“Oh, come! I’ve got a word to say about that too, haven’t I?”
Susy looked slowly and consideringly about the room. There was nothing in it, absolutely nothing, to show that he had ever possessed a spare dollar—or accepted a present.
“Not as far as I’m concerned,” she finally pronounced.
“How do you mean? If I’m as free as air—?”
“I’m not.”
He grew thoughtful. “Oh, then, of course—. It only seems a little odd,” he added drily, “that in that case, the protest should have come from Mrs. Gillow.”
“Instead of coming from my millionaire bridegroom, Oh, I haven’t any; in that respect I’m as free as you.”
“Well, then—? Haven’t we only got to stay free?”
Susy drew her brows together anxiously. It was going to be rather more difficult than she had supposed.
“I said I was as free in that respect. I’m not going to marry—and I don’t suppose you are?”
“God, no!” he ejaculated fervently.
“But that doesn’t always imply complete freedom….”
He stood just above her, leaning his elbow against the hideous black marble arch that framed his fireless grate. As she glanced up she saw his face harden, and the colour flew to hers.
“Was that what you came to tell me?” he asked.
“Oh, you don’t understand—and I don’t see why you don’t, since we’ve knocked about so long among exactly the same kind of people.” She stood up impulsively and laid her hand on his arm. “I do wish you’d help me—!”
He remained motionless, letting the hand lie untouched.
“Help you to tell me that poor Ursula was a pretext, but that there IS someone who—for one reason or another—really has a right to object to your seeing me too often?”
Susy laughed impatiently. “You talk like the hero of a novel—the kind my governess used to read. In the first place I should never recognize that kind of right, as you call it—never!”
“Then what kind do you?” he asked with a clearing brow.
“Why—the kind I suppose you recognize on the part of your publisher.” This evoked a hollow laugh from him. “A business claim, call it,” she pursued. “Ursula does a lot for me: I live on her for half the year. This dress I’ve got on now is one she gave me. Her motor is going to take me to a dinner to-night. I’m going to spend next summer with her at Newport…. If I don’t, I’ve got to go to California with the Bockheimers-so good-bye.”
Suddenly in tears, she was out of the door and down his steep three flights before he could stop her—though, in thinking it over, she didn’t even remember if he had tried to. She only recalled having stood a long time on the corner of Fifth Avenue, in the harsh winter radiance, waiting till a break in the torrent of motors laden with fashionable women should let her cross, and saying to herself: “After all, I might have promised Ursula… and kept on seeing him….”
Instead of which, when Lansing wrote the next day entreating a word with her, she had sent back a friendly but firm refusal; and had managed soon afterward to get taken to Canada for a fortnight’s ski-ing, and then to Florida for six weeks in a house-boat….
As she reached this point in her retrospect the remembrance of Florida called up a vision of moonlit waters, magnolia fragrance and balmy airs; merging with the circumambient sweetness, it laid a drowsy spell upon her lids. Yes, there had been a bad moment: but it was over; and she was here, safe and blissful, and with Nick; and this was his knee her head rested on, and they had a year ahead of them… a whole year…. “Not counting the pearls,” she murmured, shutting her eyes….
II.
LANSING threw the end of Strefford’s expensive cigar into the lake, and bent over his wife. Poor child! She had fallen asleep…. He leaned back and stared up again at the silver-flooded sky. How queer—how inexpressibly queer —it was to think that that light was shed by his 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 Susy to remind him twenty times a day that they had pulled it off—and so why should he worry? Even in the light of her far-seeing cleverness, and of his own present bliss, he knew the future would not bear the examination of sober thought. And as he sat there in the summer moonlight, with her head on his knee, he tried to recapitulate the successive steps that had landed them on Streffy’s lake-front.
On Lansing’s side, no doubt, it dated back to his leaving Harvard with the large resolve not to miss anything. There stood the evergreen Tree of Life, the Four Rivers flowing from its foot; and on every one of the four currents he meant to launch his little skiff. On two of them he had not gone very far, on the third he had nearly stuck in the mud; but the fourth had carried him to the very heart of wonder. It was the stream of his lively imagination, of his inexhaustible interest in every form of beauty and strangeness and folly. On this stream, sitting in the stout little craft of his poverty, his insignificance and his independence, he had made some notable voyages…. And so, when Susy Branch, whom he had sought out through a New York season as the prettiest and most amusing girl in sight, had surprised him with the contradictory revelation of her modern sense of expediency and her old-fashioned standard of good faith, he had felt an irresistible desire to put off on one more cruise into the unknown.
It was of the essence of the adventure that, after her one brief visit to his lodgings, he should have kept his promise and not tried to see her again. Even if her straightforwardness had not roused his emulation, his understanding of her difficulties would have moved his pity. He knew on how frail a thread the popularity of the penniless hangs, and how miserably a girl like Susy was the sport of other people’s moods and whims. It was a part of his difficulty and of hers that to get what they liked they so often had to do what they disliked. But the keeping of his promise was a greater bore than he had expected. Susy Branch had become a delightful habit in a life where most of the fixed things were dull, and her disappearance had made it suddenly clear to him that his resources were growing more and more limited. Much that had once amused him hugely now amused him less, or not at all: a good part of his world of wonder had shrunk to a village peep-show. And the things which had kept their stimulating power—distant journeys, the enjoyment of art, the contact with new scenes and strange societies—were becoming less and less attainable. Lansing had never had more than a pittance; he had spent rather too much of it in his first plunge into life, and the best he could look forward to was a middle-age of poorly-paid hack-work, mitigated by brief and frugal holidays. He knew that he was more intelligent than the average, but he had long since concluded that
