orizon and tried to help them
upward. They were always taking up the wrong people, giving the wrong
kind of party, and spending millions on things that nobody who mattered
cared about. They all believed passionately in "movements" and "causes"
and "ideals," and were always attended by the exponents of their latest
beliefs, always asking you to hear lectures by haggard women in peplums,
and having their portraits painted by wild people who never turned out
to be the fashion.

All this would formerly have increased Susy's contempt; now she found
herself liking the Hickses most for their failings. She was touched by
their simple good faith, their isolation in the midst of all their
queer apostles and parasites, their way of drifting about an alien
and indifferent world in a compactly clinging group of which Eldorada
Tooker, the doctor and the two secretaries formed the outer fringe, and
by their view of themselves as a kind of collective re-incarnation of
some past state of princely culture, symbolised for Mrs. Hicks in what
she called "the court of the Renaissance." Eldorada, of course, was
their chief prophetess; but even the intensely "bright" and modern young
secretaries, Mr. Beck and Mr. Buttles, showed a touching tendency to
share her view, and spoke of Mr. Hicks as "promoting art," in the spirit
of Pandolfino celebrating the munificence of the Medicis.

"I'm getting really fond of the Hickses; I believe I should be nice to
them even if they were staying at Danieli's," Susy said to Strefford.

"And even if you owned the yacht?" he answered; and for once his banter
struck her as beside the point.

The Ibis carried them, during the endless June days, far and wide along
the enchanted shores; they roamed among the Euganeans, they saw Aquileia
and Pomposa and Ravenna. Their hosts would gladly have taken them
farther, across the Adriatic and on into the golden network of the
Aegean; but Susy resisted this infraction of Nick's rules, and he
himself preferred to stick to his task. Only now he wrote in the early
mornings, so that on most days they could set out before noon and steam
back late to the low fringe of lights on the lagoon. His work continued
to progress, and as page was added to page Susy obscurely but surely
perceived that each one corresponded with a hidden secretion of energy,
the gradual forming within him of something that might eventually alter
both their lives. In what sense she could not conjecture: she