In the pause she heard him cough slightly and clear his throat. “Let me say, then,” he began, “that I’m glad too–immensely glad that your own future is so satisfactorily settled.”
She lifted her glance again to his walled face, in which not a muscle stirred.
“Yes: it–it makes everything easier for you, doesn’t it?”
“For you too, I hope.” He paused, and then went on: “I want also to tell you that I perfectly understand–”
“Oh,” she interrupted, “so do I; your point of view, I mean.”
They were again silent.
“Nick, why can’t we be friends real friends? Won’t it be easier?” she broke out at last with twitching lips.
“Easier–?”
“I mean, about talking things over–arrangements. There are arrangements to be made, I suppose?”
“I suppose so.” He hesitated. “I’m doing what I’m told-simply following out instructions. The business is easy enough, apparently. I’m taking the necessary steps–”
She reddened a little, and drew a gasping breath. “The necessary steps: what are they? Everything the lawyers tell one is so confusing …. I don’t yet understand–how it’s done.”
“My share, you mean? Oh, it’s very simple.” He paused, and added in a tone of laboured ease: “I’m going down to Fontainebleau to-morrow–”
She stared, not understanding. “To Fontainebleau–?”
Her bewilderment drew from him his first frank smile. “Well– I chose Fontainebleau–I don’t know why … except that we’ve never been there together.”
At that she suddenly understood, and the blood rushed to her forehead. She stood up without knowing what she was doing, her heart in her throat. “How grotesque–how utterly disgusting!”
He gave a slight shrug. “I didn’t make the laws ….”
“But isn’t it too stupid and degrading that such things should be necessary when two people want to part–?” She broke off again, silenced by the echo of that fatal “want to part.” …
He seemed to prefer not to dwell farther on the legal obligations involved.
“You haven’t yet told me,” he suggested, “how you happen to be living here.”
“Here–with the Fulmer children?” She roused herself, trying to catch his easier note. “Oh, I’ve simply been governessing them for a few weeks, while Nat and Grace are in Sicily.” She did not say: “It’s because I’ve parted with Strefford.” Somehow it helped her wounded pride a little to keep from him the secret of her precarious independence.
He looked his wonder. “All alone with that bewildered bonne? But how many of them are there? Five? Good Lord!” He contemplated the clock with unseeing eyes, and then turned them again on her face.
“I should have thought a lot of children would rather get on your nerves.”
“Oh, not these children. They’re so good to me.”
“Ah, well, I suppose it won’t be for long.”
He sent his eyes again about the room, which his absent-minded gaze seemed to reduce to its dismal constituent elements, and added, with an obvious effort at small talk: “I hear the Fulmers are not hitting it off very well since his success. Is it true that he’s going to marry Violet Melrose?”
The blood rose to Susy’s face. “Oh, never, never! He and Grace are travelling together now.”
“Oh, I didn’t know. People say things ….” He was visibly embarrassed with the subject, and sorry that he had broached it.
“Some of the things that people say are true. But Grace doesn’t mind. She says she and Nat belong to each other. They can’t help it, she thinks, after having been through such a lot together.”
“Dear old Grace!”
He had risen from his chair, and this time she made no effort to detain him. He seemed to have recovered his self-composure, and it struck her painfully, humiliatingly almost, that he should have spoken in that light way of the expedition to Fontainebleau on the morrow …. Well, men were different, she supposed; she remembered having felt that once before about Nick.
It was on the tip of her tongue to cry out: “But wait–wait! I’m not going to marry Strefford after all!”–but to do so would seem like an appeal to his compassion, to his indulgence; and that was not what she wanted. She could never forget that he had left her because he had not been able to forgive her for “managing”–and not for the world would she have him think that this meeting had been planned for such a purpose.