ves up as best they could, while she
pursued her own course of self-development. A sombre zeal for knowledge
filled the mind of this strange girl: she appeared interested only
in fresh opportunities of adding to her store of facts. They were
illuminated by little imagination and less poetry; but, carefully
catalogued and neatly sorted in her large cool brain, they were always
as accessible as the volumes in an up-to-date public library.

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 t