 CHAPTER I It rose for them, their honeymoon, 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 humor, or as great a gift for it as ours, to risk the experiment. Susie 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 amended, glancing upwards 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 hands 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 and May would have been impossible. All our Paris crowd would have run us down within twenty-four hours, and Monte Carlo was 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 ascent. I must say that Streffi 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-bottle stuff over there. What is it? Stephanotus? Yes, I suppose so. Or Gardenias? Oh, the fireflies! Look! There, against that splash of moonlight on the water, apples of silver in a network of gold. They leaned together, one flesh from shoulder to fingertips, 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've 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 inquired after a pause—without counting your grandmother's pearls? Yes, without the pearls. He pondered awhile, and then rejoined in a tender whisper, Tell me again just how. Let's sit down, then. No, I like the cushion's 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 encrusted like silver in a sharp black patterning of plain 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 branches, bugbear. They were still, and more dangerously, to be Susy Lansings. She detested them, detested them doubly, as the natural enemies of mankind, and as the people one always had to put oneself 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 that 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 rumored that he had written, had presented himself to her imagination as the sort of luxury to which Susie Branch, Eris, might conceivably have treated herself as a crowning folly. Susie Branch, pauper, was fond of picturing how this fancy 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 rowboat. 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, Susie 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 someone 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 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 Susie to understand that she was making herself ridiculous. Ah! said Susie, 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— Susie 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 Bachheimers, whom she had hitherto refused even to dine with. Of course what you fancy is perfect nonsense, Ursula, and as to my interfering! Susie 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. Susie 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 encyclopedia—V to X—and had told her what hours were dedicated to the hateful task. How 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 encyclopedia. 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. Susie, 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. Not 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 Susie all the sorrier to execute her promise, and the glatter that she 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 encyclopedia. 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 Susie, her calm and 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?" Susie looked slowly and consideringly about the room. There was nothing in it—absolutely nothing—to show that he'd 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, dryly, 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?' Susie 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 hardened, and the collar 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 protect, but that there is someone who, for one reason or another, really has a right to object to your seeing me too often.'" Ursula 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 Bachheimers. 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 in treating 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 skiing, and then to Florida for six weeks in a houseboat. 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. END OF CHAPTER I Lansing threw the end of Strefford's expensive cigar into the lake, and bent over his wife. 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 honeymoon. 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 Suzy 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-seen 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 Suzy Branch, whom he had sought out through 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 Suzy 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 had so often had to do what they disliked. But the keeping of his promise was a greater bore than he had expected. Suzy 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 going 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 Susie 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 was 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 Susie, 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 Susie there—Susie, whom he had never even suspected of knowing anybody in the fulmer's 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 veranda, 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 midday dinner was two hours late—and proportionately bad—because the Italian cook was posing for fulmer. Lansing's first thought had been that meeting Susie 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 Susie 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 amusing smile. But he remained resolutely sceptical. 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 shall never have time to do anything worthwhile with her music. They had reached a piney 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 deuces wanted to do. I wish I knew, she sighed, thinking of the Bachheimers, 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, Natt 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," Susie added hastily, I couldn't live as they do for a week, but it's wonderful how little it's dimmed them. Surgeonly Natt 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 Susie'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 any one 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 honorably, if for ever so shorter 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 Susie 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, for both rather unusually popular—why not, to 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 is 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 fervished 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-presence, jewels, and a motor, and a silver dinner-service, to she mean? Not a bit of it. She could see he'd never really given the question proper thought. Checks, my dear, nothing but checks! 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 to do was to accept the houses in turn, go on honeymooning 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 that 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 provisions had come true. If there were certain links in the chain that Lansing had ever 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. CHAPTER 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 struffie 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 day to greed on. Lansing, leaving Susie'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 months 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. Susie was a magician. Everything she predicted came true. The others 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-Vanderland's palace on the Judeka. 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, Susie 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 land 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 unconsernedly 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 Susie. He had meant, when they married, to be as philosophic for her as for himself, and he knew she would have presented 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 hang, he had composed for his own guidance a rough and ready code, a short set of maize and muscance 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 maize and muscance more fluctuating and less sharply drawn. Susie, thrown on the world at seventeen, with only a weak wasterl 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 parents' premature demise, as though she accepted in advance the necessity of ruining oneself 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 Struffy'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 Cooke Giulietta had both arms around a slippery hold-all that refused to let itself be trapped. 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 Susie had no part. By the time he came down again, dressed and hungry, to the terrace where Coffey awaited him, he had recovered his usual pleasant sense of security. Susie 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, Streffey'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 his way to his dressing-room, he found her in a cloud of finery which her skillful hands were forcibly compressing into a last portmanteau. He had never seen any one 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 made 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 Struffy's cigars?' "'I'm 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 Struffy'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 Struffy'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 Juliette'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 neared. 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 Juliette 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 Susie had gathered the day before were dropping their petals on the marble embroidery of the floor. While Chameleus floated in the alabaster tazas 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 Juliette 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. CHARLEY STREFFERD'S VILLA was like a nest in a rose-bush. The Nelson Vanderland's palace called for loftier analogies. Its vastness and splendor seemed, in comparison, oppressive to Susie. 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 minuettes should have been danced before thrown, contrasted with the happy intimacies of Como as their sudden sense of discord contrasted with the mutual confidence of the day before. The journey had been particularly jolly. Both Susie 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 Susie's bosom as she sat in her tapestryed-invaulted bedroom, brushing her hair before a tarnished mirror. I thought I liked Grandier, 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 Vanderland'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 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 have most 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 senoras 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 Vanderlin Esquire, and in the corner of each was faintly penciled 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 arm-chair 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 and 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 deer! 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. Susie lifted the letter to the lamb to be sure she had read right. 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 impertnence, 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 post-script, Susie, 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. Susie sprang up and tossed Mrs. Vanderland'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 Susie to involve departure on the morrow, and in this 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. Susie did not disguise from herself how much she had counted on the Vanderland 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 Quidekka, that the idea of having to renounce these joys, and deprive her neck of them, filled Susie 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 Vanderland 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. Ellie's faith in her power of finding a way out was inexhaustible. But suddenly she remembered the adoration at the end of Mrs. Vanderland's letter. If you ever owed me anything in the way of kindness, you won't, on your sacred honor, 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, Susie reflected. But then Nelson Vanderland had been kind to her too, and the money Ellie had been so kind with was Nelson's. The queer edifice of Susie'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 at 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 cigar still galled her, and now this big humiliation superposed itself on the raw wound. Decidedly the second month of their honeymoon 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 always being on her guard made her turn once more to the looking-glass. Her face was pale and haggard, and having by a swift and skillful 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 headache 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 broth, and Susie'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 displaced a tray on a slim, marquetry table near the bed, and over the edge of the tray Susie discovered the small, serious face of Clarissa van der Linn, at the sight of a 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 Susie between the ribs of the toast rack and the single tea-rose in an old morano glass. Susie had not seen her for two years, and she seemed in the interval to have passed from a thoughtful infancy to a 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,' Susie 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. Their 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 Susie'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. "'Offly true,' Susie 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?' Susie threw her head back against the pillows and laughed. "'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 Susie'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 makes you think so?' "'Because you look so awfully happy,' said Clarissa Vanderlyn simply. End of Chapter 4. Part 1. Chapter 5. Of the glimpses of the moon. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Elizabeth Klett. The Glimpses of the Moon. By Edith Wharton. Part 1. Chapter 5. It was a trifling enough sign, but it had remained in Susie's mind. The 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 the letter. And while she'd 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 lifelong policy not to put on called-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. Susie 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 Susie 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 Vanderlin had convinced Susie of the impossibility of deserting Clarissa. Long experience had shown her that the most crowded households often contained the loneliest nurseries, and that the rich child is exposed to evil's 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 Vanderlin's return, and of the searching truth 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. "'Streffie!' 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.' As he 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 Streffie, 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 Susie 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. Susie had always lived among people so denationalized that blows 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 intermarried, interloved, and interdivorced 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 life as monotonous and self-contained as his own was checkered 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 in 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 skeletons of old faiths and old fashions. He talks every language as well as the rest of us, Susie 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 cousin-ships 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 Susie was slowly waking to a sense of the beauty of habit. Louncing on the balcony, wither 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 he 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 l'erea? Let's go and see. But Susie 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 hypocrisy 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 it always secretly tormented Susie. 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 tomorrow. You know you would. No, 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 Altrangham in the period of Great Britain, and Baroness Dunstaville in Dombley in the periodes 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. Susie 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 inessential. Even if Nick chucks me, don't count on me to carry out that program, I've seen it in practice too often. Oh, well, as far as I know everybody's in perfect health at Altrangham. 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 amok 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 heard she put a big check in your hand instead. As he 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 called Ursula thoroughly frightened. Well, enough. And then luckily that young Nerone Altenare 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, Streffie, 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 called a glimpse of them the other day at Capri, their 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 Puggery, who was gazing up from his guide-book 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 appeared 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. CHAPTER VI Susie 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 Susie 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 Vanderlin. He was always charming to children, but fitfully and warily, with an eye on his independence, and on the possibility of being subtly bored by them. Susie 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 a place? I think she expected me to do it," said Susie, 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. Susie 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. No 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." Susie leaning back, scrutinised between her lashes, his crooked ironic face. What is it that's agreeing with you, Streffie? 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 lovesick 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, Susie would hardly have been conscious of her hostess's protracted absence. Mrs. Van der Linn 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 postcard which had reached Clarissa the day after the Lansing's arrival, and in which Mrs. Van der Linn instructed her child to be awfully good and not to forget to feed the mongoose. Susie 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 reveled 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 eulogist 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 confused 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, Susie 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 worthwhile staying in Venice for Nick's sake, and if only Ellie would come back and carry off Clarissa to San Moritz or De Ville, 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 Hicks's 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 Vanderlin were sipping their ices at Florians, the Hicks's loomed up across the piazza. Susie pleaded in vain with her husband in defense of his privacy. Remember, you're here to write, dearest, it's your duty not to let anyone 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 Hicks's. I spent five whole months on the ibis, and if they bored me occasionally, India didn't. We'll make them take us to Aqualia, anyhow," said Strefford philosophically, and the next moment the Hicks's were bearing down on the defenseless 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 Eldorado Tucker, who was Mrs. Hicks's cousin and stenographer, and finally their daughter, Coral Hicks. Coral Hicks, when Susie had last encountered the party, had been a fat, spectacled schoolgirl, whose lagging behind her parents, with a reluctant poodle in her wake. Now the poodle had gone, and his mistress led the procession. The fat schoolgirl 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 Susie, taking her measure in a flash, saw that her position at the head of the procession was not fortuitous, and murmured inwardly, Think, 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 Eldorado 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 Susie, that night, as they smoked a last cigarette on their balcony. She told me this afternoon that she had 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 seemed 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 Brynmar. She means to go to Baghdad next spring, and back by the Persian plateau in Turkestan.' Susie laughed luxuriously. She was sitting with her hand in nicks, while the late moon, theirs again, rounded its orange-coloured glory above the belfry of San Giorgio. "'Poor Coral, how dreary,' Susie 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 nicks in folding arm, and lifted her face to his. The hicks has retained the most tender memory of Nick's sojourn on the Ibis, and Susie, 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 meet out that measure to the hicks's. Even if it had been less pleasant to have a big yacht at their door during long golden days and nights of silver fire, the hicks's admiration for Nick would have made Susie 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 provoked her disapproval. Susie had had plenty of people, and the trouble was that the hicks's, judged by her standards, were failures. It was not only that they were ridiculous—so, heaven knew, were many of their rivals—but the hicks's were both ridiculous and unsuccessful. They had consistently resisted the efforts of the experienced advisers, who had first described 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 and peplums, and having their portraits painted by wild people who never turned out to be the fashion. All this would formerly have increased Susie's contempt. Now she found herself liking the hicks's 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 Elder Otter took her, the doctor, and the two secretaries formed the outer fringe, and by their view of themselves as a kind of collective reincarnation of some past state of princely culture, symbolized for Mrs. Hicks in what she called the Court of the Renaissance. El Dorada, 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 Medici's. I'm really getting fond of the Hicks's. I believe I should be nice to them even if they were staying at Danieli's," Susy said distraffered. "'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 Eugenians, they saw Aquile and Pomposa and Ravenna. Their hosts would gladly have taken them farther across the Adriatic and on into the golden network of the Aegean. But Susy resisted this infraction of Nick's rules, and he himself preferred to stick to his task. Only now he wrote in the early mornings, so that on most days they could set out before noon and steam back late to the low fringe of lights on the lagoon. His work continued to progress, and as Page was added to Page, Susy obscurely but surely perceived that each one corresponded with a hidden secretion of energy, the gradual forming within him of something that might eventually alter both their lives. In what sense she could not conjecture, she merely felt that the fact of his having chosen a job and stuck to it, if only through a few rosy summer weeks, had already given him a new way of saying yes and no. CHAPTER VII Of some new ferment at work in him, Nick Lansing himself was equally aware. He was a better judge of the book than 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 had 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 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 had 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 someone to look after, someone 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, honored, 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 the 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 prenatal 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 someone 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 his 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 Vanderlin 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 checks, and thus their enchanted year might conceivably be prolonged to two. Late as the season was, their presence and straffords in Venice had already drawn dither 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 and 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 Doveville and San Moritz, Biritz, 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 Lansing's. Strafi had set the example, and Strafi's example was always followed. And then Susie's marriage was still a subject of sympathetic speculation. People knew the story of the wedding checks, 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 honeymoon by pressing houses on the adventurous couple. Before June was over a band of friends were basking with the Lansing's on the Lido. Nick found himself unexpectedly disturbed by their arrival. To avoid comment and banter he put his book aside and forbade Susie 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 Susie 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 deers didn't see too plainly how they bored her. The patent insincerity of the reply was a shock to Lansing. He knew that Susie 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 thank 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. Susie'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 Susie'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 born 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 Canaregio. 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 the 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 jeweled, 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 Hicks's 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 irreverently, 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 wondered, with something of convalescent 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 Hicks's. 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 reflection, that that was what he meant when he thought of the Hicks's as having a religion. A few days later his well-being was unexpectedly disturbed by the arrival of Fred Gillow. Everything 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. And Susie, 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 Susie 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 check from Fred and Ursula. Plenty of sympathising 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— Hello, old Fred! with which Susie 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. Susie 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 a sound but ineffectual advice he gave himself on the day after Gillow's arrival, and immediately set to work to rethink the whole matter. And Gillow showed no consciousness of disturbing anyone's peace of mind. Day after day he sprawled for hours on the Lido sands, his arms folded under his head, listening to Streffy's nonsense, and watching Susie between sleepy lids, but he betrayed no desire to see her alone, or draw her into talk apart from the others. More than ever he seemed content to be the gratified spectator of a costly show got up for his private entertainment. It was not until he heard her one morning grumble a little at the increasing heat in the menace of mosquitoes that he said, quite as if they had talked the matter over long before and finally settled it, the moral be ready any time after the first of August. Nick fancied that Susie colored a little, and drew herself up more defiantly than usual as she sent a pebble skimming across the dying ripples at their feet. You'll be a lot cooler in Scotland," Fred added, with what for him was an unusual effort at explicitness. Oh, shall we? she retorted gaily, and added with an air of mystery and importance, pivoting about on her high heels. Nick's got work to do here. It will probably keep us all summer. Work! Rot! You'll die of the smells! Gillo stared perplexedly skyward from under his tilted hat brim, and then brought out as from the depth of a rankling grievance. I thought it was all understood. Why? Nick asked his wife that night as they re-entered Ellie's cool drawing-room after a late dinner at the Lido. Did Gillo think it was understood that we were going to his moor in August? He was conscious of the oddness of speaking of their friend by his surname, and reddened at his blunder. Susie had let her lace cloak slide to her feet, and stood before him in the faintly lit room, slim and shimmering white through black transparencies. She raised her eyebrows carelessly. I told you long ago he'd asked us there for August. You didn't tell me you'd accepted. She smiled as if he had said something as simple as Fred. I accepted everything, from everybody. What could he answer? It was the very principle on which their bargain had been struck. And if he were to say, ah, but this is different because I'm jealous of Gillo, what light would such an answer shed on his past? The time for being jealous, if so antiquated an attitude were on any ground defensible, would have been before his marriage, and before the acceptance of the bounties which had helped to make it possible. He wondered a little now that in those days such scruples had not troubled him. His inconsistency irritated him, and increased his irritation against Gillo. I suppose he thinks he owns us, he grumbled inwardly. He had thrown himself into an arm-chair, and Susie, advancing across the shining arabesques of the floor, slid down at his feet, pressed her slender length against him, and whispered with lifted face and lips close to his. We didn't ever go anywhere you don't want to. For once her submission was sweet, and folding her close, he whispered back through his kiss. Not there, then. In her response to his embrace, he felt the acquiescence of her whole happy self and whatever future he decided on, if only it gave them enough of such moments as this. And as they held each other fast in silence, his doubts and distrust began to seem like a silly injustice. Let us stay here as long as ever Ellie will let us, he said, as if the shadowy walls and shining floors were a magic boundary drawn about his happiness. She murmured her assent, and stood up, stretching her sleepy arms above her shoulders. How dreadfully late it is! Will you unhook me? Oh, there's a telegram. She picked it up from the table, and tearing it open stared a moment at the message. It's from Ellie. She's coming to-morrow. She turned to the window and strayed out onto the balcony. Nick followed her with enlacing arm. A canal below them lay in moonless shadow, barred with a few lingering lights. A last snatch of gondola music came from far off, carried upward on a sultry gust. Dear old Ellie, all the same, I wish all this belonged to you and me. Susie sighed. It was not Mrs. Vanderland's fault, if, after her arrival, her palace seemed to belong any less to the land-sings. She arrived in a mood of such general benevolence that it was impossible for Susie, when they finally found themselves alone, to make her view even her own recent conduct in any but the most benevolent light. I knew you'd be the various angel about it all, darling, because I knew you'd understand me, especially now," she declared, her slim hands in Susie's, her big eyes, so like Clarissa's, resplendent with past pleasures and future plans. The expression of her confidence was unexpectedly distasteful to Susie Lansing, who had never lent so cold an ear to such warm of owls. She had always imagined that being happy oneself made one, as Mrs. Vanderland appeared to assume, more tolerant of the happiness of others, of however doubtful elements composed, and she was almost ashamed of responding so languidly to her friend's outpourings. But she herself had no desire to confide her bliss to Ellie, and why should not Ellie observe a similar reticence? It was all so perfect. You see, dearest, I was meant to be happy," that lady continued, as if the possession of so unusual a characteristic singled her out for special privileges. Susie, with a certain sharpness, responded that she had always supposed we all were. Oh, no, dearest! Not governesses, and mother-in-laws, and companions, and that sort of people. They wouldn't know how if they tried. But you and I, darling— Oh, I don't consider myself in any way exceptional," Susie intervened. She longed to add, Not in your way at any rate. But a few minutes earlier Mrs. Vanderland had told her that the palace was at her disposal for the rest of the summer, and that she herself was only going to perch there, if they let her, long enough to gather up her things and start for San Maritz. The memory of this announcement had the effect of curbing Susie's irony, and of making her shift the conversation to the safer, if scarcely less absorbing, topic of the number of day-and-evening dresses required for a season at San Maritz. As she listened to Mrs. Vanderland, no less eloquent on this scene than on the other, Susie began to measure the gulf between her past and present. This is the life I used to lead. These are the things I used to live for, she thought, as she stood before the outspread glories of Mrs. Vanderland's wardrobe. Not that she did not still care, she could not look at Ellie's laces and silks and furs without picturing herself in them, and wondering by what new miracle of management she could give herself the air of being dressed by the same consummate artists. But these had become minor interests, the past few months had given her a new perspective, and the thing that most puzzled and disconcerted her about Ellie was the fact that love and finery and bridge and dining out were seemingly all on the same plane to her. The inspection of the dresses lasted a long time, and was marked by many fluctuations of mood on the part of Mrs. Vanderland, who passed from comparative hopefulness to despair at the total inadequacy of her wardrobe. It wouldn't do to go to San Maritz looking like a frump, and yet there was no time to get anything sent from Paris, and whatever she did she wasn't going to show herself in any dowdy rearrangements done at home. But suddenly light broke upon her, and she clasped her hands for joy. Why Nelson will bring them! I'd forgotten all about Nelson. There will be just time if I wire to him at once. Is Nelson going to join you at San Maritz? Susie asked, surprised. Heavens no! He's coming here to pick up Clarissa and take her to some stuffy cure in Austria with his mother. It's too lucky! There's just time to telegraph him to bring my things. I didn't mean to wait for him, but it won't delay me more than a day or two. Susie's heart sank. She was not much afraid of Ellie alone, but Ellie and Nelson together formed an incalculable menace. No one could tell what spark of truth might dash from their collision. Susie felt that she could deal with the two dangers separately and successively, but not together and simultaneously. But Ellie, why should you wait for Nelson? I'm certain to find someone here who's going to San Maritz and will take your things if he brings them. It's a pity to risk losing your rooms. This argument appealed for a moment to Mrs. Van Derlin. That's true. They say all the hotels are jammed. You, dear, you're always so practical. She clasped Susie to her scented bosom. And you know, darling, I'm sure you'll be glad to get rid of me, you and Nick. Oh, don't be hypocritical and say nonsense. You see, I understand. I used to think of you so often, you two, during those blessed weeks when we two were alone. The sudden tears brimming over Ellie's lovely eyes and threatening to make the blue circles below them run to the adjoining Carmine, filled Susie with compunction. Poor thing! Oh, poor thing! she thought, and hearing herself called by Nick, who was waiting to take her out for their usual sunset on the lagoon, she felt a wave of pity for the deluded creature who would never taste that highest of imaginable joys. But all the same, Susie reflected as she hurried down to her husband. I'm glad I persuaded her not to wait for Nelson. Some days had elapsed since Susie and Nick had had a sunset to themselves, and in the intervals Susie had once again learned the superior quality of the sympathy that held them together. She now viewed all the rest of life as no more than a show, a jolly show which it would have been a thousand pitties to miss, but which, if the need arose, they could get up and leave at any moment, provided that they left it together. In the dusk, while their prow slid over inverted palaces and through the scent of hidden gardens, she leaned against him and murmured, her mind returning to the recent scene with Ellie. Nick, should you hate me dreadfully if I had no clothes? Her husband was kindling a cigarette, and the match lit up the grin with which he answered, but, my dear, have I ever shown the slightest symptom? Oh, rubbish! When a woman says no clothes, she means not the right clothes. He took a meditative puff. Ah! You've been going over Ellie's finery with her. Yes. All those trunks and trunks full, and she finds she's got nothing for San Maritz. Of course, he murmured, drowsy with content, and manifesting but a languid interest in the subject of Mrs. Van der Lin's wardrobe. Only fancy, she very nearly decided to stop over for Nelson's arrival next week, so that he might bring her two or three more trunks fulls from Paris. But mercifully I've managed to persuade her that it would be foolish to wait. Susie felt a hardly perceptible shifting of her husband's lounging body, and was aware, through all her watchful tentacles, of a widening of his half-closed lids. You managed! She fancied he paused on the word ironically. But why? Why, what? Why on earth should you try to prevent Ellie's waiting for Nelson, if for once in her life she wants to? Susie, conscious of reddening suddenly, drew back as though the leap of her tell-tale heart might have penetrated the blue flannel shoulder against which she leaned. Really, dearest! she murmured. But with a sudden doggedness he renewed his—why? Because she's in such a fever to get to San Maritz, and in such a funk lest the hotel shouldn't keep her rooms. Susie somewhat breathlessly produced. Ah! I see. Nick paused again. Your devoted friend, aren't you? What an odd question! There's hardly any one I've reasoned to be more devoted to than Ellie! his wife answered, and she felt his contrite clasp on her hand. Darling! No! Nor I! Or more grateful to for leaving us alone in this heaven! Dimness had fallen on the waters, and her lifted lips met his bending ones. Trailing late into dinner that evening, Ellie announced that, after all, she had decided it was safest to wait for Nelson. I should simply worry myself ill if I weren't sure of getting my things! She said, in the tone of tender solicitude with which she always discussed her own difficulties. After all, people who deny themselves everything do get warped and bitter, don't they? She argued plaintively, her lovely eyes wandering from one to the other of her assembled friends. Streffer had remarked gravely that it was the complaint which had fatally undermined his own health, and in the laugh that followed the party drifted into the great vaulted dining-room. Oh! I don't mind your laughing at me, Streffi, darling! His hostess retorted, pressing his arm against her own, and Susie, receiving the shock of their rapidly exchanged glance, said to herself, with a sharp twinge of apprehension, Of course, Streffi knows everything. He showed no surprise at finding Ellie away when he arrived, and if he knows, what's to prevent Nelson's finding out? For Strefford, in a mood of mischief, was no more to be trusted than a malicious child. Susie instantly resolved to risk speaking to him, if need be, and betraying to him the secret of the letters, only by revealing the depth of her own danger could she hope to secure his silence. On the balcony late in the evening, while the others were listening indoors to the low modulations of a young composer who had embroidered his fancies on Browning's to-cotta, Susie found her chance. Strefford, unsummoned, had followed her out, and stood silently smoking at her side. You see, Streff, why should you and I make mysteries to each other? She suddenly began. Why, indeed! But do we?" Susie glanced back at the group around the piano. About Ellie, I mean, and Nelson. "'Lord! Ellie and Nelson! You call that a mystery? I should have soon applied the term to one of the million candle-powder advertisements that daunt your native thoroughfares.' "'Well, yes, but—' She starped again. Had she not tacitly promised Ellie not to speak. "'My Susan, what's wrong?' Strefford asked. "'I don't know.' "'Well, I do, then. You're afraid that if Ellie and Nelson meet here, she'll blurt out something injudicious?' "'Oh, she won't,' Susie cried with conviction. "'Well, then, who will? I trust that superhuman child not to, and you and I and Nick.' "'Oh,' she gasped, interrupting him, that's just it. Nick doesn't know, doesn't even suspect, and if he did—' Strefford flung away his cigar and turned to scrutinize her. "'I don't see. Hanged if I do. What business is it of any of us, after all?' That, of course, was the old view that cloaked connivance in an air of decency, but to Susie it no longer carried conviction, and she hesitated. "'If Nick should find out that I know.' "'Good Lord! Doesn't he know that you know? After all, I suppose it's not the first time.' He remained silent. "'The first time you've received confidences from married friends? Does Nick suppose you've lived even to your tender age without—' Hang it! What's come over you, child?' What had, indeed, that she could make clear to him? And yet more than ever she felt the need of having him securely on her side. Once his word was pledged he was safe, otherwise there was no limit to his capacity for willful harmfulness. "'Look here, Streff. You and I know that Ellie hasn't been away for a cure, and that if poor Clarissa was sworn to secrecy it was not because it worries father to think that mother needs to take care of her health.' She paused, hating herself for the ironic note she had tried to sound. "'Well,' he questioned, from the depths of the chair unto which she had sunk. "'Well, Nick doesn't—doesn't dream of it. If he knew that we owed our summer here to—' To my knowing!' Strefford sat silent. She felt his astonished stare to the darkness. "'Jove!' he said at last with a low whistle. Susie bent over the balustrade, her heart thumping against the stone rail. "'What was left of soul, I wonder?' the young composer's voice shrilled through the open windows. Strefford sank into another silence, from which he roused himself only as Susie turned back toward the lighted threshold. "'Well, my dear, we'll see it through between us. You and I—and Clarissa,' he said, with his rasping laugh, rising to follow her. He caught her hand and gave it a short pressure as they re-entered the drawing-room, where Ellie was saying plaintively to Fred Gillow, "'I can never hear that thing sung without wanting to cry like a baby.'"