“After all—you were right when you wanted me to be your mistress.”
He turned on her with an astonished stare. “You—my mistress?”
Through all her pain she thrilled with pride at the discovery that such a possibility had long since become unthinkable to him. But she insisted. “That day at the Fulmers’—have you forgotten? When you said it would be sheer madness for us to marry.”
Lansing stood leaning in the embrasure of the window, his eyes fixed on the mosaic volutes of the floor.
“I was right enough when I said it would be sheer madness for us to marry,” he rejoined at length.
She sprang up trembling. “Well, that’s easily settled. Our compact—”
“Oh, that compact—” he interrupted her with an impatient laugh.
“Aren’t you asking me to carry it out now?”
“Because I said we’d better part?” He paused. “But the compact—I’d almost forgotten it—was to the effect, wasn’t it, that we were to give each other a helping hand if either of us had a better chance? The thing was absurd, of course; a mere joke; from my point of view, at least. I shall never want any better chance… any other chance….”
“Oh, Nick, oh, Nick… but then….” She was close to him, his face looming down through her tears; but he put her back.
“It would have been easy enough, wouldn’t it,” he rejoined, “if we’d been as detachable as all that? As it is, it’s going to hurt horribly. But talking it over won’t help. You were right just now when you asked how else we were going to live. We’re born parasites, both, I suppose, or we’d have found out some way long ago. But I find there are things I might put up with for myself, at a pinch—and should, probably, in time that I can’t let you put up with for me… ever…. Those cigars at Como: do you suppose I didn’t know it was for me? And this too? Well, it won’t do… it won’t do….”
He stopped, as if his courage failed him; and she moaned out: “But your writing—if your book’s a success….”
“My poor Susy—that’s all part of the humbug. We both know that my sort of writing will never pay. And what’s the alternative except more of the same kind of baseness? And getting more and more blunted to it? At least, till now, I’ve minded certain things; I don’t want to go on till I find myself taking them for granted.”
She reached out a timid hand. “But you needn’t ever, dear… if you’d only leave it to me….”
He drew back sharply. “That seems simple to you, I suppose? Well, men are different.” He walked toward the dressing-table and glanced at the little enamelled clock which had been one of her wedding-presents.
“Time to dress, isn’t it? Shall you mind if I leave you to dine with Streffy, and whoever else is coming? I’d rather like a long tramp, and no more talking just at present except with myself.”
He passed her by and walked rapidly out of the room. Susy stood motionless, unable to lift a detaining hand or to find a final word of appeal. On her disordered dressing-table Mrs. Vanderlyn’s gifts glittered in the rosy lamp- light.
Yes: men were different, as he said.
XI.
BUT there were necessary accommodations, there always had been; Nick in old times, had been the first to own it…. How they had laughed at the Perpendicular People, the people who went by on the other side (since you couldn’t be a good Samaritan without stooping over and poking into heaps of you didn’t know what)! And now Nick had suddenly become perpendicular….
Susy, that evening, at the head of the dinner table, saw—in the breaks between her scudding thoughts—the nauseatingly familiar faces of the people she called her friends: Strefford, Fred Gillow, a giggling fool of a young Breckenridge, of their New York group, who had arrived that day, and Prince Nerone Altineri, Ursula’s Prince, who, in Ursula’s absence at a tiresome cure, had, quite simply and naturally, preferred to join her husband at Venice. Susy looked from one to the other of them, as if with newly-opened eyes, and wondered what life would be like with no faces but such as theirs to furnish it….
Ah, Nick had become perpendicular!… After all, most people went through life making a given set of gestures, like dance-steps learned in advance. If your dancing manual told you at a given time to be perpendicular, you had to be, automatically—and that was Nick!
“But what on earth, Susy,” Gillow’s puzzled voice suddenly came to her as from immeasurable distances, “Are you going to do in this beastly stifling hole for the rest of the summer?”
“Ask Nick, my dear fellow,” Strefford answered for her; and: “By the way, where is Nick—if one may ask?” young Breckenridge interposed, glancing up to take belated note of his host’s absence.
“Dining out,” said Susy glibly. “People turned up: blighting bores that I wouldn’t have dared to inflict on you.” How easily the old familiar fibbing came to her!
“The kind to whom you say, ‘Now mind you look me up’; and then spend the rest of your life dodging-like our good Hickses,” Strefford amplified.
The Hickses—but, of course, Nick was with the Hickses! It went through Susy like a knife, and the dinner she had so lightly fibbed became a hateful truth. She said to herself feverishly: “I’ll call him up there after dinner—and then he will feel silly”—but only to remember that the Hickses, in their mediaeval setting, had of course sternly denied themselves a telephone.
The fact of Nick’s temporary inaccessibility—since she was now convinced that he was really at the Hickses’— turned her distress to a mocking irritation. Ah, that was where he carried his principles, his standards, or whatever he called the new set of rules he had suddenly begun to apply to the old game! It was stupid of her not to have guessed it at once.
“Oh, the Hickses—Nick adores them, you know. He’s going to marry Coral next,” she laughed out, flashing the joke around the table with all her practiced flippancy.
“Lord!” grasped Gillow, inarticulate: while the Prince displayed the unsurprised smile which Susy accused him of practicing every morning with his Mueller exercises.
