To Nick there was something reposeful in this lucid intellectual curiosity. He wanted above all things to get away from sentiment, from seduction, from the moods and impulses and flashing contradictions that were Susy. Susy was not a great reader: her store of facts was small, and she had grown up among people who dreaded ideas as much as if they had been a contagious disease. But, in the early days especially, when Nick had put a book in her hand, or read a poem to her, her swift intelligence had instantly shed a new light on the subject, and, penetrating to its depths, had extracted from them whatever belonged to her. What a pity that this exquisite insight, this intuitive discrimination, should for the most part have been spent upon reading the thoughts of vulgar people, and extracting a profit from them–should have been wasted, since her childhood, on all the hideous intricacies of “managing”!
And visible beauty–how she cared for that too! He had not guessed it, or rather he had not been sure of it, till the day when, on their way through Paris, he had taken her to the Louvre, and they had stood before the little Crucifixion of Mantegna. He had not been looking at the picture, or watching to see what impression it produced on Susy. His own momentary mood was for Correggio and Fragonard, the laughter of the Music Lesson and the bold pagan joys of the Antiope; and then he had missed her from his side, and when he came to where she stood, forgetting him, forgetting everything, had seen the glare of that tragic sky in her face, her trembling lip, the tears on her lashes. That was Susy ….
Closing his book he stole a glance at Coral Hicks’s profile, thrown back against the cushions of the deck-chair at his side. There was something harsh and bracing in her blunt primitive build, in the projection of the black eyebrows that nearly met over her thick straight nose, and the faint barely visible black down on her upper lip. Some miracle of will-power, combined with all the artifices that wealth can buy, had turned the fat sallow girl he remembered into this commanding young woman, almost handsome at times indisputably handsome–in her big authoritative way. Watching the arrogant lines of her profile against the blue sea, he remembered, with a thrill that was sweet to his vanity, how twice–under the dome of the Scalzi and in the streets of Genoa–he had seen those same lines soften at his approach, turn womanly, pleading and almost humble. That was Coral ….
Suddenly she said, without turning toward him: “You’ve had no letters since you’ve been on board.”
He looked at her, surprised. “No–thank the Lord!” he laughed.
“And you haven’t written one either,” she continued in her hard statistical tone.
“No,” he again agreed, with the same laugh.
“That means that you really are free–”
“Free?”
He saw the cheek nearest him redden. “Really off on a holiday, I mean; not tied down.” After a pause he rejoined: “No, I’m not particularly tied down.”
“And your book?”
“Oh, my book–” He stopped and considered. He had thrust The Pageant of Alexander into his handbag on the night of his Bight from Venice; but since then he had never looked at it. Too many memories and illusions were pressed between its pages; and he knew just at what page he had felt Ellie Vanderlyn bending over him from behind, caught a whiff of her scent, and heard her breathless “I had to thank you!”
“My book’s hung up,” he said impatiently, annoyed with Miss Hicks’s lack of tact. There was a girl who never put out feelers ….
“Yes; I thought it was,” she went on quietly, and he gave her a startled glance. What the devil else did she think, he wondered? He had never supposed her capable of getting far enough out of her own thick carapace of self-sufficiency to penetrate into any one else’s feelings.
“The truth is,” he continued, embarrassed, “I suppose I dug away at it rather too continuously; that’s probably why I felt the need of a change. You see I’m only a beginner.”