She pondered, and then questioned: “But in the interval-how are you going to defend yourself for another year?”
“Ah, you’ve got to see to that; you’ve got to take a little house in London. You’ve got to look after me, you know.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to flash back: “Oh, if that’s all you care—!” But caring was exactly the factor she wanted, as much as possible, to keep out of their talk and their thoughts. She could not ask him how much he cared without laying herself open to the same question; and that way terror lay. As a matter of fact, though Strefford was not an ardent wooer—perhaps from tact, perhaps from temperament, perhaps merely from the long habit of belittling and disintegrating every sentiment and every conviction—yet she knew he did care for her as much as he was capable of caring for anyone. If the element of habit entered largely into the feeling—if he liked her, above all, because he was used to her, knew her views, her indulgences, her allowances, knew he was never likely to be bored, and almost certain to be amused, by her; why, such ingredients though not of the fieriest, were perhaps those most likely to keep his feeling for her at a pleasant temperature. She had had a taste of the tropics, and wanted more equable weather; but the idea of having to fan his flame gently for a year was unspeakably depressing to her. Yet all this was precisely what she could not say. The long period of probation, during which, as she knew, she would have to amuse him, to guard him, to hold him, and to keep off the other women, was a necessary part of their situation. She was sure that, as little Breckenridge would have said, she could “pull it off”; but she did not want to think about it. What she would have preferred would have been to go away—no matter where and not see Strefford again till they were married. But she dared not tell him that either.
“A little house in London—?” She wondered.
“Well, I suppose you’ve got to have some sort of a roof over your head.”
“I suppose so.”
He sat down beside her. “If you like me well enough to live at Altringham some day, won’t you, in the meantime, let me provide you with a smaller and more convenient establishment?”
Still she hesitated. The alternative, she knew, would be to live on Ursula Gillow, Violet Melrose, or some other of her rich friends, any one of whom would be ready to lavish the largest hospitality on the prospective Lady Altringham. Such an arrangement, in the long run, would be no less humiliating to her pride, no less destructive to her independence, than Altringham’s little establishment. But she temporized. “I shall go over to London in December, and stay for a while with various people—then we can look about.”
“All right; as you like.” He obviously considered her hesitation ridiculous, but was too full of satisfaction at her having started divorce proceedings to be chilled by her reply.
“And now, look here, my dear; couldn’t I give you some sort of a ring?”
“A ring?” She flushed at the suggestion. “What’s the use, Streff, dear? With all those jewels locked away in London—”
“Oh, I daresay you’ll think them old-fashioned. And, hang it, why shouldn’t I give you something new, I ran across Ellie and Bockheimer yesterday, in the rue de la Paix, picking out sapphires. Do you like sapphires, or emeralds? Or just a diamond? I’ve seen a thumping one…. I’d like you to have it.”
Ellie and Bockheimer! How she hated the conjunction of the names! Their case always seemed to her like a caricature of her own, and she felt an unreasoning resentment against Ellie for having selected the same season for her unmating and remating.
“I wish you wouldn’t speak of them, Streff… as if they were like us! I can hardly bear to sit in the same room with Ellie Vanderlyn.”
“Hullo? What’s wrong? You mean because of her giving up Clarissa?”
“Not that only…. You don’t know…. I can’t tell you….” She shivered at the memory, and rose restlessly from the bench where they had been sitting.
Strefford gave his careless shrug. “Well, my dear, you can hardly expect me to agree, for after all it was to Ellie I owed the luck of being so long alone with you in Venice. If she and Algie hadn’t prolonged their honeymoon at the villa—”
He stopped abruptly, and looked at Susy. She was conscious that every drop of blood had left her face. She felt it ebbing away from her heart, flowing out of her as if from all her severed arteries, till it seemed as though nothing were left of life in her but one point of irreducible pain.
“Ellie—at your villa? What do you mean? Was it Ellie and Bockheimer who—?”
Strefford still stared. “You mean to say you didn’t know?”
“Who came after Nick and me…?” she insisted.
“Why, do you suppose I’d have turned you out otherwise? That beastly Bockheimer simply smothered me with gold. Ah, well, there’s one good thing: I shall never have to let the villa again! I rather like the little place myself, and I daresay once in a while we might go there for a day or two…. Susy, what’s the matter?” he exclaimed.
She returned his stare, but without seeing him. Everything swam and danced before her eyes.
“Then she was there while I was posting all those letters for her—?”
“Letters—what letters? What makes you look so frightfully upset?”
She pursued her thought as if he had not spoken. “She and Algie Bockheimer arrived there the very day that Nick and I left?”
“I suppose so. I thought she’d told you. Ellie always tells everybody everything.”
“She would have told me, I daresay—but I wouldn’t let her.”
“Well, my dear, that was hardly my fault, was it? Though I really don’t see—”
But Susy, still blind to everything but the dance of dizzy sparks before her eyes, pressed on as if she had not heard him. “It was their motor, then, that took us to Milan! It was Algie Bockheimer’s motor!” She did not know why, but this seemed to her the most humiliating incident in the whole hateful business. She remembered Nick’s reluctance to use the motor-she remembered his look when she had boasted of her “managing.” The nausea
