"Oh, yes--darling Nick?" Mrs. Melrose chimed in; and Susy, her head erect, her cheeks aflame, declared with resonance: "Most awfully well--splendidly!"

"He's not here, though?" from Fulmer.

"No. He's off travelling--cruising."

Mrs. Melrose's attention was faintly roused. "With anybody interesting?"

"No; you wouldn't know them. People we met...." She did not have to continue, for her hostess's gaze had again strayed.

"And you've come for your clothes, I suppose, darling? Don't listen to people who say that skirts are to be wider. I've discovered a new woman--a Genius--and she absolutely swathes you.... Her name's my secret; but we'll go to her together."

Susy rose from her engulphing armchair. "Do you mind if I go up to my room? I'm rather tired--coming straight through."

"Of course, dear. I think there are some people coming to dinner... Mrs.

Match will tell you. She has such a memory.... Fulmer, where on earth are those cartoons of the music-room?"

Their voices pursued Susy upstairs, as, in Mrs. Match's perpendicular wake, she mounted to the white-panelled room with its gay linen hangings and the low bed heaped with more cushions.

"If we'd come here," she thought, "everything might have been different." And she shuddered at the sumptuous memories of the Palazzo Vanderlyn, and the great painted bedroom where she had met her doom.

Mrs. Match, hoping she would find everything, and mentioning that dinner was not till nine, shut her softly in among her terrors.

"Find everything?" Susy echoed the phrase. Oh, yes, she would always find everything: every time the door shut on her now, and the sound of voices ceased, her memories would be there waiting for her, every one of them, waiting quietly, patiently, obstinately, like poor people in a doctor's office, the people who are always last to be attended to, but whom nothing will discourage or drive away, people to whom time is nothing, fatigue nothing, hunger nothing, other engagements nothing: who just wait.... Thank heaven, after all, that she had not found the house empty, if, whenever she returned to her room, she was to meet her memories there!

It was just a week since Nick had left her. During that week, crammed with people, questions, packing, explaining, evading, she had believed that in solitude lay her salvation. Now she understood that there was nothing she was so unprepared for, so unfitted for. When, in all her life, had she ever been alone? And how was she to bear it now, with all these ravening memories besetting her!

Dinner not till nine? What on earth was she to do till nine o'clock? She knelt before her boxes, and feverishly began to unpack.

Gradually, imperceptibly, the subtle influences of her old life were stealing into her. As she pulled out her tossed and crumpled dresses she remembered Violet's emphatic warning: "Don't believe the people who tell you that skirts are going to be wider." Were hers, perhaps, too wide as it was? She looked at her limp raiment, piling itself up on bed and sofa, and understood that, according to Violet's standards, and that of all her set, those dresses, which Nick had thought so original and exquisite, were already commonplace and dowdy, fit only to be pa.s.sed on to poor relations or given to one's maid. And Susy would have to go on wearing them till they fell to bits-or else.... Well, or else begin the old life again in some new form....

She laughed aloud at the turn of her thoughts. Dresses? How little they had mattered a few short weeks ago! And now, perhaps, they would again be one of the foremost considerations in her life. How could it be otherwise, if she were to return again to her old dependence on Ellie Vanderlyn, Ursula Gillow, Violet Melrose? And beyond that, only the Bockheimers and their kind awaited her....

A knock on the door--what a relief! It was Mrs. Match again, with a telegram. To whom had Susy given her new address? With a throbbing heart she tore open the envelope and read:

"Shall be in Paris Friday for twenty-four hours where can I see you write Nouveau Luxe."

Ah, yes--she remembered now: she had written to Strefford! And this was his answer: he was coming. She dropped into a chair, and tried to think.

What on earth had she said in her letter? It had been mainly, of course, one of condolence; but now she remembered having added, in a precipitate postscript: "I can't give your message to Nick, for he's gone off with the Hickses-I don't know where, or for how long. It's all right, of course: it was in our bargain."

She had not meant to put in that last phrase; but as she sealed her letter to Strefford her eye had fallen on Nick's missive, which lay beside it. Nothing in her husband's brief lines had embittered her as much as the allusion to Strefford. It seemed to imply that Nick's own plans were made, that his own future was secure, and that he could therefore freely and handsomely take thought for hers, and give her a pointer in the right direction. Sudden rage had possessed her at the thought: where she had at first read jealousy she now saw only a cold providence, and in a blur of tears she had scrawled her postscript to Strefford. She remembered that she had not even asked him to keep her secret. Well--after all, what would it matter if people should already know that Nick had left her? Their parting could not long remain a mystery, and the fact that it was known might help her to keep up a presence of indifference.

"It was in the bargain--in the bargain," rang through her brain as she re-read Strefford's telegram. She understood that he had s.n.a.t.c.hed the time for this hasty trip solely in the hope of seeing her, and her eyes filled. The more bitterly she thought of Nick the more this proof of Strefford's friendship moved her.

The clock, to her relief, reminded her that it was time to dress for dinner. She would go down presently, chat with Violet and Fulmer, and with Violet's other guests, who would probably be odd and amusing, and too much out of her world to embarra.s.s her by awkward questions. She would sit at a softly-lit table, breathe delicate scents, eat exquisite food (trust Mrs. Match!), and be gradually drawn again under the spell of her old a.s.sociations. Anything, anything but to be alone....

She dressed with even more than her habitual care, reddened her lips attentively, brushed the faintest bloom of pink over her drawn cheeks, and went down--to meet Mrs. Match coming up with a tray.

"Oh, Madam, I thought you were too tired.... I was bringing it up to you myself--just a little morsel of chicken."

Susy, glancing past her, saw, through the open door, that the lamps were not lit in the drawing-room.

"Oh, no, I'm not tired, thank you. I thought Mrs. Melrose expected friends at dinner!"

"Friends at dinner-to-night?" Mrs. Match heaved a despairing sigh.

Sometimes, the sigh seemed to say, her mistress put too great a strain upon her. "Why, Mrs. Melrose and Mr. Fulmer were engaged to dine in Paris. They left an hour ago. Mrs. Melrose told me she'd told you," the house-keeper wailed.

Susy kept her little fixed smile. "I must have misunderstood. In that case... well, yes, if it's no trouble, I believe I will have my tray upstairs."

Slowly she turned, and followed the housekeeper up into the dread solitude she had just left.

XIV

THE next day a lot of people turned up unannounced for luncheon. They were not of the far-fetched and the exotic, in whom Mrs. Melrose now specialized, but merely commonplace fashionable people belonging to Susy's own group, people familiar with the amusing romance of her penniless marriage, and to whom she had to explain (though none of them really listened to the explanation) that Nick was not with her just now but had gone off cruising... cruising in the AEgean with friends...

getting up material for his book (this detail had occurred to her in the night).

It was the kind of encounter she had most dreaded; but it proved, after all, easy enough to go through compared with those endless hours of turning to and fro, the night before, in the cage of her lonely room.

Anything, anything, but to be alone....

Gradually, from the force of habit, she found herself actually in tune with the talk of the luncheon table, interested in the references to absent friends, the light allusions to last year's loves and quarrels, scandals and absurdities. The women, in their pale summer dresses, were so graceful, indolent and sure of themselves, the men so easy and good-humoured! Perhaps, after all, Susy reflected, it was the world she was meant for, since the other, the brief Paradise of her dreams, had already shut its golden doors upon her. And then, as they sat on the terrace after luncheon, looking across at the yellow tree-tops of the park, one of the women said something--made just an allusion--that Susy would have let pa.s.s unnoticed in the old days, but that now filled her with a sudden deep disgust.... She stood up and wandered away, away from them all through the fading garden.

Two days later Susy and Strefford sat on the terrace of the Tuileries above the Seine. She had asked him to meet her there, with the desire to avoid the crowded halls and drawing-room of the Nouveau Luxe where, even at that supposedly "dead" season, people one knew were always drifting to and fro; and they sat on a bench in the pale sunlight, the discoloured leaves heaped at their feet, and no one to share their solitude but a lame working-man and a haggard woman who were lunching together mournfully at the other end of the majestic vista.

Strefford, in his new mourning, looked unnaturally prosperous and well-valeted; but his ugly untidy features remained as undisciplined, his smile as whimsical, as of old. He had been on cool though friendly terms with the pompous uncle and the poor sickly cousin whose joint disappearance had so abruptly transformed his future; and it was his way to understate his feelings rather than to pretend more than he felt. Nevertheless, beneath his habitual bantering tone Susy discerned a change. The disaster had shocked him profoundly; already, in his brief sojourn among his people and among the great possessions so tragically acquired, old instincts had awakened, forgotten a.s.sociations had spoken in him. Susy listened to him wistfully, silenced by her imaginative perception of the distance that these things had put between them.

"It was horrible... seeing them both there together, laid out in that hideous Pugin chapel at Altringham... the poor boy especially. I suppose that's really what's cutting me up now," he murmured, almost apologetically.

"Oh, it's more than that--more than you know," she insisted; but he jerked back: "Now, my dear, don't be edifying, please," and fumbled for a cigarette in the pocket which was already beginning to bulge with his miscellaneous properties.

"And now about you--for that's what I came for," he continued, turning to her with one of his sudden movements. "I couldn't make head or tail of your letter."

She paused a moment to steady her voice. "Couldn't you? I suppose you'd forgotten my bargain with Nick. He hadn't-and he's asked me to fulfil it."

Strefford stared. "What--that nonsense about your setting each other free if either of you had the chance to make a good match?"

She signed "Yes."

"And he's actually asked you--?"

"Well: practically. He's gone off with the Hickses. Before going he wrote me that we'd better both consider ourselves free. And Coral sent me a postcard to say that she would take the best of care of him."

Strefford mused, his eyes upon his cigarette. "But what the deuce led up to all this? It can't have happened like that, out of a clear sky."

Susy flushed, hesitated, looked away. She had meant to tell Strefford the whole story; it had been one of her chief reasons for wishing to see him again, and half-unconsciously, perhaps, she had hoped, in his laxer atmosphere, to recover something of her shattered self-esteem. But now she suddenly felt the impossibility of confessing to anyone the depths to which Nick's wife had stooped. She fancied that her companion guessed the nature of her hesitation.

"Don't tell me anything you don't want to, you know, my dear."

"No; I do want to; only it's difficult. You see--we had so very little money...."