Strefford, on entering, had glanced about the dreary room, with its piano laden with tattered music, the children’s toys littering the lame sofa, the bunches of dyed grass and impaled butterflies flanking the cast-bronze clock. Then he had turned to Susy and asked simply: “Why on earth are you here?”
She had not tried to explain; from the first, she had understood the impossibility of doing so. And she would not betray her secret longing to return to Nick, now that she knew that Nick had taken definite steps for his release. In dread lest Strefford should have heard of this, and should announce it to her, coupling it with the news of Nick’s projected marriage, and lest, hearing her fears thus substantiated, she should lose her self-control, she had preferred to say, in a voice that she tried to make indifferent: “The ‘proceedings,’ or whatever the lawyers call them, have begun. While they’re going on I like to stay quite by myself …. I don’t know why ….”
Strefford, at that, had looked at her keenly. “Ah,” he murmured; and his lips were twisted into their old mocking smile. “Speaking of proceedings,” he went on carelessly, “what stage have Ellie’s reached, I wonder? I saw her and Vanderlyn and Bockheimer all lunching cheerfully together to-day at Larue’s.”
The blood rushed to Susy’s forehead. She remembered her tragic evening with Nelson Vanderlyn, only two months earlier, and thought to herself. “In time, then, I suppose, Nick and I ….
Aloud she said: “I can’t imagine how Nelson and Ellie can ever want to see each other again. And in a restaurant, of all places!”
Strefford continued to smile. “My dear, you’re incorrigibly old-fashioned. Why should two people who’ve done each other the best turn they could by getting out of each other’s way at the right moment behave like sworn enemies ever afterward? It’s too absurd; the humbug’s too flagrant. Whatever our generation has failed to do, it’s got rid of humbug; and that’s enough to immortalize it. I daresay Nelson and Ellie never liked each other better than they do to-day. Twenty years ago, they’d have been afraid to confess it; but why shouldn’t they now?”
Susy looked at Strefford, conscious that under his words was the ache of the disappointment she had caused him; and yet conscious also that that very ache was not the overwhelming penetrating emotion he perhaps wished it to be, but a pang on a par with a dozen others; and that even while he felt it he foresaw the day when he should cease to feel it. And she thought to herself that this certainty of oblivion must be bitterer than any certainty of pain.
A silence had fallen between them. He broke it by rising from his seat, and saying with a shrug: “You’ll end by driving me to marry Joan Senechal.”
Susy smiled. “Well, why not? She’s lovely.”
“Yes; but she’ll bore me.”
“Poor Streff! So should I–”
“Perhaps. But nothing like as soon–” He grinned sardonically. “There’d be more margin.” He appeared to wait for her to speak. “And what else on earth are you going to do?” he concluded, as she still remained silent.
“Oh, Streff, I couldn’t marry you for a reason like that!” she murmured at length.
“Then marry me, and find your reason afterward.”
Her lips made a movement of denial, and still in silence she held out her hand for good-bye. He clasped it, and then turned away; but on the threshold he paused, his screwed-up eyes fixed on her wistfully.
The look moved her, and she added hurriedly: “The only reason I can find is one for not marrying you. It’s because I can’t yet feel unmarried enough.”
“Unmarried enough? But I thought Nick was doing his best to make you feel that.”
“Yes. But even when he has–sometimes I think even that won’t make any difference.”
He still scrutinized her hesitatingly, with the gravest eyes she had ever seen in his careless face.
“My dear, that’s rather the way I feel about you,” he said simply as he turned to go.
That evening after the children had gone to bed Susy sat up late in the cheerless sitting-room. She was not thinking of Strefford but of Nick. He was coming to Paris–perhaps he had already arrived. The idea that he might be in the same place with her at that very moment, and without her knowing it, was so strange and painful that she felt a violent revolt of all her strong and joy-loving youth. Why should she go on suffering so unbearably, so abjectly, so miserably? If only she could see him, hear his voice, even hear him say again such cruel and humiliating words as he had spoken on that dreadful day in Venice when that would be better than this blankness, this utter and final exclusion from his life! He had been cruel to her, unimaginably cruel: hard, arrogant, unjust; and had been so, perhaps, deliberately, because he already wanted to be free. But she was ready to face even that possibility, to humble herself still farther than he had humbled her–she was ready to do anything, if only she might see him once again.