Chapter 14

XIV

THE next day a lot of people turned up unannounced for luncheon.
They were not of the far-fetched and the exotic, in whom Mrs.
Melrose now specialized, but merely commonplace fashionable
people belonging to Susy's own group, people familiar with the
amusing romance of her penniless marriage, and to whom she had
to explain (though none of them really listened to the
explanation) that Nick was not with her just now but had gone
off cruising ... cruising in the AEgean with friends ... getting
up material for his book (this detail had occurred to her in the
night).

It was the kind of encounter she had most dreaded; but it
proved, after all, easy enough to go through compared with those
endless hours of turning to and fro, the night before, in the
cage of her lonely room. Anything, anything, but to be
alone ....

Gradually, from the force of habit, she found herself actually
in tune with the talk of the luncheon table, interested in the
references to absent friends, the light allusions to last year's
loves and quarrels, scandals and absurdities. The women, in
their pale summer dresses, were so graceful, indolent and sure
of themselves, the men so easy and good-humoured! Perhaps,
after all, Susy reflected, it was the world she was meant for,
since the other, the brief Paradise of her dreams, had already
shut its golden doors upon her. And then, as they sat on the
terrace after luncheon, looking across at the yellow tree-tops
of the park, one of the women said something--made just an
allusion--that Susy would have let pass unnoticed in the old
days, but that now filled her with a sudden deep disgust ....
She stood up and wandered away, away from them all through the
fading garden.

Two days later Susy and Strefford sat on the terrace of the
Tuileries above the Seine. She had asked him to meet her there,
with the desire to avoid the crowded halls and drawing-room of
the Nouveau Luxe where, even at that supposedly "dead" season,
people one knew were always drifting to and fro; and they sat on
a bench in the pale sunlight, the discoloured leaves heaped at
their feet, and no one to share their solitude but a lame
working-man and a haggard woman who were lunching together
mournfully at the other end of the majestic vista.

Strefford, in his new mourning, looked unnaturally prosperous
and well-valeted; but his ugly untidy features remained as
undisciplined, his smile as whimsical, as of old. He had been
on cool though friendly terms with the pompous uncle and the
poor sickly cousin whose joint disappearance had so abruptly
transformed his future; and it was his way to understate his
feelings rather than to pretend more than he felt.
Nevertheless, beneath