Chapter 4

IV.

CHARLIE STREFFORD'S villa was like a nest in a rose-bush; the
Nelson Vanderlyns' palace called for loftier analogies.

Its vastness and splendour seemed, in comparison, oppressive to
Susy. Their landing, after dark, at the foot of the great
shadowy staircase, their dinner at a dimly-lit table under a
ceiling weighed down with Olympians, their chilly evening in a
corner of a drawing room where minuets should have been danced
before a throne, contrasted with the happy intimacies of Como as
their sudden sense of disaccord contrasted with the mutual
confidence of the day before.

The journey had been particularly jolly: both Susy and Lansing
had had too long a discipline in the art of smoothing things
over not to make a special effort to hide from each other the
ravages of their first disagreement. But, deep down and
invisible, the disagreement remained; and compunction for having
been its cause gnawed at Susy's bosom as she sat in her
tapestried and vaulted bedroom, brushing her hair before a
tarnished mirror.

"I thought I liked grandeur; but this place is really out of
scale," she mused, watching the reflection of a pale hand move
back and forward in the dim recesses of the mirror. "And yet,"
she continued, "Ellie Vanderlyn's hardly half an inch taller
than I am; and she certainly isn't a bit more dignified .... I
wonder if it's because I feel so horribly small to-night that
the place seems so horribly big."

She loved luxury: splendid things always made her feel handsome
and high ceilings arrogant; she did not remember having ever
before been oppressed by the evidences of wealth.

She laid down the brush and leaned her chin on her clasped
hands .... Even now she could not understand what had made her
take the cigars. She had always been alive to the value of her
inherited scruples: her reasoned opinions were unusually free,
but with regard to the things one couldn't reason about she was
oddly tenacious. And yet she had taken Streffy's cigars! She
had taken them--yes, that was the point--she had taken them for
Nick, because the desire to please him, to make the smallest
details of his life easy and agreeable and luxurious, had become
her absorbing preoccupation. She had committed, for him,
precisely the kind of little baseness she would most have
scorned to commit for herself; and, since he hadn't instantly
felt the difference, she would never be able to explain it to
him.

She stood up with a sigh, shook out her loosened hair, and
glanced around the great frescoed room. The maid-servant had
said something about the Signora's having left a letter for her;
and there it lay on the writing-table, with her mail and Nick's;
a thick envelope