A sudden impatience mastered her. What did he suppose, after all—? “But you know all about Ellie. We used to talk about her often enough in old times,” she said.
“Ellie and young Davenant?”
“Young Davenant; or the others….”
“Or the others. But what business was it of ours?”
“Ah, that’s just what I think!” she cried, springing up with an explosion of relief. Lansing stood up also, but there was no answering light in his face.
“We’re outside of all that; we’ve nothing to do with it, have we?” he pursued.
“Nothing whatever.”
“Then what on earth is the meaning of Ellie’s gratitude? Gratitude for what we’ve done about some letters— and about Vanderlyn?”
“Oh, not you,” Susy cried, involuntarily.
“Not I? Then you?” He came close and took her by the wrist. “Answer me. Have you been mixed up in some dirty business of Ellie’s?”
There was a pause. She found it impossible to speak, with that burning grasp on the wrist where the bangle had been. At length he let her go and moved away. “Answer,” he repeated.
“I’ve told you it was my business and not yours.”
He received this in silence; then he questioned: “You’ve been sending letters for her, I suppose? To whom?”
“Oh, why do you torment me? Nelson was not supposed to know that she’d been away. She left me the letters to post to him once a week. I found them here the night we arrived…. It was the price—for this. Oh, Nick, say it’s been worth it-say at least that it’s been worth it!” she implored him.
He stood motionless, unresponding. One hand drummed on the corner of her dressing-table, making the jewelled bangle dance.
“How many letters?”
“I don’t know… four… five… What does it matter?”
“And once a week, for six weeks—?”
“Yes.”
“And you took it all as a matter of course?”
“No: I hated it. But what could I do?”
“What could you do?”
“When our being together depended on it? Oh, Nick, how could you think I’d give you up?”
“Give me up?” he echoed.
“Well—doesn’t our being together depend on—on what we can get out of people? And hasn’t there always got to be some give-and-take? Did you ever in your life get anything for nothing?” she cried with sudden exasperation. “You’ve lived among these people as long as I have; I suppose it’s not the first time—”
“By God, but it is,” he exclaimed, flushing. “And that’s the difference—the fundamental difference.”
“The difference!”
“Between you and me. I’ve never in my life done people’s dirty work for them—least of all for favours in return. I suppose you guessed it, or you wouldn’t have hidden this beastly business from me.”
The blood rose to Susy’s temples also. Yes, she had guessed it; instinctively, from the day she had first visited him in his bare lodgings, she had been aware of his stricter standard. But how could she tell him that under his influence her standard had become stricter too, and that it was as much to hide her humiliation from herself as to escape his anger that she had held her tongue?
“You knew I wouldn’t have stayed here another day if I’d known,” he continued.
“Yes: and then where in the world should we have gone?”
“You mean that—in one way or another—what you call give-and-take is the price of our remaining together?”
“Well—isn’t it,” she faltered.
“Then we’d better part, hadn’t we?”
He spoke in a low tone, thoughtfully and deliberately, as if this had been the inevitable conclusion to which their passionate argument had led.
Susy made no answer. For a moment she ceased to be conscious of the causes of what had happened; the thing itself seemed to have smothered her under its ruins.
Nick wandered away from the dressing-table and stood gazing out of the window at the darkening canal flecked with lights. She looked at his back, and wondered what would happen if she were to go up to him and fling her arms about him. But even if her touch could have broken the spell, she was not sure she would have chosen that way of breaking it. Beneath her speechless anguish there burned the half-conscious sense of having been unfairly treated. When they had entered into their queer compact, Nick had known as well as she on what compromises and concessions the life they were to live together must be based. That he should have forgotten it seemed so unbelievable that she wondered, with a new leap of fear, if he were using the wretched Ellie’s indiscretion as a means of escape from a tie already wearied of. Suddenly she raised her head with a laugh.
