theirs, what a world they would have created for themselves! Such
imaginings were vain, and she shrank back from them into the present.
After all, as Lady Altringham she would have the power to create that
world which she and Nick had dreamed... only she must create it alone.
Well, that was probably the law of things. All human happiness was thus
conditioned and circumscribed, and hers, no doubt, must always be of the
lonely kind, since material things did not suffice for it, even though
it depended on them as Grace Fulmer's, for instance, never had. Yet even
Grace Fulmer had succumbed to Ursula's offer, and had arrived at Ruan
the day before Susy left, instead of going to Spain with her husband
and Violet Melrose. But then Grace was making the sacrifice for her
children, and somehow one had the feeling that in giving up her liberty
she was not surrendering a tittle of herself. All the difference was
there....

"How I do bore you!" Susy heard Strefford exclaim. She became aware
that she had not been listening: stray echoes of names of places and
people--Violet Melrose, Ursula, Prince Altineri, others of their group
and persuasion--had vainly knocked at her barricaded brain; what had he
been telling her about them? She turned to him and their eyes met; his
were full of a melancholy irony.

"Susy, old girl, what's wrong?"

She pulled herself together. "I was thinking, Streff, just now--when I
said I hated the very sound of pearls and chinchilla--how impossible
it was that you should believe me; in fact, what a blunder I'd made in
saying it."

He smiled. "Because it was what so many other women might be likely to
say so awfully unoriginal, in fact?"

She laughed for sheer joy at his insight. "It's going to be easier than
I imagined," she thought. Aloud she rejoined: "Oh, Streff--how you're
always going to find me out! Where on earth shall I ever hide from you?"

"Where?" He echoed her laugh, laying his hand lightly on hers. "In my
heart, I'm afraid."

In spite of the laugh his accent shook her: something about it took
all the mockery from his retort, checked on her lips the: "What? A
valentine!" and made her suddenly feel that, if he were afraid, so was
she. Yet she was touched also, and wondered half exultingly if any
other woman had ever caught that particular deep inflexion of his shrill
voice. She had never liked him as much as at that moment; and she said
to herself, with an odd sense of detachment, as if she