Chapter 26

XXVI

NICK Lansing arrived in Paris two days after his lawyer had
announced his coming to Mr. Spearman.

He had left Rome with the definite purpose of freeing himself
and Susy; and though he was not pledged to Coral Hicks he had
not concealed from her the object of his journey. In vain had
he tried to rouse in himself any sense of interest in his own
future. Beyond the need of reaching a definite point in his
relation to Susy his imagination could not travel. But he had
been moved by Coral's confession, and his reason told him that
he and she would probably be happy together, with the temperate
happiness based on a community of tastes and an enlargement of
opportunities. He meant, on his return to Rome, to ask her to
marry him; and he knew that she knew it. Indeed, if he had not
spoken before leaving it was with no idea of evading his fate,
or keeping her longer in suspense, but simply because of the
strange apathy that had fallen on him since he had received
Susy's letter. In his incessant self-communings he dressed up
this apathy as a discretion which forbade his engaging Coral's
future till his own was assured. But in truth he knew that
Coral's future was already engaged, and his with it: in Rome
the fact had seemed natural and even inevitable.

In Paris, it instantly became the thinnest of unrealities. Not
because Paris was not Rome, nor because it was Paris; but
because hidden away somewhere in that vast unheeding labyrinth
was the half-forgotten part of himself that was Susy .... For
weeks, for months past, his mind had been saturated with Susy:
she had never seemed more insistently near him than as their
separation lengthened, and the chance of reunion became less
probable. It was as if a sickness long smouldering in him had
broken out and become acute, enveloping him in the Nessus-shirt
of his memories. There were moments when, to his memory, their
actual embraces seemed perfunctory, accidental, compared with
this deep deliberate imprint of her soul on his.

Yet now it had become suddenly different. Now that he was in
the same place with her, and might at any moment run across her,
meet her eyes, hear her voice, avoid her hand--now that
penetrating ghost of her with which he had been living was
sucked back into the shadows, and he seemed, for the first time
since their parting, to be again in her actual presence. He
woke to the fact on the morning of his arrival, staring down
from his hotel window on a street she would perhaps walk through
that very day, and over a limitless huddle of roofs, one of
which covered her at that hour. The abruptness of the
transition startled him; he had not known that her mere
geographical nearness would take him by the throat