present bliss was as complete as ever, but it was ringed by the perpetual menace of all she knew she was hiding from Nick, and of all she suspected him of hiding from her….
She was thinking of these things one afternoon about three weeks after their arrival in Venice. It was near sunset, and she sat alone on the balcony, watching the cross-lights on the water weave their pattern above the flushed reflection of old palace-basements. She was almost always alone at that hour. Nick had taken to writing in the afternoons—he had been as good as his word, and so, apparently, had the Muse and it was his habit to join his wife only at sunset, for a late row on the lagoon. She had taken Clarissa, as usual, to the Giardino Pubblico, where that obliging child had politely but indifferently “played”—Clarissa joined in the diversions of her age as if conforming to an obsolete tradition—and had brought her back for a music lesson, echoes of which now drifted down from a distant window.
Susy had come to be extremely thankful for Clarissa. But for the little girl, her pride in her husband’s industry might have been tinged with a faint sense of being at times left out and forgotten; and as Nick’s industry was the completest justification for their being where they were, and for her having done what she had, she was grateful to Clarissa for helping her to feel less alone. Clarissa, indeed, represented the other half of her justification: it was as much on the child’s account as on Nick’s that Susy had held her tongue, remained in Venice, and slipped out once a week to post one of Ellie’s numbered letters. A day’s experience of the Palazzo Vanderlyn had convinced Susy of the impossibility of deserting Clarissa. Long experience had shown her that the most crowded households often contain the loneliest nurseries, and that the rich child is exposed to evils unknown to less pampered infancy; but hitherto such things had merely been to her one of the uglier bits in the big muddled pattern of life. Now she found herself feeling where before she had only judged: her precarious bliss came to her charged with a new weight of pity.
She was thinking of these things, and of the approaching date of Ellie Vanderlyn’s return, and of the searching truths she was storing up for that lady’s private ear, when she noticed a gondola turning its prow toward the steps below the balcony. She leaned over, and a tall gentleman in shabby clothes, glancing up at her as he jumped out, waved a mouldy Panama in joyful greeting.
“Streffy!” she exclaimed as joyfully; and she was halfway down the stairs when he ran up them followed by his luggage-laden boatman.
“It’s all right, I suppose?—Ellie said I might come,” he explained in a shrill cheerful voice; “and I’m to have my same green room with the parrot-panels, because its furniture is already so frightfully stained with my hair- wash.”
Susy was beaming on him with the deep sense of satisfaction which his presence always produced in his friends. There was no one in the world, they all agreed, half as ugly and untidy and delightful as Streffy; no one who combined such outspoken selfishness with such imperturbable good humour; no one who knew so well how to make you believe he was being charming to you when it was you who were being charming to him.
In addition to these seductions, of which none estimated the value more accurately than their possessor, Strefford had for Susy another attraction of which he was probably unconscious. It was that of being the one rooted and stable being among the fluid and shifting figures that composed her world. Susy had always lived among people so denationalized that those one took for Russians generally turned out to be American, and those one was inclined to ascribe to New York proved to have originated in Rome or Bucharest. These cosmopolitan people, who, in countries not their own, lived in houses as big as hotels, or in hotels where the guests were as international as the waiters, had inter-married, inter-loved and inter-divorced each other over the whole face of Europe, and according to every code that attempts to regulate human ties. Strefford, too, had his home in this world, but only one of his homes. The other, the one he spoke of, and probably thought of, least often, was a great dull English country-house in a northern county, where a life as monotonous and self-contained as his own was chequered and dispersed had gone on for generation after generation; and it was the sense of that house, and of all it typified even to his vagrancy and irreverence, which, coming out now and then in his talk, or in his attitude toward something or somebody, gave him a firmer outline and a steadier footing than the other marionettes in the dance. Superficially so like them all, and so eager to outdo them in detachment and adaptability, ridiculing the prejudices he had shaken off, and the people to whom he belonged, he still kept, under his easy pliancy, the skeleton of old faiths and old fashions. “He talks every language as well as the rest of us,” Susy had once said of him, “but at least he talks one language better than the others”; and Strefford, told of the remark, had laughed, called her an idiot, and been pleased.
As he shambled up the stairs with her, arm in arm, she was thinking of this quality with a new appreciation of its value. Even she and Lansing, in spite of their unmixed Americanism, their substantial background of old- fashioned cousinships in New York and Philadelphia, were as mentally detached, as universally at home, as touts at an International Exhibition. If they were usually recognized as Americans it was only because they spoke French so well, and because Nick was too fair to be “foreign,” and too sharp-featured to be English. But Charlie Strefford was English with all the strength of an inveterate habit; and something in Susy was slowly waking to a sense of the beauty of habit.
Lounging on the balcony, whither he had followed her without pausing to remove the stains of travel, Strefford showed himself immensely interested in the last chapter of her history, greatly pleased at its having been enacted under his roof, and hugely and flippantly amused at the firmness with which she refused to let him see Nick till the latter’s daily task was over.
“Writing? Rot! What’s he writing? He’s breaking you in, my dear; that’s what he’s doing: establishing an alibi. What’ll you bet he’s just sitting there smoking and reading Le Rire? Let’s go and see.”
But Susy was firm. “He’s read me his first chapter: it’s wonderful. It’s a philosophic romance—rather like Marius, you know.”
“Oh, yes—I do!” said Strefford, with a laugh that she thought idiotic.
She flushed up like a child. “You’re stupid, Streffy. You forget that Nick and I don’t need alibis. We’ve got rid of all that hyprocrisy by agreeing that each will give the other a hand up when either of us wants a change. We’ve not married to spy and lie, and nag each other; we’ve formed a partnership for our mutual advantage.”
“I see; that’s capital. But how can you be sure that, when Nick wants a change, you’ll consider it for his advantage to have one?”
It was the point that had always secretly tormented Susy; she often wondered if it equally tormented Nick.
“I hope I shall have enough common sense—” she began.
“Oh, of course: common sense is what you’re both bound to base your argument on, whichever way you argue.”
This flash of insight disconcerted her, and she said, a little irritably: “What should you do then, if you married?—Hush, Streffy! I forbid you to shout like that—all the gondolas are stopping to look!”
“How can I help it?” He rocked backward and forward in his chair. “‘If you marry,’ she says: ‘Streffy, what have
