Chapter 19 - Page 2

... it would be altogether for
your beaux yeux ...."

He laughed, she thought, rather drily. "No," he said, "I don't
suppose that's ever likely to happen to me again."

"Oh, Streff--" she faltered with compunction. It was odd-once
upon a time she had known exactly what to say to the man of the
moment, whoever he was, and whatever kind of talk he required;
she had even, in the difficult days before her marriage, reeled
off glibly enough the sort of lime-light sentimentality that
plunged poor Fred Gillow into such speechless beatitude. But
since then she had spoken the language of real love, looked with
its eyes, embraced with its hands; and now the other trumpery
art had failed her, and she was conscious of bungling and
groping like a beginner under Strefford's ironic scrutiny.

They had reached their obscure destination and he opened the
door and glanced in.

"It's jammed--not a table. And stifling! Where shall we go?
Perhaps they could give us a room to ourselves--" he suggested.

She assented, and they were led up a cork-screw staircase to a
squat-ceilinged closet lit by the arched top of a high window,
the lower panes of which served for the floor below. Strefford
opened the window, and Susy, throwing her cloak on the divan,
leaned on the balcony while he ordered luncheon.

On the whole she was glad they were to be alone. Just because
she felt so sure of Strefford it seemed ungenerous to keep him
longer in suspense. The moment had come when they must have a
decisive talk, and in the crowded rooms below it would have been
impossible.

Strefford, when the waiter had brought the first course and left
them to themselves, made no effort to revert to personal
matters. He turned instead to the topic always most congenial
to him: the humours and ironies of the human comedy, as
presented by his own particular group. His malicious commentary
on life had always amused Susy because of the shrewd flashes of
philosophy he shed on the social antics they had so often
watched together. He was in fact the one person she knew
(excepting Nick) who was in the show and yet outside of it; and
she was surprised, as the talk proceeded, to find herself so
little interested in his scraps of gossip, and so little amused
by his comments on them.

With an inward shrug of discouragement she said to herself that
probably nothing would ever really amuse her again; then, as she
listened, she began to understand that her disappointment arose
from the fact that Strefford, in reality, could not live without
these people whom he saw through and satirized, and that the
rather commonplace scandals he narrated interested him as much
as his own racy considerations on them; and she