iends...
getting up material for his book (this detail had occurred to her in the
night).

It was the kind of encounter she had most dreaded; but it proved, after
all, easy enough to go through compared with those endless hours of
turning to and fro, the night before, in the cage of her lonely room.
Anything, anything, but to be alone....

Gradually, from the force of habit, she found herself actually in tune
with the talk of the luncheon table, interested in the references to
absent friends, the light allusions to last year's loves and quarrels,
scandals and absurdities. The women, in their pale summer dresses,
were so graceful, indolent and sure of themselves, the men so easy and
good-humoured! Perhaps, after all, Susy reflected, it was the world she
was meant for, since the other, the brief Paradise of her dreams, had
already shut its golden doors upon her. And then, as they sat on the
terrace after luncheon, looking across at the yellow tree-tops of the
park, one of the women said something--made just an allusion--that Susy
would have let pass unnoticed in the old days, but that now filled her
with a sudden deep disgust.... She stood up and wandered away, away from
them all through the fading garden.

Two days later Susy and Strefford sat on the terrace of the Tuileries
above the Seine. She had asked him to meet her there, with the desire to
avoid the crowded halls and drawing-room of the Nouveau Luxe where, even
at that supposedly "dead" season, people one knew were always
drifting to and fro; and they sat on a bench in the pale sunlight,
the discoloured leaves heaped at their feet, and no one to share their
solitude but a lame working-man and a haggard woman who were lunching
together mournfully at the other end of the majestic vista.

Strefford, in his new mourning, looked unnaturally prosperous and
well-valeted; but his ugly untidy features remained as undisciplined,
his smile as whimsical, as of old. He had been on cool though friendly
terms with the pompous uncle and the poor sickly cousin whose joint
disappearance had so abruptly transformed his future; and it was his
way to understate his feelings rather than to pretend more than he
felt. Nevertheless, beneath his habitual bantering tone Susy discerned
a change. The disaster had shocked him profoundly; already, in his brief
sojourn among his people and among the great possessions so tragically
acquired, old instincts had awakened, forgotten associations