Chapter 5 - Page 2

Susy had come to be extremely thankful for Clarissa. But for
the little girl, her pride in her husband's industry might have
been tinged with a faint sense of being at times left out and
forgotten; and as Nick's industry was the completest
justification for their being where they were, and for her
having done what she had, she was grateful to Clarissa for
helping her to feel less alone. Clarissa, indeed, represented
the other half of her justification: it was as much on the
child's account as on Nick's that Susy had held her tongue,
remained in Venice, and slipped out once a week to post one of
Ellie's numbered letters. A day's experience of the Palazzo
Vanderlyn had convinced Susy of the impossibility of deserting
Clarissa. Long experience had shown her that the most crowded
households often contain the loneliest nurseries, and that the
rich child is exposed to evils unknown to less pampered infancy;
but hitherto such things had merely been to her one of the
uglier bits in the big muddled pattern of life. Now she found
herself feeling where before she had only judged: her
precarious bliss came to her charged with a new weight of pity.

She was thinking of these things, and of the approaching date of
Ellie Vanderlyn's return, and of the searching truths she was
storing up for that lady's private ear, when she noticed a
gondola turning its prow toward the steps below the balcony.
She leaned over, and a tall gentleman in shabby clothes,
glancing up at her as he jumped out, waved a mouldy Panama in
joyful greeting.

"Streffy!" she exclaimed as joyfully; and she was half-way down
the stairs when he ran up them followed by his luggage-laden
boatman.

"It's all right, I suppose?--Ellie said I might come," he
explained in a shrill cheerful voice; "and I'm to have my same
green room with the parrot-panels, because its furniture is
already so frightfully stained with my hair-wash."

Susy was beaming on him with the deep sense of satisfaction
which his presence always produced in his friends. There was no
one in the world, they all agreed, half as ugly and untidy and
delightful as Streffy; no one who combined such outspoken
selfishness with such imperturbable good humour; no one who knew
so well how to make you believe he was being charming to you
when it was you who were being charming to him.

In addition to these seductions, of which none estimated the
value more accurately than their possessor, Strefford had for
Susy another attraction of which he was probably unconscious.
It was that of being the one rooted and stable being among the
fluid and shifting figures that composed her world. Susy had
always lived among people so denationalized that those one took