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.