ands; and now the other
trumpery art had failed her, and she was conscious of bungling and
groping like a beginner under Strefford's ironic scrutiny.

They had reached their obscure destination and he opened the door and
glanced in.

"It's jammed--not a table. And stifling! Where shall we go? Perhaps they
could give us a room to ourselves--" he suggested.

She assented, and they were led up a cork-screw staircase to a
squat-ceilinged closet lit by the arched top of a high window, the lower
panes of which served for the floor below. Strefford opened the window,
and Susy, throwing her cloak on the divan, leaned on the balcony while
he ordered luncheon.

On the whole she was glad they were to be alone. Just because she
felt so sure of Strefford it seemed ungenerous to keep him longer in
suspense. The moment had come when they must have a decisive talk, and
in the crowded rooms below it would have been impossible.

Strefford, when the waiter had brought the first course and left them
to themselves, made no effort to revert to personal matters. He turned
instead to the topic always most congenial to him: the humours and
ironies of the human comedy, as presented by his own particular group.
His malicious commentary on life had always amused Susy because of the
shrewd flashes of philosophy he shed on the social antics they had
so often watched together. He was in fact the one person she knew
(excepting Nick) who was in the show and yet outside of it; and she was
surprised, as the talk proceeded, to find herself so little interested
in his scraps of gossip, and so little amused by his comments on them.

With an inward shrug of discouragement she said to herself that probably
nothing would ever really amuse her again; then, as she listened, she
began to understand that her disappointment arose from the fact that
Strefford, in reality, could not live without these people whom he
saw through and satirized, and that the rather commonplace scandals he
narrated interested him as much as his own racy considerations on them;
and she was filled with terror at the thought that the inmost core of
the richly-decorated life of the Countess of Altringham would be just
as poor and low-ceilinged a place as the little room in which he and she
now sat, elbow to elbow yet so unapproachably apart.

If Strefford could not live without these people, neither could she and
Nick; but for reasons how different! And if his opportunities had
been