Chapter 11

XI.

BUT there were necessary accommodations, there always had been;
Nick in old times, had been the first to own it .... How they
had laughed at the Perpendicular People, the people who went by
on the other side (since you couldn't be a good Samaritan
without stooping over and poking into heaps of you didn't know
what)! And now Nick had suddenly become perpendicular ....

Susy, that evening, at the head of the dinner table, saw--in the
breaks between her scudding thoughts--the nauseatingly familiar
faces of the people she called her friends: Strefford, Fred
Gillow, a giggling fool of a young Breckenridge, of their New
York group, who had arrived that day, and Prince Nerone
Altineri, Ursula's Prince, who, in Ursula's absence at a
tiresome cure, had, quite simply and naturally, preferred to
join her husband at Venice. Susy looked from one to the other
of them, as if with newly-opened eyes, and wondered what life
would be like with no faces but such as theirs to furnish
it ....

Ah, Nick had become perpendicular! .... After all, most people
went through life making a given set of gestures, like dance-
steps learned in advance. If your dancing manual told you at a
given time to be perpendicular, you had to be, automatically--
and that was Nick!

"But what on earth, Susy," Gillow's puzzled voice suddenly came
to her as from immeasurable distances, "Are you going to do in
this beastly stifling hole for the rest of the summer?"

"Ask Nick, my dear fellow," Strefford answered for her; and:
"By the way, where is Nick--if one may ask?" young Breckenridge
interposed, glancing up to take belated note of his host's
absence.

"Dining out," said Susy glibly. "People turned up: blighting
bores that I wouldn't have dared to inflict on you." How easily
the old familiar fibbing came to her !

"The kind to whom you say, 'Now mind you look me up'; and then
spend the rest of your life dodging-like our good Hickses,"
Strefford amplified.

The Hickses--but, of course, Nick was with the Hickses! It went
through Susy like a knife, and the dinner she had so lightly
fibbed became a hateful truth. She said to herself feverishly:
"I'll call him up there after dinner--and then he will feel
silly"--but only to remember that the Hickses, in their
mediaeval setting, had of course sternly denied themselves a
telephone.

The fact of Nick's temporary inaccessibility--since she was now
convinced that he was really at the Hickses'--turned her
distress to a mocking irritation. Ah, that was where he carried
his principles, his standards, or whatever he called the new set
of rules he had suddenly begun to apply to the old game! It was
stupid of her not to have guessed