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 ….”
“Yes?”
“And Nick–who was thinking of his book, and of all sorts of big things, fine things–didn’t realise … left it all to me … to manage ….”
She stumbled over the word, remembering how Nick had always winced at it. But Strefford did not seem to notice her, and she hurried on, unfolding in short awkward sentences the avowal of their pecuniary difficulties, and of Nick’s inability to understand that, to keep on with the kind of life they were leading, one had to put up with things … accept favours ….
“Borrow money, you mean?”
“Well–yes; and all the rest.” No–decidedly she could not reveal to Strefford the episode of Ellie’s letters. “Nick suddenly felt, I suppose, that he couldn’t stand it,” she continued; “and instead of asking me to try–to try to live differently, go off somewhere with him and live, like work- people, in two rooms, without a servant, as I was ready to do; well, instead he wrote me that it had all been a mistake from the beginning, that we couldn’t keep it up, and had better recognize the fact; and he went off on the Hickses’ yacht. The last evening that you were in Venice–the day he didn’t come back to dinner–he had gone off to Genoa to meet them. I suppose he intends to marry Coral.”
Strefford received this in silence. “Well–it was your bargain, wasn’t it?” he said at length.
“Yes; but–”
“Exactly: I always told you so. You weren’t ready to have him go yet–that’s all.”
She flushed to the forehead. “Oh, Streff–is it really all?”
“A question of time? If you doubt it, I’d like to see you try, for a while, in those two rooms without a servant; and then let me hear from you. Why, my dear, it’s only a question of time in a palace, with a steam yacht lying off the door-step, and a flock of motors in the garage; look around you and see. And did you ever imagine that you and Nick, of all people, were going to escape the common doom, and survive like Mr. and Mrs. Tithonus, while all about you the eternal passions were crumbling to pieces, and your native Divorce-states piling up their revenues?”
She sat with bent head, the weight of the long years to come pressing like a leaden load on her shoulders.
“But I’m so young … life’s so long. What does last, then?”
“Ah, you’re too young to believe me, if I were to tell you; though you’re intelligent enough to understand.”
“What does, then?”
“Why, the hold of the things we all think we could do without. Habits–they outstand the Pyramids. Comforts, luxuries, the atmosphere of ease … above all, the power to get away from dulness and monotony, from constraints and uglinesses. You chose that power, instinctively, before you were even grown up; and so did Nick. And the only difference between you is that he’s had the sense to see sooner than you that those are the things that last, the prime necessities.”
“I don’t believe it!”
“Of course you don’t: at your age one doesn’t reason one’s materialism. And besides you’re mortally hurt that Nick has found out sooner than you, and hasn’t disguised his discovery under any hypocritical phrases.”
“But surely there are people–”
“Yes–saints and geniuses and heroes: all the fanatics! To which of their categories do you suppose we soft people belong? And the heroes and the geniuses–haven’t they their enormous frailties and their giant appetites? And how should we escape being the victims of our little ones?”