omo: do you suppose I didn't know it was for me? And this too? Well, it
won't do... it won't do...."

He stopped, as if his courage failed him; and she moaned out: "But your
writing--if your book's a success...."

"My poor Susy--that's all part of the humbug. We both know that my sort
of writing will never pay. And what's the alternative except more of
the same kind of baseness? And getting more and more blunted to it? At
least, till now, I've minded certain things; I don't want to go on till
I find myself taking them for granted."

She reached out a timid hand. "But you needn't ever, dear... if you'd
only leave it to me...."

He drew back sharply. "That seems simple to you, I suppose? Well, men
are different." He walked toward the dressing-table and glanced at the
little enamelled clock which had been one of her wedding-presents.

"Time to dress, isn't it? Shall you mind if I leave you to dine with
Streffy, and whoever else is coming? I'd rather like a long tramp, and
no more talking just at present except with myself."

He passed her by and walked rapidly out of the room. Susy stood
motionless, unable to lift a detaining hand or to find a final word
of appeal. On her disordered dressing-table Mrs. Vanderlyn's gifts
glittered in the rosy lamp-light.

Yes: men were different, as he said.

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