heels: “Nick’s got work to do here. It will probably keep us all summer.”
“Work? Rot! You’ll die of the smells.” Gillow stared perplexedly skyward from under his tilted hat-brim; and then brought out, as from the depth of a rankling grievance: “I thought it was all understood.”
“Why,” Nick asked his wife that night, as they re-entered Ellie’s cool drawing-room after a late dinner at the Lido, “did Gillow think it was understood that we were going to his moor in August?” He was conscious of the oddness of speaking of their friend by his surname, and reddened at his blunder.
Susy had let her lace cloak slide to her feet, and stood before him in the faintly-lit room, slim and shimmering- white through black transparencies.
She raised her eyebrows carelessly. “I told you long ago he’d asked us there for August.”
“You didn’t tell me you’d accepted.”
She smiled as if he had said something as simple as Fred. “I accepted everything—from everybody!”
What could he answer? It was the very principle on which their bargain had been struck. And if he were to say: “Ah, but this is different, because I’m jealous of Gillow,” what light would such an answer shed on his past? The time for being jealous-if so antiquated an attitude were on any ground defensible-would have been before his marriage, and before the acceptance of the bounties which had helped to make it possible. He wondered a little now that in those days such scruples had not troubled him. His inconsistency irritated him, and increased his irritation against Gillow. “I suppose he thinks he owns us!” he grumbled inwardly.
He had thrown himself into an armchair, and Susy, advancing across the shining arabesques of the floor, slid down at his feet, pressed her slender length against him, and whispered with lifted face and lips close to his: “We needn’t ever go anywhere you don’t want to.” For once her submission was sweet, and folding her close he whispered back through his kiss: “Not there, then.”
In her response to his embrace he felt the acquiescence of her whole happy self in whatever future he decided on, if only it gave them enough of such moments as this; and as they held each other fast in silence his doubts and distrust began to seem like a silly injustice.
“Let us stay here as long as ever Ellie will let us,” he said, as if the shadowy walls and shining floors were a magic boundary drawn about his happiness.
She murmured her assent and stood up, stretching her sleepy arm above her shoulders. “How dreadfully late it is…. Will you unhook me?… Oh, there’s a telegram.”
She picked it up from the table, and tearing it open stared a moment at the message. “It’s from Ellie. She’s coming tomorrow.”
She turned to the window and strayed out onto the balcony. Nick followed her with enlacing arm. The canal below them lay in moonless shadow, barred with a few lingering lights. A last snatch of gondola-music came from far off, carried upward on a sultry gust.
“Dear old Ellie. All the same… I wish all this belonged to you and me.” Susy sighed.
VIII.
IT was not Mrs. Vanderlyn’s fault if, after her arrival, her palace seemed to belong any less to the Lansings.
She arrived in a mood of such general benevolence that it was impossible for Susy, when they finally found themselves alone, to make her view even her own recent conduct in any but the most benevolent light.
“I knew you’d be the veriest angel about it all, darling, because I knew you’d understand me—especially now,” she declared, her slim hands in Susy’s, her big eyes (so like Clarissa’s) resplendent with past pleasures and future plans.
The expression of her confidence was unexpectedly distasteful to Susy Lansing, who had never lent so cold an ear to such warm avowals. She had always imagined that being happy one’s self made one—as Mrs. Vanderlyn appeared to assume—more tolerant of the happiness of others, of however doubtful elements composed; and she was almost ashamed of responding so languidly to her friend’s outpourings. But she herself had no desire to confide her bliss to Ellie; and why should not Ellie observe a similar reticence?
“It was all so perfect—you see, dearest, I was meant to be happy,” that lady continued, as if the possession of so unusual a characteristic singled her out for special privileges.
Susy, with a certain sharpness, responded that she had always supposed we all were.
“Oh, no, dearest: not governesses and mothers-in-law and companions, and that sort of people. They wouldn’t know how if they tried. But you and I, darling—”
“Oh, I don’t consider myself in any way exceptional,” Susy intervened. She longed to add: “Not in your way, at any rate—” but a few minutes earlier Mrs. Vanderlyn had told her that the palace was at her disposal for the rest of the summer, and that she herself was only going to perch there—if they’d let her!—long enough to gather up her things and start for St. Moritz. The memory of this announcement had the effect of curbing Susy’s irony, and of making her shift the conversation to the safer if scarcely less absorbing topic of the number of day and evening dresses required for a season at St. Moritz.
As she listened to Mrs. Vanderlyn—no less eloquent on this theme than on the other—Susy began to measure the gulf between her past and present. “This is the life I used to lead; these are the things I used to live for,” she thought, as she stood before the outspread glories of Mrs. Vanderlyn’s wardrobe. Not that she did not still care: she could not look at Ellie’s laces and silks and furs without picturing herself in them, and wondering by what new miracle of management she could give herself the air of being dressed by the same consummate artists. But these had become minor interests: the past few months had given her a new perspective, and the thing that most puzzled and disconcerted her about Ellie was the fact that love and finery and bridge and dining-out were seemingly all on the same plane to her.
The inspection of the dresses lasted a long time, and was marked by many fluctuations of mood on the part of Mrs. Vanderlyn, who passed from comparative hopefulness to despair at the total inadequacy of her wardrobe. It wouldn’t do to go to St. Moritz looking like a frump, and yet there was no time to get anything sent from Paris, and, whatever she did, she wasn’t going to show herself in any dowdy re-arrangements done at home. But suddenly light broke on her, and she clasped her hands for joy. “Why, Nelson’ll bring them—I’d forgotten all about Nelson! There’ll be just time if I wire to him at once.”
“Is Nelson going to join you at St. Moritz?” Susy asked, surprised.
