Chapter 17

XVII

SUSY had decided to wait for Strefford in London.

The new Lord Altringham was with his family in the north, and
though she found a telegram on arriving, saying that he would
join her in town the following week, she had still an interval
of several days to fill.

London was a desert; the rain fell without ceasing, and alone in
the shabby family hotel which, even out of season, was the best
she could afford, she sat at last face to face with herself.

>From the moment when Violet Melrose had failed to carry out her
plan for the Fulmer children her interest in Susy had visibly
waned. Often before, in the old days, Susy Branch had felt the
same abrupt change of temperature in the manner of the hostess
of the moment; and often--how often--had yielded, and performed
the required service, rather than risk the consequences of
estrangement. To that, at least, thank heaven, she need never
stoop again.

But as she hurriedly packed her trunks at Versailles, scraped
together an adequate tip for Mrs. Match, and bade good-bye to
Violet (grown suddenly fond and demonstrative as she saw her
visitor safely headed for the station)--as Susy went through the
old familiar mummery of the enforced leave-taking, there rose in
her so deep a disgust for the life of makeshifts and
accommodations, that if at that moment Nick had reappeared and
held out his arms to her, she was not sure she would have had
the courage to return to them.

In her London solitude the thirst for independence grew fiercer.
Independence with ease, of course. Oh, her hateful useless love
of beauty ... the curse it had always been to her, the blessing
it might have been if only she had had the material means to
gratify and to express it! And instead, it only gave her a
morbid loathing of that hideous hotel bedroom drowned in yellow
rain-light, of the smell of soot and cabbage through the window,
the blistered wall-paper, the dusty wax bouquets under glass
globes, and the electric lighting so contrived that as you
turned on the feeble globe hanging from the middle of the
ceiling the feebler one beside the bed went out!

What a sham world she and Nick had lived in during their few
months together! What right had either of them to those
exquisite settings of the life of leisure: the long white house
hidden in camellias and cypresses above the lake, or the great
rooms on the Giudecca with the shimmer of the canal always
playing over their frescoed ceilings! Yet she had come to
imagine that these places really belonged to them, that they
would always go on living, fondly and irreproachably, in the
frame of other people's wealth .... That, again, was the curse
of her love of beauty, the way she