Chapter 5

V.

IT was a trifling enough sign, but it had remained in Susy's
mind: that first morning in Venice Nick had gone out without
first coming in to see her. She had stayed in bed late,
chatting with Clarissa, and expecting to see the door open and
her husband appear; and when the child left, and she had jumped
up and looked into Nick's room, she found it empty, and a line
on his dressing table informed her that he had gone out to send
a telegram.

It was lover-like, and even boyish, of him to think it necessary
to explain his absence; but why had he not simply come in and
told her! She instinctively connected the little fact with the
shade of preoccupation she had noticed on his face the night
before, when she had gone to his room and found him absorbed in
letter; and while she dressed she had continued to wonder what
was in the letter, and whether the telegram he had hurried out
to send was an answer to it.

She had never found out. When he reappeared, handsome and happy
as the morning, he proffered no explanation; and it was part of
her life-long policy not to put uncalled-for questions. It was
not only that her jealous regard for her own freedom was matched
by an equal respect for that of others; she had steered too long
among the social reefs and shoals not to know how narrow is the
passage that leads to peace of mind, and she was determined to
keep her little craft in mid-channel. But the incident had
lodged itself in her memory, acquiring a sort of symbolic
significance, as of a turning-point in her relations with her
husband. Not that these were less happy, but that she now
beheld them, as she had always formerly beheld such joys, as an
unstable islet in a sea of storms. Her present bliss was as
complete as ever, but it was ringed by the perpetual menace of
all she knew she was hiding from Nick, and of all she suspected
him of hiding from her ....

She was thinking of these things one afternoon about three weeks
after their arrival in Venice. It was near sunset, and she sat
alone on the balcony, watching the cross-lights on the water
weave their pattern above the flushed reflection of old
palace-basements. She was almost always alone at that hour.
Nick had taken to writing in the afternoons--he had been as good
as his word, and so, apparently, had the Muse and it was his
habit to join his wife only at sunset, for a late row on the
lagoon. She had taken Clarissa, as usual, to the Giardino
Pubblico, where that obliging child had politely but
indifferently "played"--Clarissa joined in the diversions of her
age as if conforming to an obsolete tradition--and had brought
her back for a music lesson, echoes of which now drifted down
from a distant window.