She did not immediately answer Mrs. Vanderlyn’s question; and the latter, repeating it, added impatiently: “I don’t understand you; if Nick agrees-”
“Oh, he agrees,” said Susy.
“Then what more do you want! Oh, Susy, if you’d only follow my example!”
“Your example?” Susy paused, weighed the word, was struck by something embarrassed, arch yet half-apologetic in her friend’s expression. “Your example?” she repeated. “Why, Ellie, what on earth do you mean? Not that you’re going to part from poor Nelson?”
Mrs. Vanderlyn met her reproachful gaze with a crystalline glance. “I don’t want to, heaven knows–poor dear Nelson! I assure you I simply hate it. He’s always such an angel to Clarissa … and then we’re used to each other. But what in the world am I to do? Algie’s so rich, so appallingly rich, that I have to be perpetually on the watch to keep other women away from him–and it’s too exhausting ….”
“Algie?”
Mrs. Vanderlyn’s lovely eyebrows rose. “Algie: Algie Bockheimer. Didn’t you know, I think he said you’ve dined with his parents. Nobody else in the world is as rich as the Bockheimers; and Algie’s their only child. Yes, it was with him … with him I was so dreadfully happy last spring … and now I’m in mortal terror of losing him. And I do assure you there’s no other way of keeping them, when they’re as hideously rich as that!”
Susy rose to her feet. A little shudder ran over her. She remembered, now, having seen Algie Bockheimer at one of his parents’ first entertainments, in their newly-inaugurated marble halls in Fifth Avenue. She recalled his too faultless clothes and his small glossy furtive countenance. She looked at Ellie Vanderlyn with sudden scorn.
“I think you’re abominable,” she exclaimed.
The other’s perfect little face collapsed. “A-bo-minable? A-bo-mi-nable? Susy!”
“Yes … with Nelson … and Clarissa … and your past together … and all the money you can possibly want … and that man! Abominable.”
Ellie stood up trembling: she was not used to scenes, and they disarranged her thoughts as much as her complexion.
“You’re very cruel, Susy–so cruel and dreadful that I hardly know how to answer you,” she stammered. “But you simply don’t know what you’re talking about. As if anybody ever had all the money they wanted!” She wiped her dark-rimmed eyes with a cautious handkerchief, glanced at herself in the mirror, and added magnanimously: “But I shall try to forget what you’ve said.”
Chapter XIX
Just such a revolt as she had felt as a girl, such a disgusted recoil from the standards and ideals of everybody about her as had flung her into her mad marriage with Nick, now flamed in Susy Lansing’s bosom.
How could she ever go back into that world again? How echo its appraisals of life and bow down to its judgments? Alas, it was only by marrying according to its standards that she could escape such subjection. Perhaps the same thought had actuated Nick: perhaps he had understood sooner than she that to attain moral freedom they must both be above material cares. Perhaps …
Her talk with Ellie Vanderlyn had left Susy so oppressed and humiliated that she almost shrank from her meeting with Altringham the next day. She knew that he was coming to Paris for his final answer; he would wait as long as was necessary if only she would consent to take immediate steps for a divorce. She was staying at a modest hotel in the Faubourg St. Germain, and had once more refused his suggestion that they should lunch at the Nouveau Luxe, or at some fashionable restaurant of the Boulevards. As before, she insisted on going to an out-of-the- way place near the Luxembourg, where the prices were moderate enough for her own purse.
“I can’t understand,” Strefford objected, as they turned from her hotel door toward this obscure retreat, “why you insist on giving me bad food, and depriving me of the satisfaction of being seen with you. Why must we be so dreadfully clandestine? Don’t people know by this time that we’re to be married?”
Susy winced a little: she wondered if the word would always sound so unnatural on his lips.