me to wield a
trowel and carry bricks. He simply did not know how.

Will-power, he saw, was not a thing one could suddenly decree oneself
to possess. It must be built up imperceptibly and laboriously out of a
succession of small efforts to meet definite objects, out of the facing
of daily difficulties instead of cleverly eluding them, or shifting
their burden on others. The making of the substance called character was
a process about as slow and arduous as the building of the Pyramids; and
the thing itself, like those awful edifices, was mainly useful to lodge
one's descendants in, after they too were dust. Yet the Pyramid-instinct
was the one which had made the world, made man, and caused his fugitive
joys to linger like fading frescoes on imperishable walls....

XXI

ON the drive back from her dinner at the Nouveau Luxe, events had
followed the course foreseen by Susy.

She had promised Strefford to seek legal advice about her divorce, and
he had kissed her; and the promise had been easier to make than she had
expected, the kiss less difficult to receive.

She had gone to the dinner a-quiver with the mortification of learning
that her husband was still with the Hickses. Morally sure of it though
she had been, the discovery was a shock, and she measured for the
first time the abyss between fearing and knowing. No wonder he had not
written--the modern husband did not have to: he had only to leave it to
time and the newspapers to make known his intentions. Susy could imagine
Nick's saying to himself, as he sometimes used to say when she reminded
him of an unanswered letter: "But there are lots of ways of answering a
letter--and writing doesn't happen to be mine."

Well--he had done it in his way, and she was answered. For a minute, as
she laid aside the paper, darkness submerged her, and she felt herself
dropping down into the bottomless anguish of her dreadful vigil in the
Palazzo Vanderlyn. But she was weary of anguish: her healthy body and
nerves instinctively rejected it. The wave was spent, and she felt
herself irresistibly struggling back to light and life and youth. He
didn't want her! Well, she would try not to want him! There lay all the
old expedients at her hand--the rouge for her white lips, the atropine
for her blurred eyes, the new dress on her bed, the thought of Strefford
and his guests awaiting her, and of the conclusions that the diners of
the Nouveau Luxe would draw from seeing them together.