above the roofs across the Grand
Canal. She sprang up, ran back into her room, and dragging the heavy
curtains shut across the windows, stumbled over in the darkness to the
lounge and fell among its pillows-face downward--groping, delving for a
deeper night....

She started up, stiff and aching, to see a golden wedge of sun on the
floor at her feet. She had slept, then--was it possible?--it must
be eight or nine o’clock already! She had slept--slept like a
drunkard--with that letter on the table at her elbow! Ah, now she
remembered--she had dreamed that the letter was a dream! But there,
inexorably, it lay; and she picked it up, and slowly, painfully re-read
it. Then she tore it into shreds hunted for a match, and kneeling before
the empty hearth, as though she were accomplishing some funeral rite,
she burnt every shred of it to ashes. Nick would thank her for that some
day!

After a bath and a hurried toilet she began to be aware of feeling
younger and more hopeful. After all, Nick had merely said that he was
going away for “a day or two.” And the letter was not cruel: there
were tender things in it, showing through the curt words. She smiled
at herself a little stiffly in the glass, put a dash of red on her
colourless lips, and rang for the maid.

“Coffee, Giovanna, please; and will you tell Mr. Strefford that I should
like to see him presently.”

If Nick really kept to his intention of staying away for a few days she
must trump up some explanation of his absence; but her mind refused to
work, and the only thing she could think of was to take Strefford into
her confidence. She knew that he could be trusted in a real difficulty;
his impish malice transformed itself into a resourceful ingenuity when
his friends required it.

The maid stood looking at her with a puzzled gaze, and Susy somewhat
sharply repeated her order. “But don’t wake him on purpose,” she added,
foreseeing the probable effect on Strefford’s temper.

“But, signora, the gentleman is already out.”

“Already out?” Strefford, who could hardly be routed from his bed before
luncheon-time! “Is it so late?” Susy cried, incredulous.

“After nine. And the gentleman took the eight o’clock train for England.
Gervaso said he had received a telegram. He left word that he would
write to the signora.”

The door closed upon the maid, and Susy continued to gaze at her painted
image in the glass, as if she had been trying to outstare an importunate
stranger. There was no one left for her to take counsel of, then--no one
but poor Fred Gillow! She made a grimace at the idea.

But what on earth could have summoned Strefford back to England?





XII.



NICK LANSING, in the Milan express, was roused by the same bar of
sunshine lying across his knees. He yawned, looked with disgust at his
stolidly sleeping neighbours, and wondered why he had decided to go to
Milan, and what on earth he should do when he got there. The difficulty
about trenchant decisions was that the next morning they generally left
one facing a void....

When the train drew into the station at Milan, he scrambled out, got
some coffee, and having drunk it decided to continue his journey to
Genoa. The state of being carried passively onward postponed action and
dulled thought; and after twelve hours of furious mental activity that
was exactly what he wanted.

He fell into a doze again, waking now and then to haggard intervals
of more thinking, and then dropping off to the clank and rattle of the
train. Inside his head, in his waking intervals, the same clanking and
grinding of wheels and chains went on unremittingly. He had done all his
lucid thinking within an hour of leaving the Palazzo Vanderlyn the
night before; since then, his brain had simply continued to revolve
indefatigably about the same old problem. His cup of coffee, instead of
clearing his thoughts, had merely accelerated their pace.

At Genoa he wandered about in the hot streets, bought a cheap suit-case
and some underclothes, and then went down to the port in search of a
little hotel he remembered there. An hour later he was sitting in the
coffee-room, smoking and glancing vacantly over the papers while he
waited for dinner, when he became aware of being timidly but intently
examined by a small round-faced gentleman with eyeglasses who sat alone
at the adjoining table.

“Hullo--Buttles!” Lansing exclaimed, recognising with surprise the
recalcitrant secretary who had resisted Miss Hicks’s endeavour to
convert him to Tiepolo.

Mr. Buttles, blushing to the roots of his scant hair, half rose and
bowed ceremoniously.

Nick Lansing’s first feeling was of annoyance at being disturbed in his
solitary broodings; his next, of relief at having to postpone them even
to converse with Mr. Buttles.

“No idea you were here: is the yacht in harbour?” he asked, remembering
that the Ibis must be just about to spread her wings.

Mr. Buttles, at salute behind his chair, signed a mute negation: for the
moment he seemed too embarrassed to speak.

“Ah--you’re here as an advance guard? I remember now--I saw Miss Hicks
in Venice the day before yesterday,” Lansing continued, dazed at the
thought that hardly forty-eight hours had passed since his encounter
with Coral in the Scalzi.

Mr. Buttles, instead of speaking, had tentatively approached his table.
“May I take this seat for a moment, Mr. Lansing? Thank you. No, I am
not here as an advance guard--though I believe the Ibis is due some
time to-morrow.” He cleared his throat, wiped his eyeglasses on a silk
handkerchief, replaced them on his nose, and went on solemnly: “Perhaps,
to clear up any possible misunderstanding, I ought to say that I am no
longer in the employ of Mr. Hicks.”

Lansing glanced at him sympathetically. It was clear that he suffered
horribly in imparting this information, though his compact face did not
lend itself to any dramatic display of emotion.

“Really,” Nick smiled, and then ventured: “I hope it’s not owing to
conscientious objections to Tiepolo?”

Mr. Buttles’s blush became a smouldering agony. “Ah, Miss Hicks
mentioned to you... told you...? No, Mr. Lansing. I am principled
against the effete art of Tiepolo, and of all his contemporaries, I
confess; but if Miss Hicks chooses to surrender herself momentarily
to the unwholesome spell of the Italian decadence it is not for me to
protest or to criticize. Her intellectual and aesthetic range so far
exceeds my humble capacity that it would be ridiculous, unbecoming....”

He broke off, and once more wiped a faint moisture from his eyeglasses.
It was evident that he was suffering from a distress which he longed and
yet dreaded to communicate. But Nick made no farther effort to bridge
the gulf of his own preoccupations; and Mr. Buttles, after an expectant
pause, went on: “If you see me here to-day it is only because, after
a somewhat abrupt departure, I find myself unable to take leave of
our friends without a last look at the Ibis--the scene of so many
stimulating hours. But I must beg you,” he added earnestly, “should you
see Miss Hicks--or any other member of the party--to make no allusion
to my presence in Genoa. I wish,” said Mr. Buttles with simplicity, “to
preserve the strictest incognito.”

Lansing glanced at him kindly. “Oh, but--isn’t that a little
unfriendly?”

“No other course is possible, Mr. Lansing,” said the ex-secretary, “and
I commit myself to your discretion. The truth is, if I am here it is not
to look once more at the Ibis, but at Miss Hicks: once only. You will
understand me, and appreciate what I am suffering.”

He bowed again, and trotted away on his small, tightly-booted feet;
pausing on the threshold to say: “From the first it was hopeless,”
 before he disappeared through the glass doors.

A gleam of commiseration flashed through Nick’s mind: there was
something quaintly poignant in the sight of the brisk and efficient
Mr. Buttles reduced to a limp image of unrequited passion. And what
a painful surprise to the Hickses to be thus suddenly deprived of the
secretary who possessed “the foreign languages”! Mr. Beck kept the
accounts and settled with the hotel-keepers; but it was Mr. Buttles’s
loftier task to entertain in their own tongues the unknown geniuses who
flocked about the Hickses, and Nick could imagine how disconcerting his
departure must be on the eve of their Grecian cruise which Mrs. Hicks
would certainly call an Odyssey.

The next moment the vision of Coral’s hopeless suitor had faded, and
Nick was once more spinning around on the wheel of his own woes.
The night before, when he had sent his note to Susy, from a little
restaurant close to Palazzo Vanderlyn that they often patronized, he had
done so with the firm intention of going away for a day or two in order
to collect his wits and think over the situation. But after his letter
had been entrusted to the landlord’s little son, who was a particular
friend of Susy’s, Nick had decided to await the lad’s return. The
messenger had not been bidden to ask for an answer; but Nick, knowing
the friendly and inquisitive Italian mind, was almost sure that the boy,
in the hope of catching a glimpse of Susy, would linger about while the
letter was carried up. And he pictured the maid knocking at his wife’s
darkened room, and Susy dashing some powder on her tear-stained face
before she turned on the light--poor foolish child!

The boy had returned rather sooner than Nick expected, and he had
brought no answer, but merely the statement that the signora was out:
that everybody was out.

“Everybody?”

“The signora and the four gentlemen who were dining at the palace. They
all went out together on foot soon after dinner. There was no one to
whom I could give the note but the gondolier on the landing, for the
signora had said she would be very late, and had sent the maid to bed;
and the maid had, of course, gone out immediately with her innamorato.”

“Ah--” said Nick, slipping his reward into the boy’s hand, and walking
out of the restaurant.

Susy had gone out--gone out with their usual band, as she did every
night in these sultry summer weeks, gone out after her talk with Nick,
as if nothing had happened, as if his whole world and hers had not
crashed in ruins at their feet. Ah, poor Susy! After all, she had merely
obeyed the instinct of self preservation, the old hard habit of keeping
up, going ahead and hiding her troubles; unless indeed the habit had
already engendered indifference, and it had become as easy for her as
for most of her friends to pass from drama to dancing, from sorrow to
the cinema. What of soul was left, he wondered--?

His train did not start till midnight, and after leaving the restaurant
Nick tramped the sultry by-ways till his tired legs brought him to a
standstill under the vine-covered pergola of a gondolier’s wine-shop at
a landing close to the Piazzetta. There he could absorb cooling drinks
until it was time to go to the station.

It was after eleven, and he was beginning to look about for a boat, when
a black prow pushed up to the steps, and with much chaff and laughter a
party of young people in evening dress jumped out. Nick, from under the
darkness of the vine, saw that there was only one lady among them, and
it did not need the lamp above the landing to reveal her identity. Susy,
bareheaded and laughing, a light scarf slipping from her bare shoulders,
a cigarette between her fingers, took Strefford’s arm and turned in the
direction of Florian’s, with Gillow, the Prince and young Breckenridge
in her wake....

Nick had relived this rapid scene hundreds of times during his hours
in the train and his aimless trampings through the streets of Genoa. In
that squirrel-wheel of a world of his and Susy’s you had to keep going
or drop out--and Susy, it was evident, had chosen to keep going. Under
the lamp-flare on the landing he had had a good look at her face, and
had seen that the mask of paint and powder was carefully enough adjusted
to hide any ravages the scene between them might have left. He even
fancied that she had dropped a little atropine into her eyes....

There was no time to spare if he meant to catch the midnight train, and
no gondola in sight but that which his wife had just left. He sprang
into it, and bade the gondolier carry him to the station. The cushions,
as he leaned back, gave out a breath of her scent; and in the glare of
electric light at the station he saw at his feet a rose which had fallen
from her dress. He ground his heel into it as he got out.

There it was, then; that was the last picture he was to have of her. For
he knew now that he was not going back; at least not to take up their
life together. He supposed he should have to see her once, to talk
things over, settle something for their future. He had been sincere in
saying that he bore her no ill-will; only he could never go back into
that slough again. If he did, he knew he would inevitably be drawn
under, slipping downward from concession to concession....

The noises of a hot summer night in the port of Genoa would have kept
the most care-free from slumber; but though Nick lay awake he did
not notice them, for the tumult in his brain was more deafening. Dawn
brought a negative relief, and out of sheer weariness he dropped into a
heavy sleep. When he woke it was nearly noon, and from his window he saw
the well-known outline of the Ibis standing up dark against the glitter
of the harbour. He had no fear of meeting her owners, who had doubtless
long since landed and betaken themselves to cooler and more fashionable
regions: oddly enough, the fact seemed to accentuate his loneliness, his
sense of having no one on earth to turn to. He dressed, and wandered out
disconsolately to pick up a cup of coffee in some shady corner.

As he drank his coffee his thoughts gradually cleared. It became
obvious to him that he had behaved like a madman or a petulant child--he
preferred to think it was like a madman. If he and Susy were to separate
there was no reason why it should not be done decently and quietly, as
such transactions were habitually managed among people of their kind.
It seemed grotesque to introduce melodrama into their little world
of unruffled Sybarites, and he felt inclined, now, to smile at the
incongruity of his gesture.... But suddenly his eyes filled with tears.
The future without Susy was unbearable, inconceivable. Why, after all,
should they separate? At the question, her soft face seemed close
to his, and that slight lift of the upper lip that made her smile so
exquisite. Well--he would go back. But not with any presence of going to
talk things over, come to an agreement, wind up their joint life like
a business association. No--if he went back he would go without
conditions, for good, forever....

Only, what about the future? What about the not far-distant day when
the wedding cheques would have been spent, and Granny’s pearls sold,
and nothing left except unconcealed and unconditional dependence on rich
friends, the role of the acknowledged hangers-on? Was there no other
possible solution, no new way of ordering their lives? No--there
was none: he could not picture Susy out of her setting of luxury and
leisure, could not picture either of them living such a life as the Nat
Fulmers, for instance! He remembered the shabby untidy bungalow in
New Hampshire, the slatternly servants, uneatable food and ubiquitous
children. How could he ask Susy to share such a life with him? If he
did, she would probably have the sense to refuse. Their alliance had
been based on a moment’s midsummer madness; now the score must be
paid....

He decided to write. If they were to part he could not trust himself to
see her. He called a waiter, asked for pen and paper, and pushed aside
a pile of unread newspapers on the corner of the table where his coffee
had been served. As he did so, his eye lit on a Daily Mail of two days
before. As a pretext for postponing his letter, he took up the paper and
glanced down the first page. He read:

“Tragic Yachting Accident in the Solent. The Earl of Altringham and
his son Viscount d’Amblay drowned in midnight collision. Both bodies
recovered.”

He read on. He grasped the fact that the disaster had happened the
night before he had left Venice and that, as the result of a fog in
the Solent, their old friend Strefford was now Earl of Altringham, and
possessor of one of the largest private fortunes in England. It was
vertiginous to think of their old impecunious Streff as the hero of such
an adventure. And what irony in that double turn of the wheel which, in
one day, had plunged him, Nick Lansing, into nethermost misery, while it
tossed the other to the stars!

With an intenser precision he saw again Susy’s descent from the gondola
at the calle steps, the sound of her laughter and of Strefford’s chaff,
the way she had caught his arm and clung to it, sweeping the other men
on in her train. Strefford--Susy and Strefford!... More than once, Nick
had noticed the softer inflections of his friend’s voice when he spoke
to Susy, the brooding look in his lazy eyes when they rested on her. In
the security of his wedded bliss Nick had made light of those signs. The
only real jealousy he had felt had been of Fred Gillow, because of his
unlimited power to satisfy a woman’s whims. Yet Nick knew that such
material advantages would never again suffice for Susy. With Strefford
it was different. She had delighted in his society while he was
notoriously ineligible; might not she find him irresistible now?

The forgotten terms of their bridal compact came back to Nick: the
absurd agreement on which he and Susy had solemnly pledged their faith.
But was it so absurd, after all? It had been Susy’s suggestion (not his,
thank God!); and perhaps in making it she had been more serious than he
imagined. Perhaps, even if their rupture had not occurred, Strefford’s
sudden honours might have caused her to ask for her freedom....

Money, luxury, fashion, pleasure: those were the four cornerstones
of her existence. He had always known it--she herself had always
acknowledged it, even in their last dreadful talk together; and once he
had gloried in her frankness. How could he ever have imagined that, to
have her fill of these things, she would not in time stoop lower than
she had yet stooped? Perhaps in giving her up to Strefford he might be
saving her. At any rate, the taste of the past was now so bitter to him
that he was moved to thank whatever gods there were for pushing that
mortuary paragraph under his eye....

“Susy, dear [he wrote], the fates seem to have taken our future in hand,
and spared us the trouble of unravelling it. If I have sometimes been
selfish enough to forget the conditions on which you agreed to marry
me, they have come back to me during these two days of solitude. You’ve
given me the best a man can have, and nothing else will ever be worth
much to me. But since I haven’t the ability to provide you with what you
want, I recognize that I’ve no right to stand in your way. We must owe
no more Venetian palaces to underhand services. I see by the newspapers
that Streff can now give you as many palaces as you want. Let him have
the chance--I fancy he’ll jump at it, and he’s the best man in sight. I
wish I were in his shoes.

“I’ll write again in a day or two, when I’ve collected my wits, and can
give you an address. NICK.”

He added a line on the subject of their modest funds, put the letter
into an envelope, and addressed it to Mrs. Nicholas Lansing. As he did
so, he reflected that it was the first time he had ever written his
wife’s married name.

“Well--by God, no other woman shall have it after her,” he vowed, as he
groped in his pocketbook for a stamp.

He stood up with a stretch of weariness--the heat was stifling!--and put
the letter in his pocket.

“I’ll post it myself, it’s safer,” he thought; “and then what in the
name of goodness shall I do next, I wonder?” He jammed his hat down on
his head and walked out into the sun-blaze.

As he was turning away from the square by the general Post Office, a
white parasol waved from a passing cab, and Coral Hicks leaned forward
with outstretched hand. “I knew I’d find you,” she triumphed. “I’ve
been driving up and down in this broiling sun for hours, shopping and
watching for you at the same time.”

He stared at her blankly, too bewildered even to wonder how she knew he
was in Genoa; and she continued, with the kind of shy imperiousness that
always made him feel, in her presence, like a member of an orchestra
under a masterful baton; “Now please get right into this carriage, and
don’t keep me roasting here another minute.” To the cabdriver she called
out: “Al porto.”

Nick Lansing sank down beside her. As he did so he noticed a heap of
bundles at her feet, and felt that he had simply added one more to the
number. He supposed that she was taking her spoils to the Ibis, and
that he would be carried up to the deck-house to be displayed with the
others. Well, it would all help to pass the day--and by night he would
have reached some kind of a decision about his future.

On the third day after Nick’s departure the post brought to the Palazzo
Vanderlyn three letters for Mrs. Lansing.

The first to arrive was a word from Strefford, scribbled in the train
and posted at Turin. In it he briefly said that he had been called home
by the dreadful accident of which Susy had probably read in the daily
papers. He added that he would write again from England, and then--in
a blotted postscript--: “I wanted uncommonly badly to see you for
good-bye, but the hour was impossible. Regards to Nick. Do write me just
a word to Altringham.”

The other two letters, which came together in the afternoon, were both
from Genoa. Susy scanned the addresses and fell upon the one in her
husband’s writing. Her hand trembled so much that for a moment she could
not open the envelope. When she had done so, she devoured the letter in
a flash, and then sat and brooded over the outspread page as it lay on
her knee. It might mean so many things--she could read into it so
many harrowing alternatives of indifference and despair, of irony and
tenderness! Was he suffering tortures when he wrote it, or seeking
only to inflict them upon her? Or did the words represent his actual
feelings, no more and no less, and did he really intend her to
understand that he considered it his duty to abide by the letter of
their preposterous compact? He had left her in wrath and indignation,
yet, as a closer scrutiny revealed, there was not a word of reproach in
his brief lines. Perhaps that was why, in the last issue, they seemed so
cold to her.... She shivered and turned to the other envelope.

The large stilted characters, though half-familiar, called up no
definite image. She opened the envelope and discovered a post-card of
the Ibis, canvas spread, bounding over a rippled sea. On the back was
written:

“So awfully dear of you to lend us Mr. Lansing for a little cruise. You
may count on our taking the best of care of him.

“CORAL”




PART II

XIII

WHEN Violet Melrose had said to Susy Branch, the winter before in New
York: “But why on earth don’t you and Nick go to my little place at
Versailles for the honeymoon? I’m off to China, and you could have it to
yourselves all summer,” the offer had been tempting enough to make the
lovers waver.

It was such an artless ingenuous little house, so full of the
demoralizing simplicity of great wealth, that it seemed to Susy just the
kind of place in which to take the first steps in renunciation. But Nick
had objected that Paris, at that time of year, would be swarming with
acquaintances who would hunt them down at all hours; and Susy’s own
experience had led her to remark that there was nothing the very rich
enjoyed more than taking pot-luck with the very poor. They therefore
gave Strefford’s villa the preference, with an inward proviso (on Susy’s
part) that Violet’s house might very conveniently serve their purpose at
another season.

These thoughts were in her mind as she drove up to Mrs. Melrose’s door
on a rainy afternoon late in August, her boxes piled high on the roof of
the cab she had taken at the station. She had travelled straight through
from Venice, stopping in Milan just long enough to pick up a reply
to the telegram she had despatched to the perfect housekeeper whose
permanent presence enabled Mrs. Melrose to say: “Oh, when I’m sick
of everything I just rush off without warning to my little shanty at
Versailles, and live there all alone on scrambled eggs.”

The perfect house-keeper had replied to Susy’s enquiry: “Am sure Mrs.
Melrose most happy”; and Susy, without further thought, had jumped
into a Versailles train, and now stood in the thin rain before the
sphinx-guarded threshold of the pavilion.

The revolving year had brought around the season at which Mrs. Melrose’s
house might be convenient: no visitors were to be feared at Versailles
at the end of August, and though Susy’s reasons for seeking solitude
were so remote from those she had once prefigured, they were none the
less cogent. To be alone--alone! After those first exposed days when,
in the persistent presence of Fred Gillow and his satellites, and in the
mocking radiance of late summer on the lagoons, she had fumed and turned
about in her agony like a trapped animal in a cramping cage, to be alone
had seemed the only respite, the one craving: to be alone somewhere in a
setting as unlike as possible to the sensual splendours of Venice, under
skies as unlike its azure roof. If she could have chosen she would have
crawled away into a dingy inn in a rainy northern town, where she had
never been and no one knew her. Failing that unobtainable luxury, here
she was on the threshold of an empty house, in a deserted place, under
lowering skies. She had shaken off Fred Gillow, sulkily departing for
his moor (where she had half-promised to join him in September); the
Prince, young Breckenridge, and the few remaining survivors of the
Venetian group, had dispersed in the direction of the Engadine or
Biarritz; and now she could at least collect her wits, take stock of
herself, and prepare the countenance with which she was to face the next
stage in her career. Thank God it was raining at Versailles!

The door opened, she heard voices in the drawing-room, and a slender
languishing figure appeared on the threshold.

“Darling!” Violet Melrose cried in an embrace, drawing her into the
dusky perfumed room.

“But I thought you were in China!” Susy stammered.

“In China... in China,” Mrs. Melrose stared with dreamy eyes, and Susy
remembered her drifting disorganised life, a life more planless, more
inexplicable than that of any of the other ephemeral beings blown about
upon the same winds of pleasure.

“Well, Madam, I thought so myself till I got a wire from Mrs. Melrose
last evening,” remarked the perfect house-keeper, following with Susy’s
handbag.

Mrs. Melrose clutched her cavernous temples in her attenuated hands. “Of
course, of course! I had meant to go to China--no, India.... But I’ve
discovered a genius... and Genius, you know....” Unable to complete
her thought, she sank down upon a pillowy divan, stretched out an arm,
cried: “Fulmer! Fulmer!” and, while Susy Lansing stood in the middle
of the room with widening eyes, a man emerged from the more deeply
cushioned and scented twilight of some inner apartment, and she saw with
surprise Nat Fulmer, the good Nat Fulmer of the New Hampshire bungalow
and the ubiquitous progeny, standing before her in lordly ease, his
hands in his pockets, a cigarette between his lips, his feet solidly
planted in the insidious depths of one of Violet Melrose’s white leopard
skins.

“Susy!” he shouted with open arms; and Mrs. Melrose murmured: “You
didn’t know, then? You hadn’t heard of his masterpieces?”

In spite of herself, Susy burst into a laugh. “Is Nat your genius?”

Mrs. Melrose looked at her reproachfully.

Fulmer laughed. “No; I’m Grace’s. But Mrs. Melrose has been our
Providence, and....”

“Providence?” his hostess interrupted. “Don’t talk as if you were at
a prayer-meeting! He had an exhibition in New York... it was the most
fabulous success. He’s come abroad to make studies for the decoration of
my music-room in New York. Ursula Gillow has given him her garden-house
at Roslyn to do. And Mrs. Bockheimer’s ball-room--oh, Fulmer, where are
the cartoons?” She sprang up, tossed about some fashion-papers heaped on
a lacquer table, and sank back exhausted by the effort. “I’d got as far
as Brindisi. I’ve travelled day and night to be here to meet him,” she
declared. “But, you darling,” and she held out a caressing hand to Susy,
“I’m forgetting to ask if you’ve had tea?”

An hour later, over the tea-table, Susy already felt herself
mysteriously reabsorbed into what had so long been her native element.
Ellie Vanderlyn had brought a breath of it to Venice; but Susy was then
nourished on another air, the air of Nick’s presence and personality;
now that she was abandoned, left again to her own devices, she felt
herself suddenly at the mercy of the influences from which she thought
she had escaped.

In the queer social whirligig from which she had so lately fled, it
seemed natural enough that a shake of the box should have tossed Nat
Fulmer into celebrity, and sent Violet Melrose chasing back from the
ends of the earth to bask in his success. Susy knew that Mrs. Melrose
belonged to the class of moral parasites; for in that strange world the
parts were sometimes reversed, and the wealthy preyed upon the pauper.
Wherever there was a reputation to batten on, there poor Violet
appeared, a harmless vampire in pearls who sought only to feed on the
notoriety which all her millions could not create for her. Any one less
versed than Susy in the shallow mysteries of her little world would have
seen in Violet Melrose a baleful enchantress, in Nat Fulmer her helpless
victim. Susy knew better. Violet, poor Violet, was not even that. The
insignificant Ellie Vanderlyn, with her brief trivial passions, her
artless mixture of amorous and social interests, was a woman with
a purpose, a creature who fulfilled herself; but Violet was only a
drifting interrogation.

And what of Fulmer? Mustering with new eyes his short sturdily-built
figure, his nondescript bearded face, and the eyes that dreamed and
wandered, and then suddenly sank into you like claws, Susy seemed to
have found the key to all his years of dogged toil, his indifference
to neglect, indifference to poverty, indifference to the needs of
his growing family.... Yes: for the first time she saw that he looked
commonplace enough to be a genius--was a genius, perhaps, even though
it was Violet Melrose who affirmed it! Susy looked steadily at Fulmer,
their eyes met, and he smiled at her faintly through his beard.

“Yes, I did discover him--I did,” Mrs. Melrose was insisting, from the
depths of the black velvet divan in which she lay sunk like a wan Nereid
in a midnight sea. “You mustn’t believe a word that Ursula Gillow tells
you about having pounced on his ‘Spring Snow Storm’ in a dark corner of
the American Artists’ exhibition--skied, if you please! They skied him
less than a year ago! And naturally Ursula never in her life looked
higher than the first line at a picture-show. And now she actually
pretends... oh, for pity’s sake don’t say it doesn’t matter, Fulmer!
Your saying that just encourages her, and makes people think she
did. When, in reality, any one who saw me at the exhibition on
varnishing-day.... Who? Well, Eddy Breckenridge, for instance. He was
in Egypt, you say? Perhaps he was! As if one could remember the people
about one, when suddenly one comes upon a great work of art, as St.
Paul did--didn’t he?--and the scales fell from his eyes. Well... that’s
exactly what happened to me that day... and Ursula, everybody knows, was
down at Roslyn at the time, and didn’t come up for the opening of the
exhibition at all. And Fulmer sits there and laughs, and says it
doesn’t matter, and that he’ll paint another picture any day for me to
discover!”

Susy had rung the door-bell with a hand trembling with
eagerness--eagerness to be alone, to be quiet, to stare her situation in
the face, and collect herself before she came out again among her kind.
She had stood on the door-step, cowering among her bags, counting the
instants till a step sounded and the door-knob turned, letting her in
from the searching glare of the outer world.... And now she had sat for
an hour in Violet’s drawing-room, in the very house where her honey-moon
might have been spent; and no one had asked her where she had come from,
or why she was alone, or what was the key to the tragedy written on her
shrinking face....

That was the way of the world they lived in. Nobody questioned, nobody
wondered any more--because nobody had time to remember. The old risk of
prying curiosity, of malicious gossip, was virtually over: one was left
with one’s drama, one’s disaster, on one’s hands, because there was
nobody to stop and notice the little shrouded object one was carrying.
As Susy watched the two people before her, each so frankly unaffected
by her presence, Violet Melrose so engrossed in her feverish pursuit of
notoriety, Fulmer so plunged in the golden sea of his success, she felt
like a ghost making inaudible and imperceptible appeals to the grosser
senses of the living.

“If I wanted to be alone,” she thought, “I’m alone enough, in all
conscience.” There was a deathly chill in such security. She turned to
Fulmer.

“And Grace?”

He beamed back without sign of embarrassment. “Oh, she’s here,
naturally--we’re in Paris, kids and all. In a pension, where we can
polish up the lingo. But I hardly ever lay eyes on her, because she’s
as deep in music as I am in paint; it was as big a chance for her as for
me, you see, and she’s making the most of it, fiddling and listening to
the fiddlers. Well, it’s a considerable change from New Hampshire.” He
looked at her dreamily, as if making an intense effort to detach himself
from his dream, and situate her in the fading past. “Remember the
bungalow? And Nick--ah, how’s Nick?” he brought out triumphantly.

“Oh, yes--darling Nick?” Mrs. Melrose chimed in; and Susy, her head
erect, her cheeks aflame, declared with resonance: “Most awfully
well--splendidly!”

“He’s not here, though?” from Fulmer.

“No. He’s off travelling--cruising.”

Mrs. Melrose’s attention was faintly roused. “With anybody interesting?”

“No; you wouldn’t know them. People we met....” She did not have to
continue, for her hostess’s gaze had again strayed.

“And you’ve come for your clothes, I suppose, darling? Don’t listen
to people who say that skirts are to be wider. I’ve discovered a new
woman--a Genius--and she absolutely swathes you.... Her name’s my
secret; but we’ll go to her together.”

Susy rose from her engulphing armchair. “Do you mind if I go up to my
room? I’m rather tired--coming straight through.”

“Of course, dear. I think there are some people coming to dinner... Mrs.
Match will tell you. She has such a memory.... Fulmer, where on earth
are those cartoons of the music-room?”

Their voices pursued Susy upstairs, as, in Mrs. Match’s perpendicular
wake, she mounted to the white-panelled room with its gay linen hangings
and the low bed heaped with more cushions.

“If we’d come here,” she thought, “everything might have been
different.” And she shuddered at the sumptuous memories of the Palazzo
Vanderlyn, and the great painted bedroom where she had met her doom.

Mrs. Match, hoping she would find everything, and mentioning that dinner
was not till nine, shut her softly in among her terrors.

“Find everything?” Susy echoed the phrase. Oh, yes, she would always
find everything: every time the door shut on her now, and the sound of
voices ceased, her memories would be there waiting for her, every one
of them, waiting quietly, patiently, obstinately, like poor people in a
doctor’s office, the people who are always last to be attended to,
but whom nothing will discourage or drive away, people to whom time is
nothing, fatigue nothing, hunger nothing, other engagements nothing: who
just wait.... Thank heaven, after all, that she had not found the
house empty, if, whenever she returned to her room, she was to meet her
memories there!

It was just a week since Nick had left her. During that week, crammed
with people, questions, packing, explaining, evading, she had believed
that in solitude lay her salvation. Now she understood that there was
nothing she was so unprepared for, so unfitted for. When, in all her
life, had she ever been alone? And how was she to bear it now, with all
these ravening memories besetting her!

Dinner not till nine? What on earth was she to do till nine o’clock? She
knelt before her boxes, and feverishly began to unpack.

Gradually, imperceptibly, the subtle influences of her old life were
stealing into her. As she pulled out her tossed and crumpled dresses she
remembered Violet’s emphatic warning: “Don’t believe the people who tell
you that skirts are going to be wider.” Were hers, perhaps, too wide
as it was? She looked at her limp raiment, piling itself up on bed and
sofa, and understood that, according to Violet’s standards, and that
of all her set, those dresses, which Nick had thought so original and
exquisite, were already commonplace and dowdy, fit only to be passed on
to poor relations or given to one’s maid. And Susy would have to go on
wearing them till they fell to bits--or else.... Well, or else begin the
old life again in some new form....

She laughed aloud at the turn of her thoughts. Dresses? How little they
had mattered a few short weeks ago! And now, perhaps, they would again
be one of the foremost considerations in her life. How could it be
otherwise, if she were to return again to her old dependence on Ellie
Vanderlyn, Ursula Gillow, Violet Melrose? And beyond that, only the
Bockheimers and their kind awaited her....

A knock on the door--what a relief! It was Mrs. Match again, with a
telegram. To whom had Susy given her new address? With a throbbing heart
she tore open the envelope and read:

“Shall be in Paris Friday for twenty-four hours where can I see you
write Nouveau Luxe.”

Ah, yes--she remembered now: she had written to Strefford! And this was
his answer: he was coming. She dropped into a chair, and tried to think.
What on earth had she said in her letter? It had been mainly, of course,
one of condolence; but now she remembered having added, in a precipitate
postscript: “I can’t give your message to Nick, for he’s gone off with
the Hickses--I don’t know where, or for how long. It’s all right, of
course: it was in our bargain.”

She had not meant to put in that last phrase; but as she sealed her
letter to Strefford her eye had fallen on Nick’s missive, which lay
beside it. Nothing in her husband’s brief lines had embittered her as
much as the allusion to Strefford. It seemed to imply that Nick’s own
plans were made, that his own future was secure, and that he could
therefore freely and handsomely take thought for hers, and give her a
pointer in the right direction. Sudden rage had possessed her at the
thought: where she had at first read jealousy she now saw only a cold
providence, and in a blur of tears she had scrawled her postscript to
Strefford. She remembered that she had not even asked him to keep her
secret. Well--after all, what would it matter if people should already
know that Nick had left her? Their parting could not long remain a
mystery, and the fact that it was known might help her to keep up a
presence of indifference.

“It was in the bargain--in the bargain,” rang through her brain as she
re-read Strefford’s telegram. She understood that he had snatched the
time for this hasty trip solely in the hope of seeing her, and her eyes
filled. The more bitterly she thought of Nick the more this proof of
Strefford’s friendship moved her.

The clock, to her relief, reminded her that it was time to dress for
dinner. She would go down presently, chat with Violet and Fulmer, and
with Violet’s other guests, who would probably be odd and amusing, and
too much out of her world to embarrass her by awkward questions. She
would sit at a softly-lit table, breathe delicate scents, eat exquisite
food (trust Mrs. Match!), and be gradually drawn again under the spell
of her old associations. Anything, anything but to be alone....

She dressed with even more than her habitual care, reddened her lips
attentively, brushed the faintest bloom of pink over her drawn cheeks,
and went down--to meet Mrs. Match coming up with a tray.

“Oh, Madam, I thought you were too tired.... I was bringing it up to you
myself--just a little morsel of chicken.”

Susy, glancing past her, saw, through the open door, that the lamps were
not lit in the drawing-room.

“Oh, no, I’m not tired, thank you. I thought Mrs. Melrose expected
friends at dinner!”

“Friends at dinner-to-night?” Mrs. Match heaved a despairing sigh.
Sometimes, the sigh seemed to say, her mistress put too great a strain
upon her. “Why, Mrs. Melrose and Mr. Fulmer were engaged to dine in
Paris. They left an hour ago. Mrs. Melrose told me she’d told you,” the
house-keeper wailed.

Susy kept her little fixed smile. “I must have misunderstood. In that
case... well, yes, if it’s no trouble, I believe I will have my tray
upstairs.”

Slowly she turned, and followed the housekeeper up into the dread
solitude she had just left.





XIV.



THE next day a lot of people turned up unannounced for luncheon. They
were not of the far-fetched and the exotic, in whom Mrs. Melrose now
specialized, but merely commonplace fashionable people belonging to
Susy’s own group, people familiar with the amusing romance of her
penniless marriage, and to whom she had to explain (though none of them
really listened to the explanation) that Nick was not with her just
now but had gone off cruising... cruising in the AEgean with friends...
getting up material for his book (this detail had occurred to her in the
night).

It was the kind of encounter she had most dreaded; but it proved, after
all, easy enough to go through compared with those endless hours of
turning to and fro, the night before, in the cage of her lonely room.
Anything, anything, but to be alone....

Gradually, from the force of habit, she found herself actually in tune
with the talk of the luncheon table, interested in the references to
absent friends, the light allusions to last year’s loves and quarrels,
scandals and absurdities. The women, in their pale summer dresses,
were so graceful, indolent and sure of themselves, the men so easy and
good-humoured! Perhaps, after all, Susy reflected, it was the world she
was meant for, since the other, the brief Paradise of her dreams, had
already shut its golden doors upon her. And then, as they sat on the
terrace after luncheon, looking across at the yellow tree-tops of the
park, one of the women said something--made just an allusion--that Susy
would have let pass unnoticed in the old days, but that now fill

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