“I don’t know whom he meant them for–but they’re not ours ….”
She continued to look at him wonderingly. “I don’t see what there is to be solemn about. The cigars are not Streffy’s either … you may be sure he got them out of some bounder. And there’s nothing he’d hate more than to have them passed on to another.”
“Nonsense. If they’re not Streffy’s they’re much less mine. Hand them over, please, dear.”
“Just as you like. But it does seem a waste; and, of course, the other people will never have one of them …. The gardener and Giulietta’s lover will see to that!”
Lansing looked away from her at the waves of lace and muslin from which she emerged like a rosy Nereid. “How many boxes of them are left?”
“Only four.”
“Unpack them, please.”
Before she moved there was a pause so full of challenge that Lansing had time for an exasperated sense of the disproportion between his anger and its cause. And this made him still angrier.
She held out a box. “The others are in your suitcase downstairs. It’s locked and strapped.”
“Give me the key, then.”
“We might send them back from Venice, mightn’t we? That lock is so nasty: it will take you half an hour.”
“Give me the key, please.” She gave it.
He went downstairs and battled with the lock, for the allotted half-hour, under the puzzled eyes of Giulietta and the sardonic grin of the chauffeur, who now and then, from the threshold, politely reminded him how long it would take to get to Milan. Finally the key turned, and Lansing, broken-nailed and perspiring, extracted the cigars and stalked with them into the deserted drawing room. The great bunches of golden roses that he and Susy had gathered the day before were dropping their petals on the marble embroidery of the floor, pale camellias floated in the alabaster tazzas between the windows, haunting scents of the garden blew in on him with the breeze from the lake. Never had Streffy’s little house seemed so like a nest of pleasures. Lansing laid the cigar boxes on a console and ran upstairs to collect his last possessions. When he came down again, his wife, her eyes brilliant with achievement, was seated in their borrowed chariot, the luggage cleverly stowed away, and Giulietta and the gardener kissing her hand and weeping out inconsolable farewells.
“I wonder what she’s given them?” he thought, as he jumped in beside her and the motor whirled them through the nightingale- thickets to the gate.
Chapter IV.
Charlie Strefford’s villa was like a nest in a rose-bush; the Nelson Vanderlyns’ palace called for loftier analogies.
Its vastness and splendour seemed, in comparison, oppressive to Susy. Their landing, after dark, at the foot of the great shadowy staircase, their dinner at a dimly-lit table under a ceiling weighed down with Olympians, their chilly evening in a corner of a drawing room where minuets should have been danced before a throne, contrasted with the happy intimacies of Como as their sudden sense of disaccord contrasted with the mutual confidence of the day before.
The journey had been particularly jolly: both Susy and Lansing had had too long a discipline in the art of smoothing things over not to make a special effort to hide from each other the ravages of their first disagreement. But, deep down and invisible, the disagreement remained; and compunction for having been its cause gnawed at Susy’s bosom as she sat in her tapestried and vaulted bedroom, brushing her hair before a tarnished mirror.
“I thought I liked grandeur; but this place is really out of scale,” she mused, watching the reflection of a pale hand move back and forward in the dim recesses of the mirror. “And yet,” she continued, “Ellie Vanderlyn’s hardly half an inch taller than I am; and she certainly isn’t a bit more dignified …. I wonder if it’s because I feel so horribly small to-night that the place seems so horribly big.”
She loved luxury: splendid things always made her feel handsome and high ceilings arrogant; she did not remember having ever before been oppressed by the evidences of wealth.