He stood motionless, unresponding. One hand drummed on the corner of her dressing-table, making the jewelled bangle dance.
“How many letters?”
“I don’t know … four … five … What does it matter?”
“And once a week, for six weeks–?”
“Yes.”
“And you took it all as a matter of course?”
“No: I hated it. But what could I do?”
“What could you do?”
“When our being together depended on it? Oh, Nick, how could you think I’d give you up?”
“Give me up?” he echoed.
“Well–doesn’t our being together depend on–on what we can get out of people? And hasn’t there always got to be some give-and- take? Did you ever in your life get anything for nothing?” she cried with sudden exasperation. “You’ve lived among these people as long as I have; I suppose it’s not the first time–”
“By God, but it is,” he exclaimed, flushing. “And that’s the difference–the fundamental difference.”
“The difference!”
“Between you and me. I’ve never in my life done people’s dirty work for them–least of all for favours in return. I suppose you guessed it, or you wouldn’t have hidden this beastly business from me.”
The blood rose to Susy’s temples also. Yes, she had guessed it; instinctively, from the day she had first visited him in his bare lodgings, she had been aware of his stricter standard. But how could she tell him that under his influence her standard had become stricter too, and that it was as much to hide her humiliation from herself as to escape his anger that she had held her tongue?
“You knew I wouldn’t have stayed here another day if I’d known,” he continued.
“Yes: and then where in the world should we have gone?”
“You mean that–in one way or another–what you call give-and- take is the price of our remaining together?”
“Well–isn’t it,” she faltered.
“Then we’d better part, hadn’t we?”
He spoke in a low tone, thoughtfully and deliberately, as if this had been the inevitable conclusion to which their passionate argument had led.
Susy made no answer. For a moment she ceased to be conscious of the causes of what had happened; the thing itself seemed to have smothered her under its ruins.
Nick wandered away from the dressing-table and stood gazing out of the window at the darkening canal flecked with lights. She looked at his back, and wondered what would happen if she were to go up to him and fling her arms about him. But even if her touch could have broken the spell, she was not sure she would have chosen that way of breaking it. Beneath her speechless anguish there burned the half-conscious sense of having been unfairly treated. When they had entered into their queer compact, Nick had known as well as she on what compromises and concessions the life they were to live together must be based. That he should have forgotten it seemed so unbelievable that she wondered, with a new leap of fear, if he were using the wretched Ellie’s indiscretion as a means of escape from a tie already wearied of. Suddenly she raised her head with a laugh.
“After all–you were right when you wanted me to be your mistress.”
He turned on her with an astonished stare. “You–my mistress?”
Through all her pain she thrilled with pride at the discovery that such a possibility had long since become unthinkable to him. But she insisted. “That day at the Fulmers’–have you forgotten? When you said it would be sheer madness for us to marry.”
Lansing stood leaning in the embrasure of the window, his eyes fixed on the mosaic volutes of the floor.
“I was right enough when I said it would be sheer madness for us to marry,” he rejoined at length.
She sprang up trembling. “Well, that’s easily settled. Our compact–”
“Oh, that compact–” he interrupted her with an impatient laugh.
“Aren’t you asking me to carry it out now?”
“Because I said we’d better part?” He paused. “But the compact–I’d almost forgotten it–was to the effect, wasn’t it, that we were to give each other a helping hand if either of us had a better chance? The thing was absurd, of course; a mere joke; from my point of view, at least. I shall never want any better chance … any other chance ….”